If you’ve scrolled through the VodaPay app in the VodaStore onto “Learning and Development” you might be wondering if the courses there are worth your VodaBucks. I recently did the “Blogging, Content Marketing and Vlogging Course” (for ten VodaBucks) and thought I’d share my thoughts on it.
I’m always keen to improve my skills and since I already had the VodaBucks, I figured why not? Let’s do the course and hopefully learn something.
If you don’t know how to access the course, watch my video here:
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What I liked about the course:
Good background and history
This course provides a good answer to why you should be blogging. It takes you through the history of blogging and gives you a good background as to how it came about. She also referred to blogging greats such as Jon Morrow.
A similar approach was in place for the Vlogging section, although she did suggest some tech tools for cameras and sound, and she had some tips like talking directly to camera with meaningful and informative content.
Good branding ideas
She gave psychological meanings to fonts and colours, if you are thinking about making logos and branding your website. I actually thought this was very useful.
The art of writing
There were lots of good ideas for writing headlines, as well as tools to use for this. Lots of ideas for content and niche.
I really liked her idea of writing a draft and then sleeping on it, because it’s often something I do too. Something you come back the next day and think, well I shouldn’t have said that, so her idea of being fair and accurate is important.
She had a whole section on punctuation and grammar. As an English teacher I liked highlighting the importance of this. I’ve always wondered about having punctuation inside inverted commas, and now I know! Yes, you do.
She also had a whole lot of writing formulas e.g. focusing on a problem and then solving it. A call to action was very important here.
Blog management – metrics
She listed different areas that you have to manage, e.g. content, marketing and email. She had some good ideas about collecting email addresses e.g. pop ups and welcome mats.
I think one good idea she had on Google Analytics that was relevant to me was to look at how long people stay on your pages. I noticed that people don’t stay long on my home page, and I need to improve that. Something I’ve done so long is to do a resources and tools page but I also need to do a category drop down on the menu as well. And possibly redo the focus categories or even do a new theme.
Professional presentation
I liked the elegant presentations of images, text and videos.
What I didn’t like:
No personal touch
The author of the course is not identified and we don’t know if she is a blogger or what her blog is. It would be helpful to look at personal examples that she’s had. Even when we get to the Google Analytics section she shows us a site (which apparently isn’t a blog) and has thousands of visitors from the USA. (And it’s still UA, not G4) Although I can tell from her accent she is South African.
Too broad and no actual nuts and bolts instructions
That’s great now that we know when blogging started and we have all the right fonts and colours. But you still haven’t actually showed me how to set up a blog or the mechanics of how to actually do a post.
Conclusion
I think this course is an excellent background on blogging and writing. It will definitely give you that overview and, considering that I didn’t really pay for it (although you have to pay about R250 if you want the certificate, and more if you want a hard copy), I can consider it a win. I do think though, that if you’re serious about setting up your own blog, with step by step screenshare instructions, you could consider my course.
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