Learning Internet Marketing in a 20 Group
Collabrotive Learning
When I entered the internet marketing profession twelve years ago, my first thought was to seek out a Twenty Group, in order to fast track my learning curve. I have been involved in such a group, in the limousine industry for the past 19 years, so it was to my great surprise that none had existed in the internet marketing business. How could the greatest tool for business success not be available, I was astounded.
For those of you who are not familiar, Twenty Group Concepts were first established after World War II, by the automotive industry to bring their dealerships from across the country together, to share and explore and share best business practices and ideas in a round table group setting. Twenty Group members learned from their peers and applied all the acquired, collective knowledge to their own businesses. It worked wonders, and it continues to this day, almost exclusively in the automotive industry.
I quickly realized why no one refers to internet marketing as an industry, because it has no structure or foundation. It is mis-information overload in its finest hour.
When you set out to learn any business there are usually business models that you can study and follow. This is not true in the internet marketing business, this is a whole different set of rules you are working with now.
The failure rate statistics in this business is between 94% and 98%, depending on whom you are listening to.
It is not because the people attempting to engage in this business are not qualified to run a business, it is due to the fact that the information and resources that are available are convoluted and ambiguous at best, and borders on down right fraud on the dark side.
I learned how convoluted it was when I attempted to build a Facebook Comment plugin to install on my website, no matter how hard I tried for a week, I couldn't get it to work. I asked several IT people and they could not see what was wrong. I then discovered that Facebook left out a key piece of information in their easy to follow directions.
If you don't put a / after your website name, it will never load, and Facebook directions never mention it. That is after it takes you several hours to learn that your app ID is the same thing as your unique ID, well why don't they just call it the same thing.
Of course, even though you are the creator of the app, you will never get it to work unless you are also the developer in JavaScript SDK, with 2 registration codes. The kicker of it all is; when you begin,they bring you to step 2 before they bring you to step 1 when you start.
I want to stress that this is an example of a protocol that I would have learned in a Twenty Group meeting enviornment in about 4 minutes.
So, I started my learning process the same as the great majority of aspiring internet marketers did, I browsed and downloaded.
The first ebook I printed, was 125 pages to show me how to build a free website using kompozer, after following this simple process for about 2 weeks, and enduring complete frustration, I discovered that I could do the same thing better and faster on Yola, also for free.
The same process repeated itself over and over on SEO, Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Social Media, Network Marketing, Site Flipping, etc.
I had to learn for myself, after doing about a week of keyword research for my website, that the easiest way to do it was to go to the websites of the most successful companies in my market, and view their source codes. Copy and paste. How simple was that. Well, somethings are only simple when you already know them. I also learned the hard way that you never do affiliate marketing from your main web site, it only diminishes the value that you are building and will lead directly to stagnation and failure. You are making a statement that your site is not valuable to your potential client, and you are sending them to another site.
One of the ways to gauge the performance of your website is to install the Google Toolbar on your browser, and customize it to include the page rank icon, this way you can monitor the page rank listing, not only for your site, but the sites of your competitors that you are watching also.
To be successful in the Internet Marketing business, and to catapult yourself to the next level, you need to learn how to be in business for yourself, but not by yourself.
The "go it alone" mentality, is the leading cause of failure in the IM industry.