My honest review of the Ahrefs “Blogging for Business” marketing course (+free super materials to master SEO in just 100 minutes 17 seconds)
Because of the coronavirus quarantine, Ahrefs opened free access to their famous online marketing course Blogging for Business and you can watch it here. I did and now I want to share with you my thoughts on it.
What is Ahrefs?
Ahrefs is a toolset for backlinks and SEO analysis with an enormous database that makes it, I think, the best such tool ever. With the help of this tool, you can make advanced keyword research, analyze your competitors’ sites, find the most shred content along with the contacts of people who shared it, get alerts when somebody mentions your article or your competitor’s similar one and so on.
So, this tool is priceless for any blogger and any business which invests in content marketing.
Creators of the tool know that, so the price is quite high — $99-$999 per month (depending on the chosen plan) or $99-$9,990 if you subscribe per year. And there is no free trial period, “free” trial costs $7 per 7 days. And within these 7 days, it will be hard to evaluate how useful this SEO tool is for you, as it takes much time to get tangible results from SEO. Hence, to my mind, the Ahrefs SEO tool is for a good fit for established businesses and entrepreneurs. This point is important to understand my further thought.
Now, let’s get down to the course.
What is Ahrefs Blogging for Business course?
It is the course aimed to shift the bloggers’ attention from the traffic attraction to the ’ acquisition of clients. At least, this is what the course intro states. The course costs $799, which is pretty much. But the price is, well, reasonable if the course indeed will help a blogger to boost his business.
So, let’s see what’s inside.
The general review of the course
Here is the syllabus of the course:
Lesson 1: The Compound Effect of Content Marketing
Lesson 2: Two major strategies of growing a blog
Lesson 3: How to analyze the traffic potential and ranking difficulty of a keyword
Lesson 4: How to find great content ideas with high business value
Lesson 5: How to optimize your article for a target keyword and generate maximum search traffic with it
Lesson 6: How to create great content that promotes itself
Lesson 7: How to create link-worthy content (and stop worrying about link building)
Lesson 8: How to promote your content & make it rank high in Google
Lesson 9: How to build backlinks to your blog content
Lesson 10: How to build links & promote content via blogger outreach
These all are very important topics for anyone who wants to grow their blog and make it profitable. So, for $799 there must be something that will give a crazy competitive advantage, as no one who didn’t buy Ahrefs course doesn’t know all these insights.
The truth is the information there is really worth attention. The only thing is that probably, you already know a lot of these “secrets” if you are interested in digital marketing, blogging, and SEO. In other words, if you’re not a total newbie in the sphere.
In this case, the course will for sure help you structure and revise the knowledge you already have (at least, it helped me with that). But there will be little new info for you.
If you’re a beginner, this course will be a goldmine for you, as it delivers the concentrate of the useful and up-to-date theory on SEO for growing a blog. So, it will help you save much time that, otherwise, you will spend on searching authoritative sources, good materials, and reding them. I strongly recommend beginners to watch the course while it’s free. You may not understand all the details and why they are important, but the theory in the course will be helpful for you in any case.
But still, you can easily find out all these tips for free from the other well-established marketing blogs (I will add a list of specific articles below). And again, if you are interested in digital marketing, blogging, and SEO, probably, you already know a lot of this info.
Secondly, ask yourself if you’re ready to pay for the Ahrefs SEO toolset. As the course doesn’t make much sense without the ability to use these specific tools.
I would even say that this is not a course on digital marketing, but rather a VERY paid tutorial on how to make use of Ahrefs.
Now, let’s talk about some big downsides of the course.
The cons of the Ahrefs course
First, as I’ve already mentioned, the course is built around the Ahrefs toolset and is highly promotional. Everybody is now used to free promotional webinars and staff, which educate you to a moderate extent and then offer you to buy the product and to get more training after purchase is made. But it seems to me not very ethical to sell promotional materials for such an impressive amount of money.
Besides, approximately, 60–70% of the course is useless if you can’t use Ahrefs or similar tools. Below I will share the best alternative to the Ahrefs toolset.
The second disappointment for me were unfulfilled promises.
The course is called “Blogging for Business”, and as I previously mentioned, it promises to acquire customers and close more sales per month with the help of a blog. However, the course is quite generic and teaches viewers to grow a general blog. But it doesn’t teach you about specific ways in what businesses can convert readers into customers (apart of a suggestion to try to rank for commercial long-tail keywords). The course just shares useful, but overall tips to grow a blog.
Here is another example of the unfulfilled promise. What are you expecting from the lesson with the title “How to compete with the “big guys” in Google search results”? Probably, some insights on how to effectively move your blog up the results page.
But what you get instead?
The answer is: you can’t overrank “big guys” until you are not as cool as they are.
Why shot this video if there is no possible way to do that? Just because of an eye-catchy title that will attract viewers? Kinda cheap shot. Especially given the fact that the course contains a sub-lesson about the importance of mastering a reader’s search intent and not deceiving readers.
OR the rarely mentioned “secret” to acquiring backlinks. Did you know that the bigger your audience, the more backlinks your materials attract naturally? Man, everybody knows that obvious “secret”. Probably, that’s why it is mentioned rarely.
I believe courses must be actionable. And the action that comes out of the Blogging for Business course is that it is very difficult to grow your blog in a quite crowded niche without Ahrefs tool (which is actually true), that’s why all the bloggers need to buy it. But it isn’t very actionable for bloggers who can’t afford it.
Now, I want to share with you the sources and tool which will replace both Ahrefs toolset and Blogging for Business course.
Free useful materials about growing a blog
As I promised, here is my list of the free materials which will teach you not worse than Blogging for Business course for less time and totally free.
First and foremost, I recommend Brian Dean’s Definitive Guide to SEO in 2020. It contains even more up-to-date and useful information than the Ahrefs course for $799 does.
Regarding the ideas generation tactics, here is an awesome article by Robert Katai about how to generate posts ideas based on social demand and search intent.
This free Ahrefs guide fully covers the topic of keywords research for SEO. And here is one more about how to evaluate your chances to rank in Google for a particular keyword based on keyword difficulty metric.
Here is my post about what valuable content is and how to create one.
And finally, a great in-depth post about link building strategies by Neil Patel.
You will spend 1 hour 40 minutes and 16 seconds (I’ve counted it on Read-o-Meter) to read these six materials and after reading them you will know even more on how to grow your blog compared to the knowledge you will get from the Ahrefs Blogging for Business course.
The single most useful SEO tool
Here I want to describe the most useful SEO tool to my mind which can easily replace Ahrefs toolset and won’t cost you an arm and a leg. This tool is Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest.
It has all the options Ahrefs has, and you can figure out how to make use of them, reading 6 articles mentioned above. Ubersuggest gives you an opportunity to:
1. Analyze search volume of specific keywords
2. Find the top 10 articles that rank for the keywords you want to rank for and analyze other keywords your competitors ranking for, including the top ones
3. Analyze SEO difficulty of a keyword
4. Analyze backlinks to competitors’ articles and find the perfect outreach prospects
Ahrefs is kinda more advanced as it uses data not only from Google Keyword Planner and Google Suggest as Ubersuggest does but also clickstream data which makes their backlink, search traffic and keyword index the largest in the world.
Also, Ahrefs, unlike Ubersuggest, has filters, which make work with it more convenient. And using Ubersuggest, you will have to make some comparisons manually which is less convenient too.
But ask yourself: do you need all this information which according to Ahrefs takes 25 years only to read it? And do you really need these filters so much? What if you use a smaller dataset and a less convenient tool with the same functionality 10 times cheaper? Isn’t it a great deal?
Pro version of Ubersuggest costs $10/month or $100/year (2 months come for free if you buy a yearly plan). Besides, there is a 7-day trial period. But you can also use Ubersuggest for free. In this case, you will be able to access only a small amount of data, but still.
Yet, writing this, I’ve just received a newsletter from Neil Patel which states that Ubersuggest becomes even more free because of the coronavirus quarantine. And premium users will receive even more pleasant staff and free training. You can read these updates here.
So, if you’re a business owner and invest in content marketing, I would strongly recommend you to check it out, as Ubersuggest seems to be the ultimate tool for growing a blog for a VERY reasonable price.
Now, getting back to Blogging for Business course. Here is what I think at the end of the day.
Conclusion
Both Ahrefs toolset and Blogging for Business course are pretty expensive. Yet, if you manage to grow your blog, you will get a solid ROI. I consider Ahrefs is a toolset that worth investments for sure if you can afford it.
Is Blogging for Business worth watching? Well, if I bought the course for $799, I would be extremely disappointed. But until it is free, I strongly recommend you listen to it. Especially if you know nothing about SEO and percept information from videos better than from blog posts. In case you love reading more than watching and want to save some time, I gave you an alternative.
And the last but not least thing. SEO theory isn’t so difficult and SEO experts know and share approximately the same information, so you can easily find it online for free. Yet, even if you know how to optimize your posts for the search engines, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will easily rank on page #1 of Google. Getting results from SEO takes much time and effort, and there is no magic pill to skip this process or make it easier.
So, it makes sense to concentrate on experimenting with SEO and not just learning about SEO theory and expecting that you will get results on autopilot.
What do you think? Will you watch Blogging for Business course? Or maybe, you’ve watched it before. What are your impressions then? Share your thoughts in the comments.
