# Beginner's Guide to Creative Blogging: How to Set Yourself Up for Success - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/beginners-guide-to-creative-blogging-how-to-set-yourself-up-for-success/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Writing · Solid intro · Rated 6 /10 # Beginner's Guide to Creative Blogging: How to Set Yourself Up for Success By Gareth B. Davies · Updated August 2026 Anne Butera · Artist. Instigating creativity and joy. All levels · 110 min A gentle, thorough mindset primer for creative bloggers, but expect almost no technical or platform-specific instruction. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fbeginners-guide-to-creative-blogging-how-to-set-yourself-up-for-success%2F1757868057) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. Anne Butera's course is less a blogging tutorial than a planning retreat for people who already suspect they want to blog but haven't figured out why. Across fifteen lessons and roughly 110 minutes, it walks through a sequence of reflective questions, why do you want to blog, what does success mean to you, who is your audience, before ever touching a platform or a publish button. That ordering is deliberate and it is the course's real thesis: figure out your motivation first, because motivation is what keeps a blog alive past the third post. ## What the course actually covers The middle stretch is the most useful part. Lesson six catalogs blog post formats, long-form essays, short photo-driven posts, DIY tutorials, interviews, roundups, comics, with real examples pulled from working blogs, which gives the survey concrete texture rather than abstract categories. Lesson nine on styling and formatting is similarly grounded, walking through several sites side by side to compare navigation, font hierarchy, and mobile responsiveness. Lesson twelve on creating and polishing posts is the closest thing to a step-by-step method: a handwritten rough draft, a day of distance before revising, then typing into a platform while running Grammarly for grammar and Headline Studio for headline scoring. It's a modest, low-tech process, but it's specific enough that a beginner could actually copy it. Where the course thins out is exactly where a "beginner's guide" title implies it shouldn't. Choosing a platform gets discussed conceptually, criteria to weigh, questions to ask yourself, but the teacher explicitly declines to recommend one or explain how to set any of them up, since her own hands-on knowledge is limited to Squarespace. Search engine optimization gets a similar treatment: named as important, gestured at, then deferred to each platform's own help documentation. Monetization is ruled out entirely at the start. None of these omissions are hidden; Anne states them upfront in the second lesson. But they mean the course teaches the thinking around blogging far more thoroughly than the doing of it. ## Strengths and limits The emotional framing is consistent and genuinely calming rather than performative, opening with a direct instruction to relax and returning to that permission throughout, which suits creative-minded viewers who tend to freeze up over rules. The content calendar lesson and the audience-growth lesson (link roundups, guest interviews, blogrolls) are practical enough to act on immediately, and the accompanying fourteen-exercise worksheet gives the reflective material actual structure instead of leaving it as passive listening. The tradeoff is pacing. Several lessons repeat the same point, no one right way to blog, in slightly different phrasing, and the course spends a comparable amount of time on mindset as it does on every technical topic combined. A viewer who already knows why they want to blog and just needs help picking a platform or formatting a homepage will find long stretches redundant. As a beginner's orientation to the emotional and strategic side of blogging, it succeeds. As a guide to actually building and running one, it is intentionally partial, and viewers should plan on supplementing it with platform-specific tutorials before they can finish the final exercise of launching a site. The standout The demonstrated post-writing workflow, handwriting a rough draft, letting it rest a day, then typing it up and running the title through Headline Studio for a readability and engagement score, gives a repeatable process rather than vague advice. ## What you will learn - · How to articulate a personal reason for blogging and use it to filter every later decision - · How to define a self-referential measure of success instead of chasing follower counts - · How to survey blog post formats (DIY tutorials, roundups, interviews, photo essays) and pick ones that fit your voice - · How to build a content calendar using a physical wall calendar plus a master list of post ideas - · Anne's personal drafting workflow: handwritten rough draft, a day of distance, then typing into Squarespace with Grammarly and Headline Studio - · How to grow an audience through blogrolls, link roundups, guest posts, and interviewing other creatives Best for: A hobbyist artist or maker who already has something to say and needs help with mindset, planning, and structure rather than technical setup. Skip it if: Anyone wanting hands-on platform instruction, SEO tactics, or monetization strategy, since the teacher explicitly declines to cover site-building mechanics or making money. Helpful Examples Actionable Steps Clarity of Instruction Organization of Lessons [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fbeginners-guide-to-creative-blogging-how-to-set-yourself-up-for-success%2F1757868057)