Do you really need another e-course?

Every day I find myself looking through an e-course and thinking that I can’t grow my blog or business without it. I love learning new things and I strongly believe that education will not only help us build a successful business, it’s also essential for our personal growth. I also believe than investing in our business will make us work harder to achieve our goals. But you might not really need another e-course to improve your skills or grow your business.

The truth is that a lot of bloggers and creative entrepreneurs think that they can’t grow their blog or business without learning more, but they don’t spend time doing the actual work. And at some point, you need to stop telling yourself that you have to learn more and start working towards achieving your goal.

Here are six reasons why you probably shouldn’t buy that e-course:

You can find everything online for free

There’s an awful lot of information available for free. If you want to learn how to code or create graphics for your blog, there are many great tutorials. If you want to grow your blog or social media following, you just have to go to Google or Pinterest and search for articles and tutorials.

Most online courses will not give you a super secret formula to grow your blog or start a business. Usually, they will present to you all the information that’s already available wrapped in a nice package. This will make learning easier and faster, but you have to be able to afford it.

You can’t afford it

I hate to see people that spend their rent money on a course or even take out a loan. You don’t need to do this!

Yes, e-courses are great investments, but you shouldn’t ruin your business so you can take a course that might not give you the skills to grow that business.

If you can’t afford to take a course, it’s better to save money for it or find a cheaper alternative.

You can find a cheaper alternative

There’s always a cheaper and sometimes better alternative.

A few years ago, when I was struggling to learn Adobe Illustrator, I wanted to enroll in a workshop taught by one of my favorite designers. It was perfect, except that the price was way out of my budget. After a while, I found a better and cheaper Illustrator course. And by cheaper, I mean almost ten times cheaper.

If you can’t afford your favorite course, you might find the same thing at a lower price on e-learning websites like Treehouse or Skillshare.

It’s not tailored to your niche

There are a lot of courses that promise to teach you how to make a large amount of money, but most often than not, they just show you what the product creators did to grow their business. You might learn a lot of great things from this, like how to build an email list or promote your blog on social media. Although you might not have the same results as the course creator you because your audience is different and what worked for them might not work for you.

If you want to learn how to monetize your blog or grow your business, try to find courses that offer one-on-one chats or work with a blogging or business consultant.

You haven’t tried anything yet

Do you really need to take an e-course that teaches you how to monetize your blog when you don’t even have a blog?

I know a lot of people take courses because they think they will be able to skip all the dirty work, but it’s not true. You still need to work hard to learn new skills or grow your blog and business. And if you try to learn something on your own you might find out that you are actually good at it and you don’t need help.

You might not get the results you want

I’m a self-taught illustrator and pattern designer, and even though I’ve been doing this for years, I wanted to take a class. I was hoping to see different techniques or maybe more details about how you should prepare your files for your clients. So I took an advanced pattern design class. While it was a great class, I didn’t learn anything new because I already knew those things but convinced myself that I didn’t.

Whether we are talking about a class that teaches you how to build a WordPress theme or one that will show you how to have a seven figure income, you will not see results if you don’t finish it or if you just watch it, but don’t do the actual work.

Or like I said earlier, an e-course that only shows you what the teacher did to grow their audience or income, but doesn’t come with at least a consultation, might not help you reach your goals.

How to find the perfect e-course

Before you hit the Pay button, ask yourself if you really need that e-course. If you take a look at what that course covers, you might learn that you already know those things.

If you don’t know if a certain class is for you, ask for recommendations from people that are at the same level of experience as you and maybe even talk to the product creator.

Make sure you are investing in quality courses and not the ones that teach you quick, short-term tactics. You don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars to learn a strategy that won’t work after an algorithm update. A lot of the product creators that teach you how to use certain platforms offer updates and support.

Only purchase from product creators that you trust or from good e-learning platforms.

And whatever you do, don’t purchase a course that you think you might need only to change your mind and ask for a refund.

Do you take a lot of e-courses? How do you know which is the best one for you?

*The photo used in this post is from Death to the Stock Photo