How to Tell the Difference Between Good and Bad Online Marketing Education – Before You Buy

Here’s the sad truth about Online Marketing “education.” Most of it falls in one of two main strategies:

1. Tease, don’t teach

This looks like webinars, videos, and “special reports” that are nothing but long sales letters, with no valuable content in them. You can spot these stealth pitches by the frequent display of sales numbers, photos of fancy cars and expensive vacations, testimonials, and phrases like, “I don’t say this to brag, but to impress upon you…”

Now, there’s nothing wrong with including any of these elements in a presentation – after all, we want you to buy our stuff, and we understand that we have to sell it to you. But if all I’m doing is pretending to teach while I’m actually appealing to your fear and greed glands, I think that’s pretty disrespectful.

2. Open the firehose

This is a more subtle way of withholding value. I give you tons of information, speak fast, overwhelm you with data and options. And then I tell you about my paid training, in which I slow down and give you a step-by-step system that you can actually follow to make money.

Again, nothing wrong with making “simplicity and order” things of value that you have to pay for. But when the market consists of hungry and confused people searching desperately for a roadmap to success, I think it’s cruel to market by confusing them more.
Cliffhanger? Keep reading…

Have you recovered from math class yet?

Remember math class your senior year of high school? Pretty meaningless stuff, for most of us. The answers were in the teachers' edition of the textbook, and our job was to figure out the formula and apply it, with as little thinking as possible.

We were being trained – and rewarded – to be impatient solvers of trivial problems.

Fast forward to our professional lives. Things are different now.

We engaged marketers know about patient problem solving. There are no problems in our businesses that are straightforward. That we can solve by applying a known formula. For which we have exactly the right information, no surplus and no deficit.

So why are we teaching kids a method of problem solving that has no use in the real world?

Check out this inspiring 10-minute talk by math teacher extraordinaire Dan Meyer: