Retiring Blogging Success Program & Passive Income System

by Celes |
Filed in Updates
, Course

Hey everyone! Today’s announcement may come as a bit of a surprise but it’s something I’ve been thinking about. I recently decided to retire 2 of my premium courses, Blogging Success Program and The Passive Income System and they have already been removed from PE Courses sales page with effect immediately. I share why below.

The truth is that this has been a difficult decision to make. Up till 2 months ago, I was still planning for new runs for BSP and PIS and how to take them to the next level. Yet, I had been having some nagging feelings about them for a while, and when the feelings kept coming back, I realized it was time to give them serious thought. This was when I realized it was time to discontinue these 2 courses.

Top-line Stats on BSP/PIS

Firstly, some top-line stats and info:

Both BSP and PIS are among the top earning courses at PE.
I’ve been conducting BSP and PIS since Dec 2011 and Jul 2012 respectively.
I’ve done 6 live runs for both courses over the past 3 years, with full signups for each run. I have also done significant content upgrades in this period, of which each upgrade was always offered free to earlier participants.
The feedback has always been excellent. Participants would walk away from each class with many new ideas and next steps. One participant went from not knowing what he wanted to do for his business to knowing his business idea and confirming speaking engagements even before the course ended. Another did a major blog overhaul after attending BSP and started getting nearly 2K pageviews/day after a year, along with $500 USD/month in earnings. A business management participant said that she has “learned ideas that no business school [would] ever teach you.”
Both courses are filled with my best, timeless frameworks and strategies on what it takes to achieve success in blogging and creating a passive income business respectively.

From a business and financial standpoint, it makes the most sense to continue BSP and PIS since they are top-earning courses. Yet, from an intuitive point, I feel it’s now time to pull the plug and move on to other projects. There are 2 big reasons why.

Why I’m Retiring BSP and PIS

Perhaps it’s easiest to start off with how these 2 courses came about. I started BSP in Dec 2011 (then known as Blogging Intensive Bootcamp) after frequent requests by clients and readers to start a course sharing my blogging tips. Following the end of that course, and after very strong feedback from participants, I then started PIS to teach my personal lessons on how to create your passive income business in Jul 2012.

I wasn’t thinking too much when I started those 2 courses, except that I saw the opportunity to support entrepreneurs / budding entrepreneurs and I ran ahead with it. As such, the first iteration of the courses were designed around the initial participants’ needs and knowledge gaps. Following that, I got new requests to do another run of BSP and PIS. Seeing the opportunity to again help new entrepreneurs, I then conducted new runs of BSP and PIS, this time significantly upgrading each course. This then continued on to a third run in the next year, again with another round of update.

In every course run, I poured my heart and soul into it, creating my best frameworks, coming up with easy-to-understand visuals, putting together case studies, and sharing important data and personal examples to drive my messages across.

Blogging Success Program — my premium course to achieve blogging success

The Passive Income System — my 6-module course to build your P.I. business

While it has been a phenomenal experience working on these 2 courses, now that we’re at the 7th year mark of PE, I feel it’s time to take stock and bring my focus back to courses that build on the core of PE. I feel that I’ve achieved the original objectives that I set out to do with BSP and PIS, which were to share my best knowledge to participants who wished to learn about blogging / building a P.I. business and to set them up for long-term success in these areas, and what’s left is really for the participants to now take the knowledge they’ve learned and run ahead with it. Having conducted these courses for 3 years, it’s now time to move on to other projects that’ll get us back to PE’s core message.

The second reason is somewhat linked to the first. I’ve found that often times when people say that they want to learn X, it may well not be what they really need. For example, someone may sign up for a blogging course to learn about blogging — but what they may actually benefit from the most is to work on their life goals and bust through personal fears. Blogging may well not even be in the cards after all is said and done. Another example: someone may want to learn about earning P.I., but what they may really need is to figure out what they actually want to do and then to develop their career plan that best suits this message. Perhaps building a P.I. business is something that would only come in after 3 years, long after the person has pursued their passion and is already seeing healthy results.

At the end of the day, maybe only about 30 to 40% of participants who attend such a course are really there to learn about the technicalities of what it takes to succeed in this field and are ready to act on this knowledge, whereas the rest are more people who are here for the “ride,” to see if this could be the next big thing for them.

The problem is that as someone conducting a blogging or passive income course, I’m often bound by the scope of the topic. While I could weave in life skills and I actually do so in all my trainings whether they are self-help-related or not, the point is that it’s still a blogging or P.I. course at the end of the day and I have a curriculum to stick to. Herein lies the problem — I’m ultimately most passionate about coaching people to live their highest life. Coaching on blogging or earning passive income is merely a subset of this passion (no different than coaching people in presentation, resume, or networking skills, which I trained in in the early years of PE). While I can do a very good job coaching on the nooks and crannies of blogging and building a P.I. business, ultimately I want to help people discover their best solutions and best paths for themselves — which, depending on each person and their goals, may well not involve blogging or P.I. at the end of the day.

So in short, after 3 years of passionately conducting BSP and PIS and supporting many in their blogging/P.I. goals, I feel that it’s time to retire them. They’re no longer compatible with what I wish to achieve at PE, and rather than continue to conduct them for another 5 or 10 years, it’s best to retire them now. Even though I’ll actually be losing out on an easy 5-figure annual income source by doing so, I feel this is the right thing to do. I believe that by focusing myself on my higher goal to deliver maximum value to all of you, the right opportunities and money will come my way eventually.

BSP/PIS Members: Download Materials NOW (by Sep 30, 2015)

For those of you who were customers or past participants of BSP/PIS, don’t worry because you’ll get to download all the course materials before I close the members portal.

Firstly, I’d like to thank you for being a part of these courses, be it as a live participant or as a product customer. Everything that I packaged in the courses are truly my best strategies on blogging and creating a P.I. business, and I hope that you’ll study them carefully and apply them in your blogging/P.I. ventures ahead. Remember something that I always stress on in the courses, which is not to get sidetracked by short-term gains or tactics. Rather, focus on your big picture vision and delivering value to your audience. Apply the strategies I taught you; stop looking outward for “secrets” and “tricks” to get ahead; the answers are really all packed in these 2 courses. Review the materials and focus on action. You already have what it takes to succeed in your path. ♥

Next, login to the members portal to download the materials before I close the members portal for BSP/PIS.

If you are a live course participant, meaning you attended my blogging or passive income course in real time, you would have received access information to the members portal 1–2 weeks after the live course ended. Please check your email for the members portal login information.
If you are a product buyer, meaning you bought the pre-recorded blogging or passive income course from PE Courses, you would have received an email with the login access information right after payment.

This is obvious, but if you bought the blogging course only, you would only have access information for Blogging Success Program. If you bought the passive income course only, you would only have access information for The Passive Income System. These are 2 separate courses, not 1 single course.

Using the login information,

Login to the BSP/PIS members portal.
Download all the materials for your respective course ASAP, namely the video lectures, audio podcasts (PIS only), slides, and worksheets (PIS only), before Sep 30. The members portal will be taken offline after that. It doesn’t take more than 10 minutes to click the links and let them download onto your computer, so please do them sooner than later.
As part of your purchase, you are free to review the course(s) privately on your computer. It’s just that the members portal for these 2 courses will no longer exist after Sep 30, so please backup the files in your own storage like an external hard disk or Dropbox so that you don’t lose the files. Dropbox gives you 2 GB free space and another 1–2 GB free space when you complete certain actions so it’s pretty good. (I personally use Dropbox Pro with 1 TB space. I know, I’m hard-core.)
Not that anyone of you would be doing this, but as with any digital product purchased on PE (or elsewhere really), you are not allowed to distribute, share, or re-sell the course files in part or in full with/to anyone. These materials are copyright of myself and PE. Your purchase warrants you the material for your private consumption as a consumer. Unlawful distribution can result in prosecution by law.

If you’ve lost your access to the members portal, email us via the customer contact form on our FAQs page with these 4 pieces of information: (1) The course you purchased, (2) your transaction ID, (3) your email used in your purchase, and (4) when you purchased this course. If you face any trouble accessing the portal, reach my customer support team at customercare [at] personalexcellence [dot] co too and we’ll do our best to help.

What’s Next?

For BSP and PIS, perhaps they may come back in a different form in the future, but I highly doubt so unless I segue into becoming a full-time blog, business, or wealth coach in the future which I don’t plan to do so. Some life coaches suddenly switch to business or wealth coaching after a few years (basically they are more lucrative careers), but it really isn’t in my interest or aspiration.

I will continue to speak on blogging or passive income in the public domain (talks, media) as invited or work with 1-1 clients on these topics, just that I don’t see myself conducting blogging or P.I. courses with such regularity or depth on PE.

Actually right after I made the decision to retire BSP and PIS, I felt relieved with the same knowingness that this is the right decision (just like how I felt after deciding to close blog comments). And then not long after (like, within days), I suddenly had an idea to start a new course, one that tackles growth/transformation at the most holistic level, one has the potential to become the mother of all courses at PE. I’ve always felt that PE Courses is missing this one “master” course that will truly transform one’s life inside out (30DLBL has been and will always be my best 30-day program on life transformation, but after years of doing live group coaching and witnessing the kind of transformation from working with people over calls etc., I see the potential of creating something more) and this course may well be my answer to that. (By the way, the words “Master Your Destiny” keeps ringing in my head as the potential title of the course.)

I’m actually quite excited about it and will chew over this for the next few weeks; if this goes ahead you guys will be the first to know! :D

In the meantime, I hope all of you are well and I miss you guys! :) Know that I’m constantly thinking of new ideas to improve PE and support all of us in our life journey, and I appreciate all your support for PE! Please keep reading and sharing the material; I promise new and exciting things ahead for us!