As I’m sitting here at my laptop on a Saturday morning, sipping coffee, I’m feeling a sigh of relief come over me. This past week we finally launched our totally free blogger course and it has been a long time coming.
Since November of 2015 we have been providing a totally free ebook to everyone who starts a new blog from this website. The ebook has been a massive success and we’ve had so numerous people emailing us and thanking us for the book and telling us how much it helped them.
We’ve had various bloggers read the book and tell us after just a few months that they’ve used the suggestions in the book to acquire sponsorships, land totally free travel and get paid to travel, which is amazing!
Why Did We create The Course?
With the success of the book, came a lot of questions from new bloggers. The book covers a bit about the very basics of WordPress, but is actually quite advanced after the first chapter, getting into the entrepreneurial journey, traffic increasing and advanced online marketing. So there seemed to be a missing step.
We know how overwhelming it can be when you first start a new blog! When we started this blog, Goats On The Road, back on February 17th 2012, we had no idea what to finish with it. When we first opened WordPress and saw all of the settings and setup involved, we were pretty sure we’d never be able to figure it out on our own.
Back then there weren’t any totally free blogging courses for travel bloggers that we could find and if there were paid ones, we were on too tight of a travel budget to splurge on a new blog we had just started.
These days I feel like my Facebook feed is swamped with ads from bloggers showing people “How to start a travel blog”, which I think is great. The much more people getting into this life, the better. The problem with 99% of those (often feed-clogging) ads, is that they show you how to start a blog and then they leave you to it.
We were guilty of this too at first.
For a couple of months while I was working hard on our first ebook, people were starting their blog from our guide and not getting much help afterwards unless they emailed me to ask questions. but then I started noticing that a lot of those potential bloggers simply left their blogs untouched, ultimately wasting their time and money by starting a blog through us in the first place.
This frustrated me to no end. What’s the point of showing people how to start, if you don’t instruct them how to finish?
One day, I evaluated all of the domains that started through Goats On The road links and saw that numerous of them still showed a “Coming Soon” page, implying they hadn’t even set up WordPress. From that moment, I was on a mission to not only help people learn how to start a travel blog, but also guide them on the steps you need to take afterwards to guarantee that their blog wasn’t just left to die.
Starting a blog is easy. building a successful blog from scratch can be overwhelming.
It turns out, pretty much every person who starts a blog for the first time is in the exact same boat as we were in 2012. They don’t know what to do next.
Despite the fact that we’ve been giving away a important 200-page ebook resource, many bloggers opened WordPress after starting their blog with the same blank stare that we had in 2012. An ebook simply can’t discuss things like videos can.
This is why we chose to create a course for new bloggers. We figure it will bridge the gap between the absolute basics of blogging and using WordPress, and the much more advanced money earning and blog building techniques in the ebook.
At first, we considered selling the course. Afterall there are numerous courses online about blogging that aren’t as extensive and are still selling for anywhere between $200 – $1500 USD. Yes, they do opt for that much.
Many of my blogging colleagues had the same reaction when I told them this course was going to be free, especially after seeing the videos, the modules and the totally free downloads we are offering.
“Why don’t you sell it?! You could make so much money from this!”
But as I completed the Beginner blogger Course, I started thinking about the purpose of the course and the purpose of this blog in general. We’ve always told people that our goal is to spread the good word about blogging and that we want to help as numerous people release themselves from the grinds of a conventional 9-5 life to experience the freedom that comes with remote work.
Had we not started this blog 6 years ago, I wouldn’t be sitting here sipping coffee in a beach house in the Caribbean on a Saturday morning. Instead, I’d likely be working an overtime shift at the plastic packaging plant I worked at in Canada.
I wouldn’t be getting paid to travel the world. I wouldn’t be getting provided totally free flights, hotels and travel in exchange for doing something I absolutely love, which is writing about and taking photos of my travel experiences.
Where We Were Living and blogging In Grenada
Instead I would be waiting in traffic to go to a job I didn’t enjoy, to pay for the car that I pretty much only used to get me to that job, only to get home to a house I owed mortgage on every night, too exhausted to really delight in my time with Dariece.
This is the main motivating element behind Dariece and I trying to help people to start on this life path.
When we first started this blog and it began to acquire a following, the most gratifying emails we received were from travellers who read one of our posts, booked their trip in our footsteps and had an outstanding time.
Today, while we still love receiving those types of emails, we are far much more humbled to receive the emails that say our blog inspired someone to quit a job they hated to pursue a life of travel, freedom and adventure.
When those same people tell us that they’re now earning money, or even earning much more than they ever did working at their difficult 9-5 job, we feel extremely rewarded for our work.
Of course, like anybody teaching people how to start a blog, there is money to be made for us linking to hosting affiliates, possibly advertising on our pages etc. but that money is only a small part of what motivates us. Really.
If money was my main motivating factor, I’d sell this course.
Obviously, it would be good to earn some money from the course, but money is always a byproduct of creating a helpful resource and our main motivation really is helping people who want to delight in a freer lifestyle, and experience this incredible, too-good-to-be-true life of a location independent nomad and blogger.
There’s no better feeling than earning your first bit of money from a blog that you built from the ground up, and then realizing that this creation, this digital business, can then support your life of indefinite travel or overseas living.
We do plan to create a much larger, much more extensive course for the next level of blogging and I’ll charge for that because it will be aimed at bloggers who are starting to earn money and it will help them increase their earnings. This course is totally free to get much more people to start a blog and get into this industry in the first place.
Are We The best people For The Job?
If you’re already Goats On The road readers, we really hope that we’ve built up our count on through the 1,000+ (yes, one-thousand) totally free articles we’ve published on this blog to help people travel and turn travel into a lifestyle. but if you’re new here, welcome! let us (quickly) introduce ourselves.
We started this blog in 2012 and in a few years we grew it to be one of the top 50 many Trafficked travel blogs in the world. It currently earns us much more than we ever made working in oil and gas (Nick) and a law firm (Dariece) in Canada. Plus, we only work on our laptops 15 – 20 hours per week.
Since 2012, our mission has been to not only share travel with others, but show them the exact steps we took to turn our travels into a lifestyle. By being 100% transparent about our mistakes and our successes, as well as our income we believe that we can inspire much more people to travel and show them how to earn money while doing it.
What Are people saying about Our course & Ebook?
We literally just launched the totally free training about a week before publishing this short article and we are already getting amazing feedback, not only from the course and email training, but also from our continued email support after new bloggers start their blogs:
This is what people have been saying on Amazon about our ebook:
As I’m sitting here writing this post and adding these testimonials from our students, this is starting to feel like a sales page. but the funny thing is that we’re not really selling anything here.
I just know that so numerous people always have doubts and the Internet is flooded with people saying “I’ll show you how to make money online”, so I feel it required to show a bit about our previous experience and response.
This course is still free, the ebook is still totally free and this is not a Goats On The road paid product. You can’t purchase the course, you can only get it for totally free when starting a new blog. What we’re providing is a win-win-win for everyone (yes, three wins).
So What is This course All About?
When you start a new blog using this guide, you’ll receive our totally free 4-Part video course including over a dozen totally free PDF downloads and step-by-step tutorials to not only help you start a blog, but to start a blog with the foundation to be a successful, money-making blog down the road.
On top of that, we’re still providing our 200-page blogging ebook that has a lot of information for new bloggers moving forward, after they complete the course.
The course is set up in four separate modules, all developed to walk you through the initial set up of WordPress and instruct you the basics of blogging like a pro.I’ve created the course with its own design to make it easy to navigate and easy to follow.
Once you’ve finished one module and completed all of the downloads, you can simply click “Next Module” and relocation to the next video and the corresponding series of downloads and tutorials.
How much Does It cost To start a Blog?
This is kind of the third win in that win-win-win scenario I was talking about. because we’ve been sending Bluehost so numerous new bloggers (this site is running on Bluehost and they’re the best host for WordPress in our opinion), they’re also providing Goats On The road readers a 63% discount, so you’ll get 12 months of hosting plus your domain name (ie: YourNewBlogName.com), for $95 $59.40.
That works out to $4.95 per month. If you decide to sign up for 3 years to start, you can the hosting price down to $2.95 per month with our discount. That’s a lot less than we paid when we first started this blog and with this deal, you get a totally free domain name and the outstanding support at Bluehost.
Bluehost also provides a 30-Day money Back Guarantee, so there’s really nothing to lose and one added bonus offer is that you don’t even have to think of a blog name today, they’ll let you start a blog with a short-term domain and change it for totally free later on!
I actually highly recommend choosing a name later, because that way you can start to design your blog, create messages and narrow down a niche, and then name the blog and company once it has a bit of focus and direction. Brilliant.
Why Do We recommend Bluehost?
A lot of people are recommending hosts based on who pays them the most. If you read their blog they’ll say “Start with ____” but then you soon find out that they’re hosting on another platform. That’s because certain hosts pay affiliates much more than others to recommend them.
Goats On The road and our other sites are running on Bluehost. We’ve tried SiteGround and had a awful experience (more on that in later posts), we’ve also tried HostGator, but we find that Bluehost has the best customer service, the best server speed (by far) and the best prices (especially with our discount).
When we switched Goats On The road from Siteground to Bluehost, we saw a 45% increase in site load speed, a 25% increase in traffic and the cost was actually less than we were paying with Siteground at the time. The point is, every host is different. Wec ould earn the same commission if we recommended Siteground or Dreamhost, but we don’t. We recommend Bluehost because it has been the best WordPress host in our experience.
Why do you have to start a blog to get the totally free course?
I put a lot of time and energy into creating this course. I hired a developer to create a site for us to run courses on, I learned a whole new avenue of blogging and online education, I studio recorded over 2.5 hours of videos and I created a dozen PDF downloads.
The only thing we acquire monetarily from this course is the commission we receive from Bluehost when new bloggers start their blog with them. That is why we ask everyone to at least start their blog through our link in purchase to receive the course and totally free ebook.
Call it the fourth win. You get a totally free course, totally free ebook, discount on your hosting price, plus you get to support The Goats ? Thanks!
Is This course only For travel Blogs?
Absolutely not. The course covers the basics of WordPress, SEO and blog post writing, which is the same for any type of blog. Whether you want to start a blog about parenting, tech gadgets, news, politics, cooking, travel, bartending… whatever you want, these basics of WordPress will apply to you.
Have a few Doubts?
Trust me, I know! before we started this blog, we were on such a budget that we didn’t think we could afford the price to start a blog and we didn’t know if anybody would care about our travel blog or want to read it.
I’m so thankful that we started this blog despite our concerns, but I wish we had someone there at the time to guide us in the best direction and let us know that our doubts were normal, but not necessary.
That’s why I’m going to answer a few of the frequently asked questions /