What Happened When I Paid a Guru $3,000 for a Course?
Should you stay away from expensive guru courses?
I’ve read countless stories from people that paid some guru thousands of dollars for a course that turned out to be a scam. These days, the word guru is almost synonymous with the word scam. I didn’t let that stop me from putting my money down.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably seen hundreds of ads for courses that promise to make you money online. Usually while lying on a beach and sipping a mojito.
You may even have taken some of these courses. Maybe you made money, maybe you didn’t. Let me know in the comments.
While I know many of these courses are nothing but scams, I hate that many people think that all courses are scams, because that’s just not the case.
A scam course versus a legit course
So, how do you tell the difference between a scam course and a legit course?
The most obvious way is to ask yourself if it sounds too good to be true? If it does, it’s almost certainly a scam.
If an ad for a course shows a Ferrari or Lamborghini as part of the marketing, it’s also almost certainly a scam.
Even courses that teach you how to “make money online” are often scams. Not all of them though.
Are you too gullible?
We all want to make big money with as little effort as possible, but the reality is that life isn’t that easy.
I see many people fall for these scam courses simply because they’re lazy. They don’t actually want to learn valuable skills that they can monetize. That would mean they have to do some work. What they want is easy money.
Stop being so gullible and lazy, and you can easily avoid the scams.
Legit courses
Yes, there are plenty of them out there. Do your due diligence when choosing a course and you might learn a skill that can make you money.
This means that you should look for a course that teaches you a skill that you’d like to learn. The typical scam guru courses don’t tend to teach specific skills. They claim to teach you how to make money online.
As you should be aware, making money online isn’t something you can learn from taking a course that’s a few hours long. It takes time to build up your skill set and gain experience.
I’ve been working online for the last 15–20 years. I still only understand a tiny fraction of making money online.
The course I took
The course I took cost $3,000. It was a 6-hour course. It was one hour a week for 6 weeks.
When I told friends that I was paying this amount of money for just 6 hours of tutoring they thought I’d gone crazy. But I hadn’t.
At the time, I ran an ecommerce business. It’s a business that ended up making me a total of $550,000 over 3 years.
Part of the success was because of the course.
The course I took was 1-on-1 mentoring with an AdWords guru. It seemed like a no-brainer to me that the course would make more money than it cost.
I was spending $3,000 a month on AdWords, so paying the same amount for a course didn’t seem extravagant at all. It was the business that was paying for it, not me. That meant that it was treated as a business expense.
Let me be clear here. I didn’t just fork out $3,000 to some stranger on the internet that claimed to be a guru. If you do that you’re probably crazy. I would never do that.
The guy I took the course with came highly recommended by some AdWords experts. I had already learned a ton from these experts but want to step up my skills. There was no way that these people would suggest some scam course to me.
Within 6 months of taking the course and implementing what I had learned, my AdWords spending dropped from $3,000 a month to $2,000. That means that the business saved $12,000 a year in advertising costs.
As well as saving money on the ad spend, I also got more sales because my ads were targeted more efficiently. That resulted in around $1,000 a month of increased profit.
So I was $24,000 a year better off after having taken the course.
The icing on the cake was that I sold the business for $72,000 more than I would have otherwise gotten for it — $24,000 a year extra profit multiplied by the 3 times annual profit equals $72,000.
As you can see, the course was well worth it.
Takeaways
The main takeaway for me is that you should spend money on courses that will teach you a specific skill. Don’t buy a course with a vague title like Make Money Online.
There are thousands of ways to make money online. Do you really just want to learn something random that probably won’t even work?
Stay away from courses that have images of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and people with perfect bodies sitting on the beach with their laptops.
If you want to make money online you need to get serious. Put some effort into planning what you want to do. Learn from free online resources in the beginning. Get some experience before deciding the exact skills you need to learn.
If you enjoyed reading this, you might also be interested in learning to set up an ecommerce store.
