If you’ve been trying to learn about online income for any amount of time, you’ve probably come across tons of courses that make bold claims about how much money you can make, and how successful your online business will be after you take them.
Should you pay to learn affiliate marketing though? For me, the answer right now is no, but maybe it’s a yes for you. I’ll dive into the pros and cons of self-taught vs buying a course in this post, to help you decide for yourself!
Pros of Buying A Course To Learn Affiliate Marketing
The biggest pro of purchasing a course is that everything is laid out for you. If you struggle with self-directed learning, having a course with a curriculum to follow, and resources that you can keep going back to will help you stay on track and move towards your goal of building a successful online business.
Another pro of buying a course is getting advice and direction directly from people who have been successful in the space. Often the frameworks you learn in courses are the same ones the creator has used to build their business.
Last, there’s something to be said for paying to acquire skills, to speed up your timeline. The question in this post, in my opinion, is less about whether or not you should buy a course, but more are you willing to trade your money to learn something instead of your time.
Cons of Buying A Course To Learn Affiliate Marketing
I’ll start with the obvious here, there’s no guarantee the course you’re buying is actually going to help you be successful. It’s entirely possible that you spend money on something that’s little more than an advertisement for the next tier of that person’s course, or even worse just garbage and useless.
Second, a number of courses out there exist solely to teach you how to sell that course. This is ok in my book, especially when the information is actually helpful, but there’s a strong possibility that you end up competing against literally thousands of other people who are trying to sell the same course to the same audience. You can end up pigeonholed in a niche you didn’t want to target, which can be frustrating.
Finally, there are just so many choices out there it can be hard to pick something actually valuable. Sure, you can find reviews for a lot of the popular courses, but in many cases, those reviews are made by people who are also promoting the course, which makes their actual feelings on the material hard to confirm.
Pros of Teaching Yourself
I’m biased, so I’ll start by saying that teaching yourself is my preferred method for pretty much everything. There’s tons of quality information out there, and you can genuinely teach yourself everything you need to know to build a very successful online business without spending a cent on a course.
A big pro of self-guided education is you can tailor your learning to exactly the niche & business type you want to focus on. You don’t have to worry about investing time and money into a course that ends up not covering what you are looking to learn.
Last, you don’t have to spend any money. The information is out there, for free, and its as good as what you’ll learn in a course. If a big reason you’re looking to build an online business is that money is tight, it can be hard to justify spending sometimes larges amounts of money on a course, especially early on. You already have to pay for things like a website and tools, the added cost of education makes the barrier to entry higher than necessary.
Cons of Teaching Yourself
Doing it yourself isn’t easy though. Self-directed education takes time, and discipline. This is often the biggest hurdle for people, you have to have the perseverance to keep learning as you build, which is hard. Along with the discipline it takes to show up every day and do the work on your business, you also need to show up everyday and learn how to run it. When you’re a busy person, with a family and responsibilities, this can be hard to overcome.
Its also easy to go down a research rabbit hole and never really get started. Its so easy to trick yourself into thinking you’re being productive when you read tons of articles, listens to hours of podcasts, and watch all the videos you can find. Problem is, you spend all that time researching and spend no time building. It comes down to being afraid to fail in my opinion, if you only ever research and never actually get started, its easy to say you tried and it just wasn’t for you. I’ll give some advice on this in the close of this post.
Last but not least, its so easy to continually question if you’re doing the right thing when you’re teach yourself. You’ve probably seen plenty of different ways to do everything when it comes to building an online business, the hard part can be settling on something and putting the work in. When you don’t have a well laid out frame work, its hard to feel confident in what you’re doing.
Closing thoughts
So, to buy or not to buy? Here’s what I think, and how I’m going about it. I’m not buying a course until I’ve started to see some success. I’m not in a situation where I desperately need to make money yet, and I’ve always been a bit of a DIY kind of person. I think the answer to this question is really going to depend on the kind of person you are, and the unique situation you’re in.
I’ll even give you a idea of my framework, so you can walk away with some value beyond answering the question of the post.
First – use this blog, and other outlets, to generate traffic to this website. If you’re reading this, that part worked, thanks for hanging out!
Second – offer valuable info, for free, to people who want to learn how to build an online business and also don’t want to get suckered into a crappy course.
Third – recommend the tools and products that I personally use, or that I believe are the best in category if I don’t personally use them. Affiliate commissions from those recommendations, along with other revenue generating streams that I’ll add along the way, will be the base of my business
Fourth – keep up the cycle of providing value and recommending good stuff for my audience, and become a trusted resource for anyone looking to find success in the space.
