The true story of how I quit following “best practices.” Sometimes the gurus are wrong.

This was originally posted elsewhere on August 15, 2018. In the wake of a ‘content audit’, I sent it marching off to the trash can, after noticing zero ROI from it compared to my other blogs. At the last moment, I saved it from total death and decided to republish it here. May the odds ever be in your favor, and perhaps you’ll learn a thing or two from my somewhat tragic, if not lesson-learned, story below. ~ Julia

This is going to be a hard post to write. Forgive me while I dry some angry tears for a moment. (Only angry at myself.)

…Okay, I’m back.

Sometimes, the “gurus” in marketing are wrong.

Deadly wrong.

Earlier this 2018 (January-ish), I paid over $1000 for a training program that taught me how to “sell” a program, from start to finish. Launch a webinar, set up email sequences, the whole nine yards.

After spending a month and many, many countless hours to peruse and learn the material in the program I bought to teach me how to sell my program (ironic, I know), I took an entire month to develop my “machine-like” marketing tool.

The physical format? It was an on-demand webinar.

Now, I knew in my gut these can be super sleazy — I’ve attended a few that were terrible — so I put some real effort into this class. I developed over 50 slides, with data-intensive research and an accurate timeline history of my marketing woes and gains, carefully and exactly expounding the steps I’ve taken to build a multi-million dollar business through content.

It was B.S.-free.

The content was seriously good. I ran it by a bunch of industry peers — and they loved the webinar I was going to present.

Then, I made a fatal flaw.

I set up the B.S.-filled webinar program I was taught to do in the guru’s $1,000 program I’d bought and gone through.

I treated the guru’s system like it was the Golden Rule of Course Marketing — heck, she’d made $1,000,000 in a year through setting up this machine-like selling system.