How Mignon Fogarty launched a massively successful series of online courses
She isn’t just one of the world’s most popular podcasters, she’s also an incredibly innovative media entrepreneur.
For nearly two decades, Mignon Fogarty has built one of the most durable franchises in digital media.
Best known as the creator of Grammar Girl, she was an early podcasting pioneer who turned a tightly formatted, highly practical show into a broader media business that spans books, a podcast network, and a massive archive of evergreen content. That archive continues to generate traffic and revenue long after publication—an advantage most media companies struggle to replicate.
But in recent years, Fogarty has quietly added another layer to her business: online courses. Unlike her podcast or books, which are broadly distributed and largely consumer-facing, her courses tap into a different audience, a different pricing structure, and a different set of distribution partners.
What makes her approach particularly notable is that she didn’t follow the typical creator playbook of building and selling courses directly to her audience. Instead, she leaned heavily on partnerships—with organizations that already had built-in demand for her expertise.
The result is a course business that behaves less like a risky new product line and more like a steady annuity layered on top of an already resilient media company.
In a recent interview, Fogarty explained how she entered the courses market, what goes into putting together a course, and why she decided to partner with powerful distributors like LinkedIn Learning rather than create the courses by herself.
Let’s jump into it…
Building an Evergreen Media Engine
Fogarty launched Grammar Girl 18 years ago as a tightly scripted podcast offering quick writing tips. Each episode focused on a single concept—how to use a semicolon, for example—and was designed to be concise, practical, and evergreen.
That structure turned out to be a strategic advantage. While many podcasts rely on timely commentary or news-driven content, Fogarty’s episodes retained their relevance indefinitely. Over time, this created a massive back catalog that continues to attract listeners.