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Today I want to talk about what happens when you are burned out on the online marketing industry. This podcast episode is dedicated to Kelly Garrett, she posted in the marketer’s heart, which is a free Facebook group that Cathy Olson and I run to support our Funnel Gorgeous customers.

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And she wrote about the online marketing industry and she said that is burnt out. She has lost her motivation for her business, and she felt like, she wanted to know, what is the future of online marketing in courses?

And I think that a lot of people ask this question because once you jump into the world of online marketing, it’s everywhere. It’s everyone and their mother, and their brother thinks that they can create a course and make millions. And a lot of these people are not actually experts in their field, they just learn something and turn around and spit it back out, put a cute cover design on it, and it’s just full of scam and fluff and crap.

And the people who are in the market who are trying to create a product that’s good, great, awesome, actually gets people the results, based on the expertise that they actually have to wade through so much crap, and the customers have to wade through so much crap. And sort of in response to this, there’s been this rising trend of authenticity and transparency, which a lot of the real people have been doing all along. They didn’t make it a marketing trend, this is just something they did naturally almost to the point where now, even the authenticity band wagon, and the transparency fad has become cliché, they’re using it as a marketing tactic.

So it feels like oftentimes once you get into this world, you can just get so burned out. And in full disclosure, I have felt that same level of burned-out-ness as well, because I have seen a lot of the insides. so to speak, popular masterminds, and courses, and people that on the outside are showing one thing, and on the inside it’s very different.

So how do you fall back in love with the info product business, and how do you fall back in love with online marketing when you’re just so burned out? These are some of the things that I’ve done, and take what you want and leave the rest.

So the first thing that I am very careful about, is who I learn from. There are plenty of good teachers out there, there’s plenty of good mentors, but I have either by design or by the fact that my life is so crazy, I am very, very careful about who’s events I go to, who’s masterminds I go to, who’s mentors I go to. And I have even continued to shrink that smaller and smaller and smaller because what will happen is you’ll, even if you have 5 good mentors, you’re just getting it from all sides, and you’re going to grow weary of it. And then even if it’s good information, sometimes it’s going to contradict itself and then you’re going to feel lost.

And then usually what happens when you have multiple teachers and you’re listening to multiple teachers, and then you’re confused and you want to go find someone who can un-confuse it, and you end up spinning in a rabbit hole where you’re absorbing too much information and you’re not implementing. So pick one mentor or two mentors to follow and turn off all the other noise.

This requires you to come to grips with your FOMO, in fact, just the other day in my mastermind group someone was talking about an event, and you can see, “Oh my gosh, you’re going to that event, I should go. I should go.” That sense of “What am I going to miss out on?” and what I wanted to say in that moment was, “Just stop. Is it an event that you need? Is it something that you’re actually working on right now? Or are you just attracted to it because your friends are going?” And you’re going to spend all this time and money, and I’ve actually had to do this, even, not just with attending events, but with speaking engagements, which are awesome and help my business, but it’s like, is this engagement actually going to bring me the return on investment that I need for whatever, x goal?

If you don’t have goals and you don’t have benchmarks, and you don’t have things that you’re actively working on, in the act of doing, you will get sucked into all of the marketing messages of every latest and greatest course and guru. But if you are anchored down by a plan and a goal that you’re taking action on, with one or two mentors, it sort of inoculates you from all of that noise. And the more noise you let in, the faster you’re going to get burned out. Okay, so that’s one thing.

The second thing is every time you see someone say, “Courses are dead. Webinars are dead. Email is dead.” I want you to say to yourself, “That is a lazy attempt at throwing rocks.” All that’s happening in that moment when somebody says something like that is dead, they are trying to get your attention. They are basically taking the marketing principle of you know, throwing rocks at the prevailing wisdom of the day, purely for attention.

So if you see someone say, “Courses are dead.” Do not worry for one minute that courses are actually dead, because that person really is just trying to come up with a good curiosity hook to get your attention so that you can buy their course or their program, or their thinly veiled course that’s now called something different. None of the things are dead. Email is not dead, courses are not dead, webinars aren’t dead, none of it is dead. because what will never die is learning.

Sure things will change, sure webinars may have lower show up rates, sure email may have lower open rates, all that kind of stuff. Things do change, but learning, the act of learning, the desire to learn and then to implement is not going away. So none of this stuff is going away. This is just laziness on the part of marketers who are trying to get your attention.
And you know, as far as what to do about all the times that maybe you’ve gotten legitimately burned by a course creator or a coach who promised one thing and then delivered something else. I’m going to ask you a couple of hard questions because there are a couple of scenarios that are possible. The first is that you were actually legitimately scammed. “Here, buy this item,” which is whatever, a course, “And this is what it’s going to teach you.” And then you purchased it. And either they never delivered the course, like they literally never delivered it to you, which is fraud. Or they delivered something so entirely different than what was promised, that it would be considered false advertising.

So if either of those things happen to you, that is either fraud or false advertising and you have been scammed. Same as if you got pick pocketed, or mugged, or someone broke into your house. You are a victim of a crime, so take action. Take action however you see fit. Taking action might be blessing and releasing, it might mean trying to get your money back, it might mean going to court. Only you know, but that’s a scam.

Believe it or not, that is rampant, but it’s not as rampant as the second scenario, which is you were sold something, you were sold a result, a transformation of some kind, you got the course or the program or whatever it was and it didn’t actually produce the results. This is the gray area, because there’s two things at play here.

The first is that the seller, or the coach, or the course creator, or whatever set an expectation through their sales copy, through their webinar, they set an expectation. Did they correctly set the expectation, or did they exaggerate? There’s different levels, there’s some people who are way more comfortable exaggerating based on one or two case studies, versus other people that are going to be more transparent about what it really takes.

So there’s the course creators responsibility of how badly, or well they set expectations. And then, and this is the hard part, there’s your responsibility. And most people who take courses or programs consistently don’t see results. The problem is that through whether it’s the newsfeed or content consumption, you have created a wildly unrealistic expectation for yourself.

So you keep buying, or keep looking, because you think that there’s a bullet or a magic formula or whatever that’s going to help you, and there isn’t. And you’ve created a scenario where nobody is really going to be able to give you the transformation you’re looking for. Because the problem isn’t really in the course or in the program, it’s that your expectations and your percentage of learning versus doing is really skewed.

So most people who get burned out are not, haven’t necessarily been legitimately scammed, although many of you have, in which case you have to get justice however you need to, but it’s in that second bucket, and sometimes the seller has done a really piss-poor job of setting expectations. And they have leveraged you know, NLP and direct response market, and they’ve used everything in their arsenal to get you to buy, and they’ve set the expectation so high that you haven’t gotten that transformation. That’s on them.

However, there’s also the scenario where your expectation is out of whack as well. So all we can control is ourselves. So for you, it’s important for you to adequately set expectations. If you want to launch a course and you don’t actually have an expertise in whatever it is you want to sell, you shouldn’t create a course. You shouldn’t teach, and I know there’s lots of people who are like, “just teach one step ahead.” And I think there’s a difference between teaching and documenting. So it’s perfectly fine to document your process as you’re learning and becoming an expert, versus setting yourself on a pedestal as an expert and trying to sell a course.

So if you have been trying to sell a course and you don’t really have an expertise, or you don’t have social proof, or validation that your transformation works, and you’re trying to sell a course and you’re taking program after program after program on how to build a funnel and how to run traffic and none of its working, and you’re crying scam, part of the problem might be that your expectation, someone told you along the way that you didn’t have to be an expert to teach, and you kind of do. So that’s why you’re burned out.

So it’s a really, really hard thing to look at as far as what’s causing burn out. I would say that if you do have an expertise in something, whether it’s knitting or marketing or design or dog training, or sales, or painting, or gardening, if you are actually an expert, and then I know what the next question is, “How do I know I’m an expert?” well, you’re an expert because you’ve either put in a lot of hours, you have a lot of social proof, you have documentation of a beautiful garden with ripe vegetables, or you helped your mom and your mom also had a beautiful garden.

Whatever expertise looks like to you, which it’s different to different industries, a surgeon’s expertise is going to be very different than a gardener’s expertise. But if you can look at yourself and say, “Yes, I’m an expert.” And this whole course online marketing thing hasn’t worked for you yet, it may just be a matter of dimming the noise, finding one or two people to follow, and the recalibrating your expectations about how long it actually takes to get progress.

If you’re the kind of person that’s been trying and hasn’t really developed that expertise yet, then that’s where you gotta start. You’ve got to become an expert in something. It doesn’t have to be 10,000 hours of expertise, but it does have to be expert enough that you can teach 100, 200, 300 other people how to do it and have success.

So anyway, that’s a little bit of a rant. But if you buy from somebody and you are pretty reasonable about your expectations and they have over sold, really over sold, do not buy from them again. There’s a lot of those people out there, and there’s a lot of people that teach marketing techniques that are really gray hat. Just don’t buy from them again.

And if you have been legitimately scammed, which is possible, however you need to get justice is how you need to get justice. And also on behalf of all marketers, I’m really sorry that you got scammed. I hate that our industry is rife with liars and people that twist the truth just to make a dollar. So I want to say that as well.

So I hope that helps for any of you guys who are burned out, because the truth is, once your expectations are set correctly and you find good people to learn from, yes the journey is hard, it’s up, it’s down, it’s high, it’s low, but you don’t have that sense of having the rug pulled out from under you all the time, and really just stop buying from anybody who has bait and switched you, because chances are that’s all they will continue to do.

Anyway, I hope that helps. I appreciate you all, talk to you soon.