Do I Need Another Class? Why You Keep Buying Marketing Classes and Still Aren’t Marketing

Hey Tori! Answering Your Digital Marketing Questions for Creative Entrepreneurs Podcast

You have four classes on email marketing. A Pinterest course you never finished. A Reels workshop from last spring — you watched two of the eight videos. Last week you signed up for another one, and this time you’re really excited about it.

You’ve been in business five years. Seven, maybe. Your email list has 41 people on it, and you haven’t sent them anything in months. And the thought that keeps circling is: I just need to learn a little more before I start. What’s wrong with me? Nothing is wrong with you. But something is definitely happening, and today we’re going to name it.

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What you’ll learn in this post/episode:

• Why procrastination is an emotion problem, not a time management problem

• The one sentence hiding underneath every marketing task you’re avoiding

• Why the classes that feel best to take are teaching you the least

• A five-step framework for deciding whether you actually need another class

• The rule I use on myself before I buy anything new

I Used to Sell a Course. Here’s Why I Stopped.

Let me tell on myself first. I used to sell a digital marketing course. I don’t anymore — I pivoted on purpose, because I watched enough people buy a whole course when what they actually needed was one person telling them which single thing to do next.

What I sell now is coaching. There is still a resource library with worksheets, videos, and a complete success path. But the library isn’t the product. The coaching is. Most of the women I work with don’t have a knowledge problem — they know what an email list is, they usually already have one, they know what a lead magnet is. What they’re not doing is taking action.

Buying a class is one of the most sophisticated, most socially accepted ways there is to avoid marketing your offers. It looks like progress. It feels like progress. And six months later your email list hasn’t grown and neither has your revenue.

I know, because I ran my own business that way for quite a while, with my own money.

Procrastination Is Not a Time Management Problem

We treat procrastination like a scheduling failure — like a better calendar system would fix it. The research says otherwise. Procrastination is an emotion regulation strategy. When a task feels bad — overwhelming, too hard, too exposed — we don’t put it off because we’re lazy or disorganized. We put it off because avoiding it makes us feel better right now. Researchers call it short-term mood repair.

In 2013, two psychologists — Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl — published a paper arguing that procrastination is not a scheduling failure at all. It is a failure of emotion regulation. When a task feels bad, we do not put it off because we are disorganized. We put it off because putting it off makes us feel better right now. They call it short-term mood repair.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Because it means avoiding your marketing is not irrational behavior. It works. It reliably makes an uncomfortable feeling go away for the afternoon. That is precisely why it is so hard to stop doing.

Sirois and Pychyl also name who pays the bill: your future self. The relief lands immediately. The cost arrives later, and it arrives for a version of you who feels, in the moment, almost like a different person entirely — which is why it is so easy to hand her the problem.

So the useful question is not "why am I so undisciplined about marketing my business."

The useful question is: what is the bad feeling I am managing?

Sit with that, because it reframes everything. Putting it off works. That’s why we keep doing it. It isn’t irrational at all — it’s extremely effective at the thing it’s actually doing, which is making a bad feeling go away.

What Marketing Actually Asks You to Say Out Loud

For quilters, pattern designers, teachers, and makers, I think I know exactly what it is.

Marketing requires you to say out loud, in public: I made this, and I think it’s worth your money.

That’s the whole thing. Every marketing task you’re avoiding is some version of that sentence. Posting the pattern. Sending the email. Announcing the workshop. Putting a price on something you made with your hands. Every one of those is you standing up and claiming your work has value where people who know you can watch you do it.

And in our world it can feel like bragging. We come out of a craft built on generosity — we give quilts away, we donate to guilds and local charities, we teach our friends for free. Then you go to charge ten dollars for a pattern and something in your chest says, who do you think you are?

Now hold a class up next to that. It costs money. It takes time. It takes effort. So it doesn’t feel like avoidance. But look at what it asks of you emotionally: almost nothing. You get to be the student. You get to be humble. You get to be safe. Nobody side-eyes a woman for working on her business.

There is no version of taking a class where you have to say your work is worth paying for. That is exactly what makes it such a good hiding place.

Why the Classes That Feel Best Are Teaching You the Least

There’s a second thing going on, and it lands squarely in my wheelhouse. I have a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction, which means I’ve spent a good chunk of my adult life studying how people learn — and, more to the point, how people convince themselves they’re learning when they aren’t.

Researchers call it the fluency illusion. When information goes down easy, your brain reads that smoothness as evidence that you’ve mastered it. But smoothness is just smoothness. It isn’t learning.

Robert Bjork at UCLA, writing with John Dunlosky and Nate Kornell, reviewed decades of work on this in the Annual Review of Psychology. Their conclusion is uncomfortable and worth sitting with: people routinely hold a faulty mental model of their own learning, which makes us prone to both misjudging and mismanaging it. We assess how well we are learning partly by how easy the material feels going in — and ease turns out to be a poor signal. Smooth is just smooth.

A separate review published the same year, led by Dunlosky with a team of researchers, went further and tested ten common study techniques against the evidence. The techniques students reach for most — highlighting, underlining, rereading, summarizing — were rated low utility. The two that came out strongest, practice testing and spacing your practice out over time, are the ones that feel harder and less satisfying while you are doing them.

The study methods that feel best — rereading, re-watching, highlighting — are consistently the weakest. The methods that build durable skill feel harder and make you feel worse while you’re doing them. It’s like lifting weights: the fatigue isn’t a sign something’s wrong, it’s the getting-stronger part.

Side by side:

• Watching a marketing class goes down smooth. It feels productive. It’s predictable — you know what’s coming. There’s no risk of failing in public.

• Writing your own email feels rough. It feels hard. You’re fully exposed, and it might flop.

One of those grows your business, and your nervous system will fight you on which one to pick every single time. I’ve been doing this for seven years and I still get nervous sending emails. It doesn’t fully go away.

The One Question That Tells You the Truth

Here’s your test. Actually answer it — don’t just read it and move on with your day.

What did you actually put out into the world from the last class you took?

Not what did you learn. Not was it a good class. What went out? What did a customer actually see? What email got sent? What pattern got launched? What workshop did you host?

If the answer is nothing, the next class is not the thing standing between you and a successful launch.

One more piece worth naming: decision fatigue. Sometimes it’s simply easier to decide to buy a class — where you’ll get at least one useful thing — than to decide what’s actually right for the stage your business is in.

Stage Two Is Called Experiment on Purpose

Inside the DMMC, the whole program runs on a success path with five stages: Foundation, Experiment, Consistency, Focus, and Tweak. I named stage two Experiment deliberately.

Stage one is foundations — your ideal customer, your content themes, what you want to sell. That’s the learning stage, and it’s the part everybody loves. It feels like building something, and you are. But most of you have been in business two to five years. You already have those blocks in place.

Stage two is where you take it out into the wild of the internet and find out what actually works. And the very first thing in stage two is a three-week challenge: post three times a week on one platform. One platform. Three weeks.

The instruction isn’t just “go do it.” It’s pick your start date, post the date publicly in our community — and then we cheer you on.

Notice what that’s doing, because it isn’t teaching you anything. Pick a date, tell somebody the date, go do the thing.

This is also where the wall shows up in my coaching. My work runs on three strategies: lead, nurture, and launch. People move through lead strategy fast. Where they stall is launch — because a launch has a date on it, and a date creates urgency whether you want it to or not. So the question I keep asking is the same one: when are you launching?

To be clear, I’m not telling you to stop taking classes. There are things you need to learn. But a class with a date attached — a date you’re going to implement what you learned — is training. A class with no date can be entertainment. It can be procrastination. It can be a very expensive, very sophisticated way to put off the bad feelings, because learning feels good.

I say that with a lot of love and zero judgment, because I did it too. I only got better once I started calling myself out on it.

Five Steps to Decide If You Actually Need Another Marketing Class

Here’s what I’d walk you through if we were on a coaching call and you were going back and forth on buying something new.

1. Take inventory — on paper.

Three columns: the class name, what it taught, and what you actually put into action from it. Include summits and webinars. Use paper, not a screen, so you don’t disappear down a rabbit hole — the point is to take action, not to hand you one more thing to do instead of marketing.

Class Name	What It Taught	What I Actually Put Into Action
e.g. Email Marketing 101	Welcome sequences	—

Then look at the page. If that third column is blank, that is a more useful answer than anything I could hand you.

2. Go back to one you already own.

Pick the one that speaks to the struggle you’re facing right now — ideally the instructor whose energy you liked, whose emails sound like something you’d want to write. Take it again, or review the part you need.

3. Pick a date and tell someone.

Not “soon.” A date. Then say it out loud to a person, for accountability. You can email me at hey@heytori.tech if you need somebody to tell. “I’m sending an email on Friday.” That’s it.

4. Do the small version.

Not five batched emails. One email. Keep it simple, small, close, and reasonable. You have the information. You have the date. Let’s make it happen.

5. Then reevaluate.

Now do you need another class? Sometimes the honest answer is yes — there’s a real gap and you need to go learn something. I am not telling you to stop learning. I’m telling you to act first when you already have the knowledge, so you’re deciding from what you did rather than from what you’ve been avoiding. If what you know gets you 50% of the way, the other 50% is the doing.

Here’s the rule I use on myself: don’t buy another class until you can name what you took action on from the last one.

How CELA Helps When You Hit the Launch Wall

Let me pull back the curtain a little. DMMC members have access to a suite of custom AI tools I built around my own frameworks — not generic chatbots. The one that’s relevant today is CELA, the Creative’s Email Launch Assistant.

I want to be honest about what CELA does: she gives you a starting point. My clients move through lead strategy quickly and then stop at launch, where they’d actually have to sell something. Every launch comes with email marketing attached, and that’s where CELA picks up. She has a ten-day launch framework on her back end and gives you basic messaging so you’re not staring at a blank screen. Then you fill in your own voice, your real customer testimonials, and the actual questions people have asked you.

She doesn’t write your launch. She makes the next step small enough to take.

What Happened When She Stopped Signing Up and Started Taking Action

One of my members was taking class after class after class. When she came to me, she told me she wanted to shift her business from being a service provider to being a teacher.

She started with the Workshops Unleashed Book Club, which is built around action — moving you forward to actually create your class and get the marketing out. She told me she did more toward getting her class out there in the book club than in any other program she’d taken, and she’d named about three of them. I won’t say which. There’s real value in learning. It only becomes a problem when we use it to avoid deciding.

What she found wasn’t more information. It was a community that expected her to take the action.

She joined the DMMC shortly after and has been in ever since. Her growth has been exponential — she’s closing down her service business and opening up her teaching and her classes. It has been really, really fun to watch.

Hey Tori Takeaway

I have to say one thing first: this episode was kind of a class. You just spent 25 minutes listening to me explain marketing to you. If you close this feeling motivated and then don’t do anything, I just sold you the exact thing I spent the whole episode warning you about. I’d rather that not happen.

Your assignment — in the next 24 hours.

1. If you’re considering a class right now, run the five steps. On paper.

2. If you’re the person who isn’t sending emails, skip straight to it. Open your email platform and send one email using what you already know. It does not matter whether that list has 41 people, 12, or 6,000. Spend fifteen minutes on it. Send it. See what happens.

3. Tomorrow, revisit the class. If you still want it, you’ll actually be able to tell whether the value is there — because you’ll be deciding from an action you took, not from something you’ve been avoiding.

If You’ve Been Considering the DMMC, Here’s the Fair Question

Here’s the objection I’d have if I were you. I just spent this whole episode telling you that buying more content, more lessons, is hiding — and my program comes with a resource library. Videos, worksheets, a full success path. So what exactly stops you from doing the same thing inside my program?

That’s a fair question, and I’ll answer it straight: nothing stops you. If you join the DMMC and treat it like a course, it will be just another course.

What’s different isn’t mainly the material, though it is written for quilters and crafters with quilting and crafting examples. What’s different is that the first thing that happens is a kickoff call with me, and the entire point of that call is to figure out where you should start and ignore the rest. Then there are monthly calls where I ask you what you did — that’s the accountability. And there are one-on-ones when you need to go deeper. I’ll tell you where I think you should start and how to take that action, and I will notice whether you do or you don’t. That’s what I pivoted toward, and it’s why I’d rather be your coach than your course provider.

I’d love to have you in the Digital Marketing Magic Coaching Program. But if you do one thing first, send the email. Do the action you’ve been avoiding, and see what happens. If you send it tonight and by next week you find yourself thinking okay, I want a real system around this and people who will hold me to it — then come find me. That is exactly what the DMMC is for.

And if you’re still avoiding the action? My program may not be the right fit yet. Not because I don’t want you to join, but because you’d be doing the exact thing we just spent this whole episode talking about — and I’d be the one helping you do it.

The best first step is a free 30-minute strategy session — no pressure, just clarity on your next move. Book yours here.

Now go take action.

Want me to answer your question? Submit a question here!

Sources

On procrastination as emotion regulation: Sirois, F., & Pychyl, T. (2013). Procrastination and the Priority of Short-Term Mood Regulation: Consequences for Future Self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(2), 115–127. Publisher: https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12011

On the fluency illusion: Bjork, R. A., Dunlosky, J., & Kornell, N. (2013). Self-Regulated Learning: Beliefs, Techniques, and Illusions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 417–444. Publisher: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143823 Journal page: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143823

On the low-utility study techniques: Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58. Plain-English summary from the Association for Psychological Science (best link for your readers): https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/journals/pspi/learning-techniques.html

About the Author: Tori McElwain is a digital marketing coach for quilting and creative businesses. With 24+ years of quilting experience and a Master’s degree in Education, she helps quilters attract more students, sell more patterns, and grow their businesses online — without losing the joy of creating. She’s the author of “Workshops Unleashed” and cohost of the Quilting on the Side podcast.

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