REVIEW: Simpleology's Multimedia Blogging Course

By Administrator | January 14, 2009

I just finished going through Simpleology’s free (as of this writing anyway) multi-media course on blogging. It’s a ‘learn how to blog’ covering everything from what a blog is to how to do SEO to how to make money with it.

Broken into 15 lessons it’s aimed at the new to beginning level blogger. Each lesson has a video to watch, an mp3, a written section, and a quiz. The written section and mp3 are identical to the video so you can take them with you and review the lesson without rewatching the video.

There’s also a worksheet that you use with the lessons to help lock what you learned into your memory. Some of the questions on the worksheet are designed to apply what you’ve learned to your own blog.

Here’s the lessons you learn:
Lesson 1
What is a Blog?
Lesson 2
Essential Parts of a Blog
Lesson 3
Creating Your Blog
Lesson 4
Choosing A Theme For Your Blog
Lesson 5
General Writing Tips
Lesson 6
3 Ways To Attract Traffic Part 1: Improving Your Posts
Lesson 7
3 Ways To Attract Traffic Part 2: Search Engine Optimization
Lesson 8
3 Ways To Attract Traffic Part 3: Linking With Other Blogs
Lesson 9
More Strategies for Attracting Traffic
Lesson 10
6 Ways To Make Money From Your Blog
Lesson 11
Advertising
Lesson 12
Affiliate Programs
Lesson 13
Getting Paid For Blogging
Lesson 14
Why Small Business Owners Should Have A Blog
Lesson 15
The Next 15 Days

So here’s my review:

THE GOOD:

Each lesson is designed to be done one a day so you don’t get overwhelmed, they also (and this is a biggie for me) are short, the longest one was just over 6 minutes. So if you need to review a lesson for any reason, it’s no big deal.

Even though they cover a vast range of topics from beginning to advanced in only 15 very short lessons, they do a fantastic job. Explained quite simply enough to follow the concept it’s not so overly simple that a lot of critical information is left out.

Getting the concept is more important, once you have that you can find out everything else you need to put it into place and they do tell you to use outside tutorials for more technical details though I doubt you will need many of them if you’ve been around the technical end of computers for a while.

It also does a good job of referencing outside sources to show real life examples of what they are talking about. Even though there’s no clickable links, you are told what the links are so it’s simply a matter of typing them into your browser’s address bar.

THE BAD:

If you are a computer savvy or a blogger with intermediate experience there’s unlikely anything here you won’t already know. That’s not to say it isn’t worth going through however. If you find yourself explaining topics to non-bloggers you might find that the explanations they give are pretty easy to understand.

Also, if you are looking for more specific technical how to information, this isn’t it. For example, in the lesson where they talk about using Google’s Adsense on your blog as a possible revenue stream, they don’t tell you how to insert the code.

I had mixed feelings on this, but ultimately I realized that not only would it have complicated the lesson but how you do a specific task can be different depending on which software you use for your blog and if you use a blogging service instead of hosting your own.

The only other major complaint I had was in the written section and the worksheet. Each one is a pdf that covers all 15 lessons so you can’t just print one lesson at a time. If you’re low on ink or don’t know how to print select pages this can be annoying. Since I am almost out of ink, it was annoying.

MY RECOMMENDATION:

If you are new or getting started I say, “go for it”. In my case, I’ve been around computers since I was 12 and even though I knew what blogging was I had never done blogging until recently so I learned quite a few helpful tips.

Just keep in mind that it’s supposed to be simple and don’t expect to walk away a computer techie, but do expect to know how to blog effectively and profitably.

- Jeffery

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