Monthly Archives: June 2016

Filling In The Gaps Of Working Online – What You Need To Be Careful About

The internet has brought many fame and fortune but it’s also brought many more misery than money. The reason for this is often due to making the incorrect paradigm shift from offline working to online business like internet marketing.

Many enter the web absolutely clueless about what to expect and in place of common sense they insert dreams and innuendos that seem to make sense. There are a lot of myths out there about the online world that can cause you to crash and burn if you don’t validate them before you make a fool of yourself.

The first myth is that the internet is a free for all. Many think that working online means saying goodbye to hard work and hello to templated shortcuts to success. If you really think about this how can this be true if most people are failing to make it? It’s not that they can’t make it or build wealth; it’s more about not thinking realistically and applying the wrong mindset.

The first thing you have to do when making the transition is to stop listening to anything that sounds too good to be true in the real world. The internet is merely a different venue but it runs on the same main principals that evolved in the offline world of business.

There are no real shortcuts a newbie can use. I say newbie because shortcuts do exist, but only if you have the experience fortification that allows you to use them. Think about it like going to a job interview. A college student fresh out of school with no experience to speak of will be considered in a different way someone who’s proven their experience and who’s been on the job for years.

The interviewer will ask some scoped questions and verify their resume contents then may give them the job. This could be considered a shortcut, but is it really a shortcut a newbie could use? No. If they did make up a resume and did try to slip one past them, even learned from other employees at the firm what questions would be asked and how to answer them, they may get hired, but when it came down to it, they’d fail at the job. In this case the shortcut worked to get past the first wave- the interview, but it puts them in a compromising position that could not only cost the company money when they screw up, it could land the applicant in jail if large sums of money are lost due to their incompetence.

Taking shortcuts on the web will only cost you a lot of money, wasted time, and in the end you will not have learned enough to survive the first time you run into problems. You will likely fall into the hole of desperation and order a course hoping it will save you- but it will bury you deeper. You can take the same amount of time making money online while you learn and your mistakes will not be liabilities- they will be assets.

The internet simply levels the playing field. This doesn’t mean you will have all the power and experience handed to you that the larger firms or other marketers have, it just means your afforded the same opportunities without roadblocks like being required to go to a costly college to get a degree that might get you the job, and if you dedicate your time to learning how the internet marketing landscape works and how all the pieces fit together, you won’t have to spend a fortune to get there.

You have to treat your online career like any other offline endeavor. You have to put in the time learning. You have to ride the treadmill learning to write articles, learning about advertising and the monetization models like adsense and affiliate marketing. If you do order a course order it for the sole purpose of exposure to concepts, but ignore any shortcuts- they only work if you have the resources and experience to use them. Learning to write, for example, and learning to write in a way that can be monetized and bring in money, you can later hire out that task. If you don’t do it yourself you will never know if what you get back from the ghostwriter is worthy of using.

Applying the leg work is the only true way to learn and grow. The beauty is, when you do grow and become more competent in the field, you will find faster, more efficient, and effective ways to tune up your steps. I say your steps because using someone else’s step by step won’t likely work. This is one reason sites like Super Apprentice don’t give you steps in their manuals, they give you awareness and tell you to generate your own steps then let you into the sandbox to go through the motions of ONE way of applying what you’re learning at a time. They teach several methods used widely today by professionals and even the modular/templated site builder they employ has no hard rules about how or in what order you build a site. There are several dozen ways to build a site that are effective and even more ways that aren’t. learning by doing is essential in this business.

Expect to put in the work and expect that in time it will get easier and crystallize better. Expect to spend some time perfecting what you learn by doing and failing. Failing simply gives you clues into what doesn’t work or what you need to figure out more. Don’t be afraid of it. Don’t chase money at first- it will let you down. Eventually you can chase money, but not until you know what your doing.  The bottom line is enter this like any other job where you get on the job training.

You will be confused at first but don’t chase relief in the form of skipping ANY of the work. The work is how you learn. What you read is merely being exposed to the information- applying it takes a lot of time and energy- but in time you will become a manager over your income not so much the treadmill worker.