Have you ever tried to implement some recommendations from a big-name expert, but not got the results you were hoping for?

It's certainly happened to me a few times.

You watch a video. The guru tells you “follow my exact, step-by-step approach”. They say “do X, Y and Z”. You do X, Y and Z.

And your results are nothing like theirs.

Sometimes that's because the guru, ahem, “exaggerates” their results so you buy their products.

More usually it's because they neglect to mention the conditions they got those results in.

Like already having a huge mailing list and a pre-established brand. Or that this stuff works in their niche (usually the weird niche of people wanting to learn how to do marketing) but it won't necessarily work in your niche.

I'm sure the same thing has happened to people following some of my recommendations too.

Sometimes things just work out differently in different situations. Life isn't paint-by-numbers.

But what does work every time is learning. Trying out the recommendations and if they don't work as well as you'd hoped, tweaking them to make them work.

I ran a campaign recently based on a guru recommendation that started out badly. Results about half as good as he'd got percentage-wise.

But rather than abandon the whole thing I rethought it a bit.

I was sure the core idea of the strategy was good. It's just the type of offer at the end wasn't a great match for my clients.

So I changed it around based on feedback from clients. Lo and behold, my results were twice as good as the guru had reported.

Try the same thing yourself. Rather than just copying what the experts say you should do, treat it as an experiment.

Test what they're saying. If it doesn't work as well as you hoped, look at why not and try changing something.

You'll very often find that even if the expert's strategy doesn't work straight out of the box, there's at least the germ of a great idea in there you can use and get results from.

Success at marketing is never about just blindly copying others. It's about testing and tweaking and getting something that works for you.