Can an Online Marketing Course Help You Generate Sales?
I have seen many an online marketing course. These courses are offered by internet marketing ‘gurus’ who claim to have made millions of dollars from their patented marketing ’systems’. But can these online marketing courses help you generate sales?
The answer to this question depends on the depth of your marketing knowledge. I have seen several online marketing courses and have been thoroughly unimpressed. Many of these courses simply tell you to provide more backlinks to your website. Most do not provide any worthwhile insights into the minds of consumers. Once you’ve seen one, you’ve pretty much seen them all.
Backlinks are links that lead to your website. Theoretically, it would make sense that the more backlinks you have, the more traffic you will generate. But that explanation is ultimately simplistic and unsatisfying.
In order to illustrate this point, we first need to understand the rather abstract notion of ‘backlinks’.
Backlinks are the digital equivalents of flyers. Both are used for the same reasons. They are a cheap way of creating brand awareness.
But there are good flyers and there are poor flyers. Out of all the flyers you’ve been given your entire life, how many can you remember? How many did you discard?
Backlinks are no different. Simply putting your link out there may help, but the probability of chance is never a satisfying solution. Marketing is a science. It should not be a whimsical act of randomness.
Unfortunately, that’s what many of these online marketing courses offer. These courses will tell you to generate backlinks on media platforms like Youtube, EzineArticles or de.licious. What they will not tell you is how to write good copy, or produce compelling and powerful messages that will drive consumers into purchasing your product. They won’t tell you this simply because they don’t know how to.
A large majority of the people who create online marketing courses have never been employed by a multinational corporation. Many of them have never worked in good advertising or marketing companies. Judging from the quality of their own websites, I wonder if any of them have been employed at all.
Many of these hacks make their money by coning honest people. Are they genuinely rich? They may be, but not for the reasons they suggest. Some of the shysters are rich not due to the potency of their marketing ’systems’, but due to their uncanny ability to conjure up pleasant fictions and selling them to honest businesses who believe them whole-heartedly.
Can an online marketing course help you generate sales? The answer to this question depends of your ability to discover the obvious. Personally, I feel that the amount spent on these ‘marketing’ DVDs or ebooks could be better spent on material written by true legends in the field of advertising and marketing. If you are looking for good material, I highly recommend “Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy”. This book is a staple in many MNCs and is the definitive guide on everything related to advertising.
By: Dedrick Koh