Every day millions of new people flood the internet, and every day a nice chunk of these people decide that internet marketing is what they want to do, that they want to learn internet marketing.
The internet is rife with people who think that they can read a few articles, pick up a few free ebooks and reports, and they will be instantaneously transformed into a money making internet marketer.
This was never true, even in the early days when I put up on the internet a list of services and it got 200 thousand visitors a day… this was back in 1995… but making money from it wasn’t easy even there… and I surely didn’t know how.
But even if there had been books on how to make money then… (I could not find any) it would have been completely useless unless…
Let’s talk about what goes after the unless, ok?
Until I learned creating an ad, capturing emails, writing effective emails, and the like, there was no money to be made, in spite of the incredible amount of traffic.
The point is: even if you have perfect recall: until you actually DO the things you read about, you only learned words, and not what you intended to learn.
Let’s see if you can make money knowing the words, though, because if you could, that would be fine… right?
A few years ago I participated in an experiment. It was in a small class setting. I was given an office tool in a brown bag, such that only I could see what it was. Then a volunteer came to the whiteboard and following my verbal instructions, supposedly he was going to draw an image of the item I held in the brown bag. I wasn’t allowed to say what the item was, I was supposed to instruct the other person.
Now, I happen to be an architect, and for about 20 years I expressed myself with straight and curved lines… so I thought it was going to be easy. In addition I had a creative staff of 7 at that time, at my magazine publishing company.
I tried, and the results were disastrous. Every word I said was misunderstood, not clear, not to the point… and the drawing came out totally not similar to the item.
Why am I sharing this story with you? Because it is one thing to do something and another thing to help another do it.
Even when it’s a video, I sometimes have to rewind a few times and even then I can’t see what on earth the presenter is doing… and only when I am really persistent and willing to stare at my screen for long minutes, maybe even hours, I won’t be able to duplicate what seemed so easy and self-evident while watching the video.
If you take someone’s ebook and rewrite it: you don’t know if it works. You don’t know how to do it. How much do you think your information is going to be worth? Nothing? Negative? I think so.
All in all, you want to learn internet marketing, right? reading ebooks, reading reports, but not implementing and not testing it out provides you with no useful knowledge, and won’t take you any closer to making money than reading the daily paper.
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2 responses so far ↓
1
Thom Lancaster
Hi Sophie, it’s interesting as this is a topic I was thinking about recently and posted about on my blog as well.
I think the fact of the matter is that some people can learn from a book (or an e-b0ok), but there just aren’t that many of them. And a lot of is about motivation. People just get more into online classes and, because they’ve likely invested more, they feel accountable for themselves and need to succeed.
The other part of the equation is that a lot of e-books just aren’t very good (with some exceptions). There’s a lot of misinformation flying around. With the benefit of a coach available to answer questions and who can visibly demonstrate their expertise, you can expect to do much better.
2
admin
I wholeheartedly agree, Thom. Having a coach is the best way to go.
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