Course review: Blog Life

This month I've been studying an e-course on blogging, Blog Life, run by one of my favourite blogs, A Beautiful Mess. I've been reading the blog for a few years now, after coming across it a couple of times while searching for photography related ideas, although I'd heard of Elsie from when I used to do scrapbooking.

This course came along at just the right time for me, when I had just done a major redesign of my blog and was looking at ways to attract more readers.

At first I was unsure if taking a course about making a living from blogging would be right for me. After all, I have been averaging under 100 page views a day, and didn't really see my blog as a business idea! But, as with the book Craft Show & Sell that I recently reviewed, this course has a lot to offer even the hobbyist blogger.

I've learned loads from the course about what content I should be concentrating on, how to work with my own strengths, identifying my audience, being original, engaging readers, etc. It's not at all airy-fairy, it's full of real, practical tips, some that I can start putting into practice straight away, and others that will be useful to me in the future when my blog has grown some more. And there's a real honesty and integrity to their recommendations - so much advice I've seen online just advises leaving loads of comments and joining linky parties, but this course approaches networking in a non attention-seeky but friendly way.

I love reading ABM on a daily basis, but after doing this course I feel like I know Elsie and Emma even better than before - you certainly engaged this reader, ladies!

I hugely enjoyed this course, and found it well worth the money. And I might sign up for their blog design course next month too - even though I've done a lot of work on designing my blog, I'm interested in learning more.