In the online marketing world there is no shortage of courses, teaching everything you can imagine, and ranging from $5 to $5000, and mixed quality, so it’s a bit of jungle out there.

Why so many courses?

2 main reasons:

1. Some people really enjoy teaching what they know to other people
2. “Sell shovels to the miners instead of digging for gold”.

The first point is clear, but what about the second one?

Do you know who got really rich in the California gold rush era? Many people came with their pickaxe and started digging, and after long days ended up with nothing.

However, some others sold the miners the tools and supplies they needed. And those people made tons of money!

Sure, selling wheelbarrows and jeans sounds much less glamorous than digging  for gold, but in the end it is a much better business model, with less risk, and a ton of potential customers.

How does it apply to the world of Online Marketing?

Well, you can find tons of people digging for gold (ie, people trying to get rich by doing niche sites/cpa/affiliate marketing…) and a few people selling them the pickaxes, profiting from the first group.

What are the pickaxes here? They can be

• Courses
• Services
• Tools
• Coaching
• etc.

So now you know why you will find so many people selling courses about how to make money online. Many of them actually make more money by selling the courses than by doing what they teach…

So how can you find out if the course you are thinking about purchasing is a good one or not?  The answer is, most of the times, you can’t. And sometimes the content is reasonably good, but you might not need it at that point (ie, it’s too advanced, even when in their sales page they say it’s for everyone).

(As a general rule, if it sounds too good to be true… it probably is).

But this wasn’t what I wanted to talk about in my post (doing vs learning).

Many people tend to think: I need to learn everything I can about XXX then I’ll start doing. They research. Purchase a course. Then another. Read forums, blogs… And in the end they devote 90% of the time to learning, and 10% to doing, when in my opinion, the percentages should be the other way round.

Sure, if you can get some education in the topic, that will probably help you, but there is nothing like rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty. You will probably learn much more by making mistakes than by reading the latest e-book.

And if you take a course, make sure to implement what you learn!

So, after reading this post, make sure to take some action!

See you on the next post 🙂

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