Why Affiliate Marketing Courses Suck (Even My Own)

I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is the List Building Lifestyle, a podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world, and help people improve their lives in the process, then this podcast is for you.

I also invite you to attend a free workshop at Igor.ac where I’m teaching how I made $21,779.45 in affiliate commissions by sending just 481 clicks to my affiliate link in one day. I’m also explaining why I walked away from ClickBank and I don’t promote ClickBank offers anymore, as well as the five things I look for in the perfect affiliate offer. I’m even going to show you the one-page website that I used to make over half a million dollars in affiliate commissions this year. And I’ll even bribe you to attend this workshop by giving you a $497 value course that shows you how to share your big high converting affiliate offers, free and next affiliate promotion.

In addition, I’ll even give you the three offers I’m promoting right now that are making me money as we speak. All that and more at Igor.ac. And now it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

Welcome back to another edition of the List Building Lifestyle with your host, Igor Kheifets.

I want to talk about affiliate marketing courses and you know what, maybe even all courses for that matter. Now, I’ve been someone who’s been investing in courses since about 2008, and this has been a consistent daily experience. There hasn’t been a week or a month when I didn’t buy some kind of a course be it a $7 thing, or a $777 thing, or maybe even $7,000 thing. I’ve bought things from small eBooks all the way to robust video courses, and all the way to three-day intensives. I paid for $25,000 a year masterminds. I mean, if there’s anything you can do, if you can get private coaching for $2,500 an hour, I’ve done it. Okay? I’ve done all of it. And here’s what I’ve concluded, and this is something I believe you will find interesting because one of the most common things that I’m hearing from my customers is that they go through course, after course, after course, they go from one course to the next, but every time the experience is very disappointing. Meaning that in some way, these courses all fail to meet expectations.

There’s very few people who will go out there and stay positive and find something positive to say about the courses they’re purchasing. Most of the time it people will share that, “Oh, this course didn’t give me what it promised” or “This course promised this, but I don’t see any results,” or “I’ve invested myself into this course, but I haven’t seen a penny back,” or whatever.

So here’s a couple of things to consider when it comes to courses. And in general, this will explain why all affiliate marketing courses suck. And as I say that, I include my own course as well. So if you ever checked out my elite affiliate pro course where I teach how I build these really profitable affiliate campaigns, you can go check it out at Igor.ac right now. There’s an on demand streamable webinar you can watch.

So anyway, why do they all suck? Well, all affiliate marketing courses suck, first of all, because of your expectation, yours and mine and everyone else’s. The expectation is, and this is partially because of how we are as human beings and what we seek, and partially of how the courses are being sold to sort of accommodate to to these builtin desires we have, we expect a paint by numbers manual where everything has been figured out for us and if we have a question, for us to get a response to that question within minutes of us asking it. And so what we want is we want this absolutely no guesswork super, super, super micro detailed thing, and especially what we want is we want it all simplified. We don’t want more complexity in our lives. We have enough of it as it is. We want everything simplified and we want for this complexity to go away. We want for someone who’s been there, done that, come back and quite literally eliminate every question that we may have.

In fact, what we want is for that person to anticipate the questions we have and offer a quick and easy push button like solution to every challenge that may come up on the way. And so this expectation, whether you want to admit that you have one or not, it is ever present in everyone’s brain. That’s how the brain works. The brain just craves it like crazy. The brain wants instant gratification. I don’t care who you are, I don’t care even if you’ve been conditioning yourself to not expect it, you still expect it because you can’t rewire human nature after millions and millions of years.

And so the thing is that there’s no course out there who can actually deliver on such an outrageously, outrageously, unreasonable request because there’s no way in hell anyone can put together a course and answer all the questions, all the questions, without actually sitting there next to you and answer them as they come up for you because you’ve got your unique experience, you’ve got your unique set of skills, your unique perspective, you’ve got your own unique handicap and your own unique superpowers. So it’s really, really hard to predict what questions you may have.

Now in addition, another factor that contributes to it is that most affiliate marketers who create courses, they are bad teachers. I mean, I don’t care if you’ve been doing affiliate marketing for for 50 years, if you never taught yourself how to teach other people, how to present your ideas, how to get them to follow through, if you haven’t really done any research on that or you don’t have much experience doing that, then guess what, you’re going to suck as a teacher and as a result, your course will suck as well. And that’s normal. That’s perfectly normal. It shouldn’t stop you from releasing courses and helping people, but just know that it’s not going to be perfect and that teaching is another skill you’ll have to master if you’d like to achieve high levels of satisfaction with your courses, which is again, something that takes some time to master as well.

Now, besides knowing how to teach and teaching, there’s also another aspect of it, and that is being able to craft a user experience when it comes to having your people, having your customers, go through what you teach. Now, of course, right now I’m talking to course creators, but if you’re a course consumer, if you’re trying to learn affiliate marketing and you’re finding all the courses to be very, well, unfulfilling, let’s put it this way, they don’t deliver on what they promise based on your unique experience with the course, chances are either that person is just a bad teacher, not because they’re a bad person, but because they don’t have much experience teaching and they sort of assume that if they just lay out to you what they’ve just done, it will be enough, which most of the time it’s not.

And second, the experience that you build out for the customer, the experience that you as a customer go through when you go through a course, that is also very important because that determines how receptive the student is to the material and how likely the student is to actually go through the material and how likely your student is actually to implement the material as well. Again, not the same thing. All of these things are totally different things requiring totally different set of skills.

That’s why coaching is in such high demand in the 21st century because it’s not enough to have the information. It’s not enough to have the information laid out in front of you. It may depend on your learning style, it may depend on your learning disability, there’s a lot of people out there with learning disabilities, it may depend on a lot of things that are outside of your control as the course creator. And as a course consumer, that may also depend on a bunch of different things that you may not even be aware of. And again, it’s not necessarily the course creator’s fault. All they’re trying to do is they’re trying to show you what they’re doing, hopefully you’re buying from somebody who’s actually doing what they’re saying they’re doing, and the second thing, of course, is trying to make a little bit of money doing that.

But most people who create courses are just not great at doing that. They’re not great at crafting courses that get engagement, they’re not great at teaching, they’re not great at expressing their ideas. It’s not like they went through a university level curriculum building course or anything like that. They just sat down behind their computer and went out there and recorded some thoughts and showed you some things on the screen. That’s what they do now.

Now, it doesn’t disqualify them. They shouldn’t be disqualifying themselves if they don’t know how to teach, but it explains why every course you’ve ever purchased kind of sucks.

Yo, it’s Igor. If you’re loving the content, hop on over listbuildinglifestyleshow.com for more free training and a free transcript of this episode. Oh, and I’d really appreciate if you logged into iTunes and rated the show. It really helps. Thanks.

Now, what’s next? So should you just stop buying courses? Should you stop buying coaching programs? No, you should not. But you should also not expect to get all the answers from a single course. And that is why, if you’ve been online for a little while, you’ve probably noticed that what happens is you’re sort of compiling your own puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle, made of thousands of pieces and you’re compiling it piece by piece based on the courses you go through. You sort of go through and you learn from a bunch of different people, and they teach in a bunch of different styles, you attend events and you get the coaching programs, and you have membership areas with lectures and stuff like that, sometimes you do certification, but at the end of the day you’re the one creating your own puzzle and making sense of that puzzle so you can then finally understand what’s going on. But it’s rarely, if ever, that you’ll be able to do that by going through a single course.

And I’ve noticed that in my coaching experience, back when I was teaching people how to build [inaudible 00:11:11] businesses, I noticed that the people who succeeded the fastest were the ones who spent a little bit of time online, trying things out and failing at them. So by the time I showed them my blueprint, they’ve had enough of experience in failing to make sense of what I was sharing and as a result, implemented correctly and quickly and therefore, get results. People who came in expecting to get all of their questions answered, they got their questions answered, but even then they didn’t take action.

I’ve actually had a dedicated staff member, her name was Chrissy Darrington, she’s no longer online unfortunately, but she was there dedicated specifically to getting on calls with people, group calls and one-on-one calls, and helping them through different questions they’ve had. And even then, they were still refusing to take action for a myriad of different reasons. So there’s really no perfect affiliate marketing course out there.

There’s really no perfect course, period. And the only thing I believe that separates people who are successful at going through courses and people who are not successful at going through courses is that people who are going through courses successfully, first off, look at it as a loose map of where they should be going. Second, they may pick up nuggets from the course, but they don’t think and they don’t believe they’ll have all of their questions answered in one single course. Also, the people who get results tend to trust themselves to gain that initial direction, implement, and then ask questions as they implement in the real world, which is a lot of what people don’t do. Believe it or not, the implementation rate or the action rate on a course, like if you were to sell a $500 course to 500 people, you’d be surprised, but you would only have probably around 12 people or 10 people do anything at all.

And most would get discouraged really quickly regardless of how clear and how much of a checklist you’re providing them with. Why? Because people get discouraged not seeing the full clear path. They get discouraged by not understanding the path. So they may see it, but they may not understand it. They may get discouraged by looking at the path and saying, “Oh, this path does not seem like the kind of path I personally would like to take.” So all of this stuff is just not something you can even control as a course creator and, as a result, you have an entire marketplace of people who are running around and saying, “Ah, these courses, I’ve been buying this course and that course, and I’m going through them, but I’m not seeing much results. I’m not happy. I don’t think the results I’m getting are the results that I was promised.”

So my advice to you as somebody who wants to succeed online and somebody who wants to succeed in affiliate marketing or internet marketing, first off, get rid of that fucking mentality that says you’re entitled to getting all the answers just because you paid someone $500. You’re absolutely not entitled to anything besides an equal opportunity. That’s all you’re entitled to. The rest is up to you to figure out. The fact that they are giving you the right direction, the fact that they’re laying out the foundation for you, the fact that they’re sharing some tips that they’ve learned along the way by making mistakes, that alone is worth tens of times of what they’re charging you over the course of the rest of your life. But if you approach every course you’re buying with that mentality, with that entitlement attitude that you’re supposed to be told all the answers, it’s impossible to do in the first place. It’s just not possible.

So if you get 70% of the answers in the course, that’s amazing. That’s unheard of. If you can get 50%, be happy. If you get 30% then that’s borderline for you to not be satisfied. But for the most part, when it comes to courses and coaching programs, you will never get an A to Z complete and thorough, no gaps left sort of path. It’s not going to happen. It just doesn’t. Not because people don’t want to give it to you, but because there’s so many variables in the process that you will simply have to go and figure out a bunch of that stuff on your own.

Now, a lot of these courses will shortcut your path from six years to six months, a lot of these courses will take you from trying to figure out how to build a funnel for two years down to two month, I mean they can really shortcut your path, but they can’t walk the path for you. You still have to be the one to walk it. You still have to be the one to ask some questions, figure some things out on your own, and you have to believe in yourself to do it. You can no long… You just can’t. It doesn’t work like that. You can’t expect for things to be handed to you on a silver platter. You just can’t. Unless you’re willing to pay 100,000, 200,000, half a million dollars for something that’s called a franchise. But even then, it will come with a set of issues and challenges you’re not being told that you will have to deal with on a daily basis.

So again, something for you to chew on next time you’re thinking of buying the next course, because you will be buying the next course, we all will, we need the courses, otherwise we’re completely lost in the dark. The courses are amazing. The fact we can buy them and get educated regardless of where we’re at in the world and regardless of the people we know and the connections we have and even our income level, even if you’re on social security now and there’s a course about affiliate marketing for 500 bucks, you can actually buy it. You can get a credit card, or line of credit, or you can borrow money from someone, the society today gives you access to that information. 50 years ago, 70 years ago, 100 years ago, those secrets would have never reached you unless you were born into a wealthy family or unless you were close friends with somebody who was actually doing it.

So you are very privileged just having the opportunity to learn from other people all across the globe for very little money. It may seem like a lot of money to you, but it’s actually not a lot. If you divide your investment in the course, let’s just say it’s $10,000, by the rest of your life.

So if you’re trying to make money online and you’re trying to learn how to make money online, and you’re buying this course for $10,000, and you divide whatever’s left of your life, with the average life expectancy of about 84 years old, so even if you’re 70 years old, you still have 14 more years, that means you’re paying less than a thousand dollars a year for the rest of your life to learn some skill that can make you a millionaire by then. I mean, it’s not even in the same ballpark. It’s unfair to the person creating the course. And they’re charging you way less than they’re supposed to, yet a lot of times what I hear from people that it’s costing them a lot more than they can afford. Well, I call bullshit on that. You want to get rich?

Learn to take a little bit of a responsibility for your success and invest in yourself. How can you expect other people to buy from you if you will not buy from other people, if you won’t take risks, financial risks, and invest in yourself, if you won’t show that, “Hey, I believe so other people will believe in me as well”? It’s impossible. If you’re not buying from other people to advance yourself, you will never have other people buying from you to advance themselves in some way. It’s just the way the universe works.

So again, something to chew on next time you’re thinking of whether or not to buy an affiliate marketing course. So this is Igor Kheifets and this concludes another episode of the List Building Lifestyle. Until next time we chat, have a good day.

Thank you for listening to the List Building Lifestyle. Get access to previous episodes, the transcription of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, don’t forget to claim your free seat at the workshop I’m hosting this week where I show the two-step system that made me the top affiliate for people like Ned Baysac, John Crestoni, Richard Legg, Michael Chaney and many, many others. In fact, on this workshop, I’m going to show you the exact approach I take whenever I promote an affiliate offer, the exact offers I promote, as well as how I was able to make over half a million dollars in commissions using my small list of just 18,000 people, promoting a weird type of product that almost no one else promotes. All that is yours at Igor.ac. So go ahead, claim your seed right now and I’ll see you there.