Theo McArthur: “Decide what you want to study and stick with it. Take action on what you’ve learned, then go and learn some more!”
Having spent more than 20 years in the fields of website creation, online marketing, and e-commerce, including 5 years of experience as an Amazon seller, Theo’s main passion now is sharing her knowledge with others. Theo published her first full-length training course back in 2015 and to date she has taught more than 91,000 students worldwide. Theo spoke to Alison about creating websites, sticking to your studies and the important of taking challenges one step at a time.
I created my first websites back in the mid-90s. My first few sites were terrible and back then we didn’t have any of the tools we have now. It was a learning curve, but I kept practicing and my first real website, in terms of generating revenue, was in the green energy niche, which back then was a new concept. Since then I’ve built hundreds of websites in multiple different niches. The main focus of my blogs and websites has been on affiliate marketing and promoting high quality affiliate products. More recently, in 2013 I ventured into e-Commerce, including Amazon. I’m still a part-time Amazon seller and still very much involved with affiliate marketing. I’ve been publishing and educating since 2015. In total I’ve published around 30 courses, with approximately 120,000 students.
A representative from Alison reached out to me and, after checking out some of the courses available, I was impressed and decided to upload one course initially and take it from there. With Alison, you get professionalism every step of the way and the ability to structure courses in a way that helps students to study the material in a user-friendly way.
If I could publish a course on anything, I think it would be the importance of taking action every day, of doing something towards your goal (whatever that might be). Sometimes, a task can seem so big and so overwhelming, that it’s easier to keep putting it off. Breaking a large task down into small bite-sized tasks and completing even just one of those smaller tasks daily, leads to a complete shift in mindset and of course, each day we are a little closer to the goal.
My courses are all based on my own experience. I’m always at home publishing courses relating to website and content creation, blogging, SEO for websites and affiliate marketing. I’ve been working in these areas for over 20 years and they are all interrelated – if you want to generate revenue as an affiliate, you need a website/blog, you need content and you need traffic. It all goes hand in hand.
My Amazon courses are well received because a lot of people want to know how to sell on Amazon. But the courses that tend to have the most impact overall are the courses that teach people how to create their own websites. I’ve just released a 5 hour course on Alison that’s focused on creating a site and creating content, with the goal of attracting organic traffic from Google and the other search engines. In my opinion that is one of the most valuable skills an entrepreneur can ever learn.
There shouldn’t be any barriers to education. Since I started teaching back in 2015, I’ve focused on providing my courses at a low price, or free.
Don’t jump around from course to course without ever finishing one or taking action on what you’ve learned. I think this is the biggest mistake and a really common one. Decide what you want to study and stick with it. Take action on what you’ve learned, then go and learn some more!
