You gotta spend money to make money - My personal experience
Happy Easter! Hope you and family are having a great weekend!
In this week’s newsletter, I want to talk about how you gotta spend money to make money. I’ve heard this over and over again growing up. Is this true or not?
I think it can be true to a degree.
First, there’s a wealth of knowledge available online. You can scour the internet, look on YouTube, check out free courses on Udemy and other places to find most if not all of what you’re looking for.
So, if the information is free online, why pay?
Paying for the information can:
Save you time
Get you better results possibly
Saving Time
Saving time is a big deal. Time is precious. It’s an asset people are willing to pay for.
I learned affiliate marketing from blog posts. I took information here and there and put it all together to develop a full understanding of this marketing skill to create a business and make money.
It worked but, not as well as when I invested in a course that taught me affiliate marketing from a seasoned expert.
In fact, my results 10X’d within just a few weeks of completing that training.
So, if I would’ve taken that course initially instead of trying to learn it myself, I could’ve saved time and made more money!
I talk a bit more about my experience with affiliate marketing and the course in an upcoming post on Medium. Make sure you follow me here to see when that post gets published (within the next few days).
Getting Better Results (Potentially)
Getting better results learning from an expert is likely to happen as well, compared to if you try to learn it on your own.
An expert can show you the ropes, give you examples, and illustrate scenarios and other helpful info to truly teach you the skill.
For me, I got real-life examples that I could model and I learned information that I didn’t know that helped me produce better results.
So in all, the investment was totally worth it.
How can you invest in your business and at what cost?
It can be really easy to fall down the rabbit hole of courses, coaching, and paid education. I am a big supporter of investing in yourself to expand your skillset.
One investment can teach you a lifelong skill.
But, you have to consider what skills you want to develop, determine if it’s really worth it to invest in a course, and what you’ll be gaining from it all.
I have taken dozens of online courses.
Most of them were not worth it.
And, more than the feeling of lost money after finishing a course that didn’t teach you anything is that lost time you invested in learning.
It sucks.
To avoid this, get really detailed about what you want to learn and why. Refine your research process so you make a solid investment when it’s time to buy that educational material.
These two steps can take you a long way but, it’s not a 100% guard against what many people would call “getting scammed” out of their money and time, buying into something that didn’t teach them what they thought.
Here’s a list of some of the best courses and tools I’ve invested in that I recommend:
1. Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing
This is the affiliate marketing course I mentioned above. The creator is a seasoned marketer.
She blogs. She’s made over $300K from a single affiliate and regularly earns $50K/month from affiliate marketing. After taking her course I 10X’d my affiliate earnings and made back the cost of the course in 3 weeks.
2. Stupid Simple SEO
This is the SEO course that helped put it all together for me.
I knew what SEO was but had no real strategy or course of action when doing SEO research. This course was the solution to that.
The creator has built many successful websites fueled by SEO and he teaches his strategies. I saw real results and first-ever first page Google rankings for keywords after I went through the curriculum.
This, like the two courses above, are one of the only ones I go back through as a refresher. The focus is on backlinking for SEO purposes. I learned a lot in this book.
Then, rapid-fire style, some of my favorite tools I recommend:
Jasper - AI tool for writing blog posts, press releases, social captions, etc.
Speedwrite - best article rewriter I’ve found
Systeme - all-in-one tool to replace your email marketing, webinars, course hosting, affiliate marketing management, and more
Grammarly - grammar/spelling checker, free version
Google Docs - word processing from Google, it’s free
Hunter extension - An email finder. Activate it on webpages to find email addresses that you can contact for cold pitching, etc.
Ahrefs - SEO research
Detailed SEO extension - SEO research
Tailwind - social media scheduling (Pinterest and IG)
Canva - graphic design tool for beginners
Colorpick Eyedropper - find the exact color from webpages
Lastpass - store all your passwords
Podcastle - transcribe text to audio so you can have blog posts read aloud to you while working, etc.
Bookmarked posts of the week
5 Realities of Full-time Creators Nobody Tells You About
Systeme Review: Is This All In One Tool Worth It?
The Secret Sauce Behind My Top-Viewed Case Study Headlines
Why I Quit My Secure $116,500 Paying Job To Make Money Online
How I Made $3,000 From One Medium Article As An Affiliate
How To Get Your Articles Published in Large Publications
Enjoy your week!
Jenn