Crossroads of Online Marketing… Going It Alone VS. Guided By A Mentor

Audio

Summary

The Video explores the dilemma of choosing between pursuing online marketing alone or with the guidance of a mentor. The speaker, CJ, shares personal experiences of initially going it alone due to financial constraints and trust issues with mentors. After facing challenges and pitfalls, they eventually found success with mentors Dean Holland and Russell Brunson. The text highlights the drawbacks of going alone, such as a steep learning curve, lack of personal feedback, emotional support, and networking opportunities. CJ emphasizes the value of mentorship, viewing it as an investment rather than an expense. The conclusion encourages individuals to choose their path but suggests considering mentorship for its numerous advantages. CJ recommends Dean Holland and Russell Brunson as trustworthy mentors, providing links for further exploration.

Links

Dean Holland

Russell Brunson

Transcript

Hey, this is CJ here again, and welcome to the CJSJ marketing blog.

Today, in episode seven, we’re going to be looking at the crossroads of online marketing: going in alone versus guided by a mentor.

This is a fantastic topic, one that I love to talk about because I enjoy mentoring other people. I enjoy being mentored. I enjoy studying the art of mentorship. So, you know, I get excited when we talk about mentors.

But one of the problems is in the online marketing realm, it became a tough topic for SJ and me because we are people of modest means and we don’t have a lot of extra money to spare.

We can’t go buy tons of different books, and we can’t dump much money into mentors and things of that nature because working with a mentor was out of the question for us. We simply couldn’t afford to pay the high premiums. I don’t know if you can relate to that, but the high premiums associated with it get pretty pricey. And even if we wanted to find a mentor, who can we trust to deliver on their promises? I don’t know. But we’ve been burnt several times.

After a while, you get to be a little gun shy on what to buy, especially when money’s tight, and you don’t really have the money to spend on it. Then you end up getting burnt.

So, you start wondering, who can I trust? SJ and I have been at this crossroads, on more than one occasion, asking ourselves, do we get a mentor or do we just go it alone? I have to say, 99% of the time, we chose to go it alone. Why? Well, as I mentioned previously, we had no money to spend on it and didn’t know who to trust. After all, we tried countless courses online where the marketers didn’t keep their promises and didn’t deliver, just as we mentioned before.

But out of these 99 times and all the times, we chose to do it alone. The problem with choosing to go alone is we ended up drowning in online digital junk and confused, falling into a number of pitfalls along the way. And falling into these pitfalls left us frustrated and continuously changing the path from one direction to another direction, hoping we’d find a solution. But as long as we were going it alone, we never did find a solution.

Eventually, we found a solution. But that solution was we came to the conclusion that nothing else is working. So, the only thing left is to find a way to get a mentor. Unfortunately, we went through several so-called mentors and thousands of dollars before we found two mentors. both of these mentors are phenomenal and are helping guide us to the path of success. We have found them both to be honest, caring, and they way over deliver more than we even imagined or expected from them.

I’d like to take the time right now to introduce you to them. One is Dean Holland, which he has helped us get off our feet and get us really started. He’s the one who’s brought us up, helped me get the blog put in place, and is coaching us how to monetize and how to drive traffic and all kinds of other stuff. Then of course, there’s Russell Brunson. He’s taught us about funnels and how the funnels work, how we build funnels, how to put them together, how to turn them into the marketing campaign and how to start monetizing them.

Both of these two men together make a great mentorship. They help us together, they complement each other, and they’re helping us reach our goals and our dreams. SJ and I, the only thing we can say is that we appreciate them and are thankful that they’re part of our personal and business development.

Like we said, we went through a lot of trial and error before we found these mentors.

My hope and prayer for sharing these honest mentors with you is to keep you from having to go through all the junk and all the trial and the error and the money and everything else it costed us to find these two mentors.

So though SJ and I changed course and decided to hire a mentor, still most individuals out there are at the crossroads of do I do it alone or do I get guided by a mentor?

For the remainder of this post, I’m wanting to go ahead and dive into a contrast between both options because neither option is wrong. You can do it alone, or you can go with a mentor. It’s strictly up to you. It’s strictly your choice.

SJ and I just couldn’t find a solution that worked for us when we went alone, and we decided it was a priority. So, we decided to get a mentor and find a way to sacrifice and do that.

But I want to look at the contrast of these two so you can have some information to help you make an intelligent decision.

The first thing I want to look at is cost prohibited. Many would agree that going in alone is more cost-friendly. If you do it by yourself, you don’t have the cost of the mentors, which are expensive. But however, I would like you to consider something. On the surface, this seems very plausible and makes sense because a mentor isn’t free. It makes sense that it seems to be more cost-effective and easier on the budget.

However, I’d also like you to consider the old saying, time is money. The loads of extra time it takes to locate information when going alone is measured in years, not days, not months, but years. And that is our personal experience from SJ and me. It robbed us of years, not just a day here or a month here, but it robbed us in years. And with a good mentor, respectfully, you can reduce all that down to six to 18 months to get up and start running and producing some sort of income from it versus going it alone.

A lot of the mentors said it took them 5-10 years before they even got up and really got running when they were trying to do it alone. I could tell from personal experience it takes a whole lot longer to dig through all the stuff and everything else. And now that we’re in mentoring, we’re moving along at a much smoother, faster progress. I don’t know about you, but I don’t find it cheaper because I can’t get time back. I can get money back, but I can’t get my time back. And my time is valuable. So, to me, it’s not cost-prohibited and it’s not cost-friendly because it costs me so much extra time, frustration, and years of my life off just because I have to try and figure this out on my own. If I do it alone versus doing it through a mentor.

The second thing I want to go over is a learning curve.

If you wish to go it alone, then you can plan on a very, very steep learning curve.

With so much information out there on online marketing, the questions are, where do you even begin? How do you decide what to learn and implement? How do you stay out of the pitfalls? How do you get things organized in the correct order? These questions are what caused most individuals who choose to go it alone to fail and quit. It’s sad when somebody quits on their dreams because it’s just so frustrating they can’t find a path. And instead of going and finding a mentor that can show them the path and has blazed the trail and everything.

I heard a really neat analogy the other day, and the analogy was this. There were several feet of snow, and the father didn’t want his two boys to have to walk through the deep snow. Instead, he walked in front of them and he told his boys, hey, put your footsteps into my footsteps and that’ll make it easy for you. However, the older boy that was there kept stepping out of his footsteps and trying to dredge through the snow to see around, to see what was happening. And he kept falling behind and falling behind as he was trying to go by himself instead of falling in the mentor’s footsteps like his younger brother did, that blazed and went ahead. It’s important you want to be able to do that. It’s so much faster and so much quicker because the steps are already there. You’re not having to lean out and try and figure them out, and you’re not having to get pushed backward and falling out, falling away from the opportunities that are there because you just give up.

A mentor blazes the trail where if you go alone, you have to blaze your own trail. Next. Personal feedback.

I don’t know about you, but personal feedback is important to me. That’s why I like mentors. They give me feedback. When a person decides to go alone, they have no one to give them feedback on what they are doing right and what they’re doing wrong. There is no constructive criticism to a person to make the needed changes or corrections if they’re going it alone. Where with a mentor, you have constructive criticism and you can tie into a feedback loop that helps keep one on track. That constant feedback helps you adjust and make sure you stay on track and make sure you’re going in the right direction and not getting lost off in the woods and the weeds and the ocean and everything and drowning. It keeps you on track. One footstep in front of the other so that you don’t drown. However, if you’re doing it alone, you don’t have that guide, you don’t have that feedback loop. All you do is keep dredging and hoping you find the path and hopefully you can blaze that path. And you have to just, I guess, keep talking to yourself like we did and just keep hoping that what you’re doing is correct because you don’t have a feedback loop like you would if you had a mentor.

The next thing that’s very, very important to consider is emotional support.

One thing you need to ask is if you are looking to go alone is who is going to give you the emotional support you need to reach your dreams. No one can reach their dreams going it alone. Everybody has to have someone. There’s no such thing as a self-made person. If you choose to go alone, you have to be self-supporting emotionally and have some kind of other emotional support team that you have to set up that may or may not have your dreams and your other things at your best interest. But with a mentor, you have the support to succeed, you have the needed emotional support. You have other people around you, you have people of like-mindedness, and you have people that are encouraging you in the communities, and the mentor encouraging you as well. And the mentor’s team that’s working with you, they’re constantly helping motivate you, they’re constantly giving you support, they’re constantly telling you, okay, you’re not behind, you’re where you need to be. Okay, take this step. This step. So just like the feedback loop, the emotional, you need an emotional support loop that keeps you up. Nobody can emotionally get through things without running into a lot of issues and a lot of things that drag us down. I know SJ and I got dragged down a lot of times, got frustrated and didn’t know where to go or what to do. But now, if we ever get that way, all we do is have to go back to our mentor in our community that’s out there of like-minded individuals, and they help us. But you can’t do that if you’re going it alone.

And then the last thing I want to look at is access to networking, other opportunities.

An individual that chooses to go it alone loses out on the inside opportunities. Often you won’t know it, but often there are opportunities for advancement that are just simply not available to those outside of the mentorship. Going it alone in this case is like looking into the fishbowl.

You can see from the outside, but you can’t come in. In addition, you miss out on the ability to network with others of like-minded people and dreams. Like I said, with the emotional support and the personal feedback, that community that you can relate with inside that mentorship and everything else. I know I keep saying it, but it is so valuable. It’s not something you need to discount. And the only way you know how valuable it is because we’ve had the opportunity to be in them.

A bunch of us in the group right now are looking at each other’s blog, helping each other, helping us with questions that are getting answered and we help somebody else with questions answered and the ones we can’t answer. The online mentor team and our online mentors answer those for us so that we can get going. There’s no question that we can’t ask and get the answers to. We don’t have to try and go dig for those answers. So having that network and the opportunities are priceless.

We’ve looked at these different things and we could go on. There are several more advantages to having a mentor. Accelerated learning, fast achievement, faster achievement, increased confidence, and these are just to name a few. But in conclusion, I would like for you to think about some things. SJ and I, after many tries, decided to take the mentor fork at the crossroads and are so glad and thankful we did. We didn’t get any richer. We didn’t win the lottery or miraculously run into money. Instead, we changed our perspective and started viewing it not as an expense, but as an investment.

Plus, both of us were tired of all the frustration and disappointment coming from trying to do it alone. One thing we realized is if we truly wanted something and it was a true priority, we could make the sacrifices needed to cover the cost of a mentorship. I have learned in my lifetime that if there’s something you want bad enough, you’ll find a way to get it. This wasn’t easy to make those sacrifices, but so far it has been worth every dime of the investment that we’ve made and we are comfortable with those investments and we are glad that we did them.

The question remains, what fork in the road are you going to travel down?

That of the mentor or that of going it alone? I want you to know that neither one is wrong. The choice is just simply yours. I hope you choose a mentor because I know it will be better, but still, you have to make the choice for yourself. SJ and I wish you the best on whichever road you choose to travel.

However, if you choose to travel the mentor path, then check out mine and SJ’s mentors, Dean Holland and Russell Brunson. I’m going to put some links down below this video in the blog post and so you can click on them. Go check out some of their stuff and if you have any questions, ask me questions about the mentors. I’ll gladly answer them and if I don’t know the answer, I’ll go to those mentors and I’ll ask them and I’ll get the answers for you. But do check them out. I know you will find them to be of the caliber of which I told you they were and I don’t take those lightly and I don’t give praises out to mentors and people lightly. But they are two good guys that are honest and that you won’t get burnt through.

Of course, you still have to do your part with the mentor so to get the value out of them, you will have to do your part. I mean, they’re not going to do everything for you, but they certainly will guide you down the trails that they’ve blazed in front of them.

Till next time, this is CJ signing off.