How buying an online course could be hurting your business…

A Tick In the Box

A couple of months ago, I was excited and looking forward to attending a 2 day entrepreneur event up in London.

…a trip up to ‘the smoke’… catch up with old friends and meet new ones… maybe grab a dinner with someone who can point me in the right direction…

Fortunately, it was not your traditional “pitch-fest” event (where a succession of presenters tried to convince you that their presentation was actually packed full of value and wasn’t an overly long sales pitch), although at times it did “verge on this!

There were some actual presenters who were really good value for money.  Gary Vaynerchuk was there dispensing his brand of no-nonsense business talk, but the speaker I identified with most was Ryan Deiss.

Ryan is head of digitalmarketer.com and in my mind one of the leading lights when it comes to online marketing in today’s complicated and confusing world.

He did a couple of info-packed presentations, and the second finished with a short sales pitch (I did say it wasn’t completely sales pitch free!) about one of digital marketers online programmes.

At the time it seemed to fill in some of my knowledge gaps perfectly, and like a teenage girl rushing to sign up to the latest boy band fan club, went to the back of the hall to sign up to the programme.

(trust me, my fandom was a mere blip compared to the furore that Gary Vaynerchuk caused when he walked to the stage – that was true boyband adoration!)

Anyways, back to my shiny new, all singing all dancing training course.

It is a fantastic course – really up my street and delivered by someone I felt was on top of the digital marketing world.

Unfortunately, as is the case with so many entrepreneurs out there, I fell into a simple trap.

I thought that purchasing the course would solve all my problems.

I’d been sold on the course, where in fact all it was, was a course.

Ultimately, the course wasn’t going to solve all my issues and make me millions…

… Nope

…that was down to me.

I had to actually do the course and implement the learning.

3 months later and I’m still only halfway through it (although I am now making progress and I can see how it all fits together!)

…but at the time I was caught up in the magic pill…

The thing is – I’m the magic pill… only I can actually benefit from the training, and only if I actually implement what I learned.

I’ve encountered this phenomenon in too many people (I know it because a few years ago when I was starting out, I suffered from it)

The belief that a tick in a box, or a click on a button can solve all my marketing problems.

I even saw it in networking (of which I used to go to way too many!).  People would attend the meetings and then think “well I’ve done my marketing now”… without realising that the hard work started outside of the meetings.

So whatever you’re doing – remember that there isn’t a short cut, a magic pill or an online training course that will solve your problems…

…you are the one, and you need to make sure you’ve got time and focus to not just complete the course itself, but actually implement what you learn.

So how does this relate to MailChimp?

Well you may have noticed that I’m running a training course myself on the 17th October in Woking, UK.

It’s a day long “KickStart MailChimp” course, which is focused on helping small businesses actually get to grips with email marketing and MailChimp.

… it’s also one I’ve run several times before and had some glowing feedback from.

Yet despite all that, I’ve reviewed the course and decided to change some of it up – and increase the focus on “the doing”.

(Fortunately, the course is already quite focused on getting things done – it’s why I insist on people bringing a laptop to actually work on their MailChimp account there and then.)

The thing is, having seen it in myself, I don’t want to see others suffer from the same affliction.  I want you to actually implement stuff while you’re there.

You’ve put aside a day and some of your hard earned cash to attend – you need to see tangible actual results from your investment.

I hate to hear people who’ve tried to learn MailChimp from crappy out of date YouTube videos and badly written PDFs.  Spending a day with an expert and actually doing stuff whilst you are there is the only way to really get things to work.

This day is the best way for you to actually get MailChimp working successfully – it’s not just about MailChimp, it covers a lot about marketing and will get you in the right mindset to understand how everything fits together.

…and now it’s even more focused on implementation.

Because I know from my own, painful, personal experience…

Learning stuff is fun… but the value is in the doing.

If you’re interested in booking the course, just click here to learn more and book a spot – I’ve extended the early bird discount until Friday 6th October so you can get over 35% of the published course price if you book before then. Spaces are limited and I’m not planning on running the course again until early 2018, so now’s your last chance to make some significant progress.