Buying Your Expertise With Paid Resources – Becoming A Paid Expert Part 2

You can find Part One to this Becoming A Paid Expert series at: Becoming An Expert With Free Resources. That post focused on free learning resources. In this post, part two, we’ll look at paid learning resources. Part three we tackle a few potential income sources for the paid expert.

There are almost an unlimited number of paid online training solutions available for almost any endeavor conceivable.

Paid Mentorship

No, mentors aren’t always free. Choosing the right mentors, paid or otherwise, can oftentimes be an investment that makes or breaks your business. Great mentors can often shave years of trial and error lessons from your path to success.

There are an endless supply of success story examples but I’ll just mention one for now: John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur on Fire hired Jaime Tardy of Eventual Millionaire as his mentor. John credits Jaime Tardy for helping him launch what is today a 7 figure online business and podcast.

How many people could see past that $1,000 a month mentorship fee and see it as an investment that would very quickly set them on a path to becoming a millionaire?

Hiring A Consultant

Sometimes hiring a consultant makes sense. You can learn from consulting but, honestly, most of us look to consultants to tackle project specifics that we can’t, or we don’t want to, deal with ourselves. Nevertheless, it’s worth mentioning here.

Group Masterminds/Memberships

I’ve taken this path a couple of times myself and the right group can really become an invaluable resource. Some call them group masterminds but these paid membership sites come with a variety of labels. The idea is an influencer or group of influencers setup a membership site with lessons, resources, and connections that help others within that niche take their business to the next level.

Investigate the membership and determine the benefits before jumping into a group mastermind because they come in a wide variety of value and levels. Don’t base the value solely of the influencer involved. Often we find access to that influencer lacking and the value is left to peer to peer contact in a forum or a social group.

Paid Online Courses

Online courses also come in many flavors. You’ll find everything from single courses built by bloggers and marketers to mega-sites designed to offer hundreds or even thousands of individual online courses of almost any topic imaginable.

For example, sites like Udemy, Creative Live, and Lynda.com have a combined number of courses well over 36,000, including 32,000+ courses on Udemy alone. You can even learn from a handful of famous people at MasterClass.com. Personally, I think the James Patterson Teaches Writing course looks pretty interesting.

Online Colleges?

Oh, you want credentials? Use GetEducated.com to find and compare 1,200 online colleges and over 20,000 online programs/courses.

Audio books

I’ve been an Audible Platinum Member since January 2014 and have no plans to leave. I’ve listened to over 140 audio books, many of which are business books. I’m a huge advocate for Audible. I listen every single day between several devices (Android, Kindle, & Laptop) and everything syncs for me.

Books

Yes, print books still exist. I have an impressive library of both physical and digital business books. I even have a small business book review blog that I post to once in a while.

Amazon has all but become a member of my family since I bought my Kindle. Not only am I an Amazon Prime and Kindle Unlimited member, I’m a huge fan of Immersion Reading (See: Kindle Me Smart – Getting The Most From Kindle Books).

Avoiding Learning Overload

With the massive amount of learning tools and resources we have available today, the biggest challenge is actually implementing what we know – taking action. I think it is important to recognize the importance of learning but becoming an expert also takes doing. A lot of doing.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the ten thousand things it takes to get our online business off the ground that we forget to take action. When I was in the Army, sensitive information was disseminated and filtered on a “Need To Know” bases. With so much information threatening to overwhelm us, this just might be a better strategy.  Don’t bother learning something (in detail) until you actually need to know it.

This type of learning is often called, “Just In Time Learning“.

For example, you don’t necessarily have to know every detail about setting up a membership website, reading analytics, creating webinar slides, or dozens of other future tasks to become an email marketing expert right now. Sure, you may need those in the near future but what is required right this moment to accomplish your immediate goals?

What’s Next?

Next up in this Becoming A Paid Expert series is the fun part, “Profit From Your Expertise“. We’ll take all of this learning and take action with it. 🙂