Like many of you I’m sure, I buy quite a few programs of one sort or another for learning purposes. Video and text programs designed to teach me the ins and outs of various forms of Internet Marketing. How important is it that the person who authored the content has been successful with the method he is teaching? Do they need to have made a thousand dollars, or a million? Does it matter if they have made any money at all?
I am sure that many of the training products being sold out there are not created by people who make a living with the concepts they teach. In fact, given that many of the wildly successful entrepreneurs have almost all of their content ghostwritten, it may be that most are not. And I don’t really care.
If your goal is to find a Guru to follow and do everything exactly as they do, great! That is certainly a workable business model. If you can build a relationship through coaching or mentoring even better. I hope it works out for you.
If what you are doing is trying to find your way around Internet Marketing, then here are three truths:
One – most of the core concepts of internet marketing are relatively straight forward and fairly static. Sure, the way a given strategy is best implemented might change slightly over time, but the basic processes remain.
Two – everything is available free. It’s true. If you take enough time and effort, virtually everything you need to know about Internet Marketing is available somewhere online.
Three – many people who are wildly successful at Internet Marketing either aren’t going to spend their time making products, or couldn’t teach their way out of a paper bag.
Is it a good thing to learn from someone who is a real, honest to goodness success story in an industry? Sure. If you can find one you can afford who speaks to you. But the fact is that even if they have made a bazillion dollars doing what they do, there is no guarantee that you will, even if you mimic their every step. I don’t know why this is so, but it is.
So let’s address the idea that the only way to learn Internet Marketing is by learning from those who have been wildly successful at what they teach. The pool of those people is limited, by interest and by ability. Even if there are good examples available, you need to afford them, you need to find them, and you need to understand them.
It’s fine for someone to say that you should learn from so-and-so, but if his upper end course is $2000 and the version of it that is in your reach is the “lite” version that has holes in it, what good is that to you? He’s an expert, but he sure as heck doesn’t care about you.
The internet is HUGE, with nooks and crannies to hold virtually everything digital. Because of this sheer volume, there are products and people out there that might have just what you are looking for, but that you will never come across. Yesterday I watched a brief video in which the presenter (a solid six figure earner) mentioned the names of a half dozen “Gurus” in the internet marketing niche. I had never heard of 5 of them. And those are experts in the niche I am involved in, not dog training or anxiety cures.
I have courses on my hard drive (as I’m sure you do) that I know have enabled their followers to make thousands of dollars. But what does that matter? Sometimes I just don’t get it. And it’s not that I’m slow, or that the general technique is strange to me. It’s just that the way things are explained, or maybe the things are chosen for explanation, just don’t work for me. I am sure I have learned valuable information from those courses, but it’s background information. I am not able to take that method online and make money with it.
Given these constraints – that everything is available free, that you might not be able to find the right expert, or that you might not be able to learn from them, is the “expert” status more important, or is it the “learn from them” part?
List building is hot these days, and with good reason. Since I intend to build a list soon, over the last several months I have been collecting information on list building from one source or another, and guess what? All the products I have, free and paid, say pretty much the same thing. As do all the posts I have read that I have not bothered to copy and save. The basic concepts haven’t changed much over time, so everybody is doing pretty much the same thing. Some have more success with one type of list building and some with others, but as in the “learn from a guru” section above, that’s the way it goes.
Now, you don’t know me and I don’t have a list, so I am certainly no version of a guru. I guarantee you, though, that I could take all the information in my head, do a bit of research to get facts and figures from free sources so as not to plagiarize, and put together a killer report on List building. Is it rehashed information? Sure. Is it worthless? Not on your life. It would have solid, actionable content and if nothing else, many of the readers of the report will pick up something, some little way I explained a bit that suddenly makes sense to them. And occasionally, someone will have an AHA! moment. The time, the place, or the way I put a sentence together is going to resonate with them and they will finally get it.
Some of the best coaches in the world couldn’t play their way off the bench and some of the best teachers in the world would never make a living at their craft.
The fact is it is not mandatory that someone be able to do something well in order to be able to understand it. If they can understand it, they can probably teach it. The real question, and the only one that matters, is can they teach it to you?
