I started The Skool of Life sometime towards the end of April. I previously had two blogs, neither of which quit achieved lift off. It was only after reading another personal development blog, that I learned about The Blog Mastermind Program. First let’s look at the idea of a mastermind group. A mastermind group is essentially a group of individuals working to together to help each other achieve their goals. Blog Mastermind is a group of individuals with the common goal of building successful blogs for profit, and is led by Yaro Starak, who’s blog you can see here.
To put it briefly the blog mastermind program provides you with weekly lessons designed to help you build a profitable blog. I’m in the final stages of the program and thought I’d offer you a review of the program in case you are considering joining the program. The program is approximately 6 months and the lessons are broken down as follows:
Part I: Getting Started
The focus of this initial section is really about launching your blog. It provides you with some very basic foundations such as the importance of moving your blog to a platform such as Wordpress and coming up with content ideas. For a somewhat savvy person, this first section moves a bit slow and a good amount of the lessons in the first few weeks can be completed in less than 15 minutes a day. As you progress things tend to be a bit more complex and require more time.
- Lesson 1: Let’s Get Blogging!
- Lesson 2: Blog Foundations
- Lesson 3: RSS, Social Proof & Plug-ins
- Lesson 4: Finalizing Your Blog Structure
- Lesson 5: Set Up Key Content Pages
- Lesson 6: Content Focus and Structure
- Lesson 7: Authentic Content
- Lesson 8: Personal Branding and Sourcing Content
- Lesson 9: Hiring Bloggers
Part II: Building Traffic
In my opinion the meat of the program is really in the lessons provided in this section of the program. My previous blogs never reached more than 1500 visitors total. As of today I’m reaching over a 100 visitors a day a few times a week. One great thing about this section is that each lesson gives you one method for generating traffic and you get to test which method is the most effective for your blog. I think that like most things in life the 80/20 rule applies to blog traffic. 80% of your traffic will come from 20% of your efforts. In my opinion implementing these techniques becomes more complex as you get further along in the program. I’ve included a snapshot of my growth since the inception of this blog below
- Lesson 10: Copywriting For Blogs
- Lesson 11: Marketing Through Conversations
- Lesson 12: Leveraging Content For Traffic Part 1 – Forums
- Lesson 13: Leveraging Content For Traffic Part 2 – Article Marketing & Blog Carnivals
- Lesson 14: Leveraging Content For Traffic Part 3 – Guest Writing
- Lesson 15: Search Engine Optimization For Blogs
- Lesson 16: Impact Marketing
- Lesson 17: Podcasting
- Lesson 18: Publicity
- Lesson 19: The Traffic Secret Every Blogger Knows
Part III: Monetization
I’m at at the monetization phase of mastermind program. If you have noticed i’ve recently started incorporating Google’s Adsense program into my posts. I’m going to be completely honest and let you know at this point, that my blog is not profitable. As of this week I generated my first 8 dollars in revenue by selling text links. But, like anything in life, investing time and effort is key to your success. The monetization lessons are well organized and great for providing you with the guidance you need to get things off the ground.
- Lesson 20: The Monetization Process
- Lesson 21: Contextual Advertising
- Lesson 22: Affiliate Marketing
- Lesson 23: Direct Advertisers
- Lesson 24: Five Powerful Ways to Make Money from Your Blog
The pros:
- Blog mastermind gives you a structured approach to getting your blog off the ground
- Weekly lessons keep you disciplined
- You have access to a members forum which provides you with support/opportunities to collaborate
- Each of the lessons is also available in MP3 format and often include multimedia (video, audio, etc.)
- Yaro actually provides plenty of advice on his blog and I used one of his guest posts, How to write product reviews that sell, as a guideline for writing this review
The cons:
- The Cost: 97 dollars a month is not on the cheap side. But since you invested this much it almost forces you to keep up
- Some of the bloggers in the forum are lazy and really there are only a few who are the most active in terms of helping you
- Most of the information in the program is available for free on the internet. The thing is that it would take you a long time to find it and put structure around it.
- Not every single thing in the program works to perfection. For me that has been increase in RSS readership.
Consensus: I can honestly say the blog mastermind program has been a good investment for me. I’ve worked as a social media intern for a major consumer brand, I’ve learned more in the blog mastermind program than I did in that internship. I honestly think that almost anybody can benefit from the blog mastermind program. If you are already running the kind of blog that is getting thousands of RSS readers and thousands of hits daily, then I don’t think you’ll gain much from it. But, if you are just getting started or really looking to push it to the next level then it would be worth your while. If you have any questions feel free to email me or ask in the comments below.
The Skool of Life Promotion: After a conversation with one of my guest writers, I decided that I want provide you with an incentive for joining blog Mastermind ,if you decide it’s something that’s for you. If you sign up for Blog Mastermind through my affiliate link, send me a receipt, and when I see it in my account, I will go ahead and paypal you 25 dollars for signing up. This will help you to register your domain, pay for a web host, and some other expenses.
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