Well, as noted in my last post, I did actually sign-up for the BecomeABlogger Premium course from Gideon Shalwick & Yaro Starak, so here are some reflections after spending a little time with it.
This seems to be a really excellent product. You can choose to pay month by month and gain access to the material on a week-by-week basis, or you can choose to pay more up front and get access to it all at once.
I chose the “all at once” path and was pleased to find that there are almost 60 video lessons here. Their scope takes you from knowing next to nothing about blogging, right up to multiple monetization techniques.
Video is the predominant medium here, but there are transcripts available as downloadable PDFs if you prefer that. You can also download the videos if that works better for you.
As to what they say, most importantly, Gideon & Yaro stress right from the outset the importance of creating not just high quality content, but also how to produce content that stands out by using “X factor” techiniques such as graphics, audio and video.
But before you get to that fancy stuff, straight out of the gates the guys get stuck in to the very basics of blogging. Fundamentally, they stress the importance of owning your own blog rather than taking the easier path of using Blogger or WordPress.com. They recommend the use of WordPress.org’s software to set up your blog on your own domain, and then they walk you through all the steps needed to do this.
In fact, on nearly all that I’ve watched so far, it’s the multimedia guy in the partnership, Gideon Shalwick, who does most of the presentation. Gideon has an excellent way of talking through and demonstrating technical concepts that should take the pain away from setting up a blog for all but the most rabid of technophobes.
He then goes on to talk about themes, plugins, RSS, Feedburner … the whole shmeer really. I have only got to the end of module 2 so far, but although I already know most of the basics that he’s talked about, I have still learned several valuable tips.
Although he may be more prominent later in the course, Yaro Starak’s biggest contribution seems to be in the bonuses. I’ve taken a quick peek at his 10 part Mastering The Mindset audio course and I like what I have seen of this so far.
There’s more here than I could absorb or review on just a couple of days, so I’ll say no more, especially since the doors are now closed. However, I will say that Yaro Starak has a similar product, Blog Mastermind, that is “always open”. There was actually an upsell for this on the back of the BecomeABlogger offer and I signed up for that too.
It seems more text & audio based rather than video and to be aimed at more experienced bloggers, but I have not had time to look at this too closely yet. Perhaps a more detailed review is a topic for another day !
QUICK UPDATE: I should point out that as an introduction to blogging, becomeablogger.com‘s free videos are definitley worth a look.