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Going Pro: Are You an Amateur or a Professional in Internet Marketing?

Written by kevin

There are two main ways of approaching Internet Marketing…

You can be an amateur

- or you can be a professional.

If you want to build revenue beyond the pocket money level in Internet Marketing then you have to change your approach from an amateur to that of a professional with a proper online business.

Over this last year I’ve had a number of people ask me about getting started in Internet Marketing. Almost without exception these have been people who are dissatisfied with their present employment or work situation and are attracted by the idea of making money online for minimal effort. It’s the concept of “passive income”, four hour work weeks, “bright shiny objects” and that sort of thing that attracts them.

I refer them to the two courses that I consider to be the best available right now for beginners to start learning and practising Internet Marketing. Namely the free Challenge course and the paid-for Chris Farrell Membership.

In most cases they’re interested – at least for a while. But after a while the interest tends to wear off. That’s probably when they realise there are no quick fixes, there is no easy money out there, no dollar bills coming at you straight out of the computer screen.

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Internet Marketing Requires Dedication

Instead, Internet Marketing involves learning new concepts about what is a relatively new marketing medium. It means spending much time, effort and also a certain amount of money upfront in learning and researching – and then taking action to actually implement what you have learned. All this also takes time – and there are no short cuts. And you have to keep at it.

An Internet Marketing business is also never “completed”. I don’t believe the talk you hear in some quarters about “passive income”. OK, there’s a certain amount of automation and systematization possible with an online business. But an Internet business – like any business, has to be continually maintained, monitored, modified and developed further. Those who simply abdicate from all this and expect to be able to sit back and just watch the revenue roll in will lose momentum over time.

Small wonder then, that it’s only those who are dedicated, and who are truly interested in Internet Marketing and Internet Media who tend to stay the course. The rest simply drop out in the early stages. And of those who remain, only a small number will go on to be professionally successful. The rest will languish and remain at the amateur hobby level. It’s a bit like the statistical chances the average sperm has of reaching the egg in the ovary!

Ed Dale’s Views on Going Pro

So I was particularly interested in a webinar presentation by Ed Dale, the founder of the Challenge Course, in which he discusses precisely this issue (Internet Marketing that is, not egg fertilization). And in particular, the difference between amateur approaches to Internet Marketing and what he calls “Going Pro”; namely, moving on to take a fully professional attitude to the activity as a business.

It’s interesting to see what Ed discusses in this video. He mentions three key aspects that he regards as crucial if you are to go professional with your online business.

They are: Focus, Process, and Measurement.

I want to spend some time here discussing these points because I think they are highly relevant to all new Internet Marketers who are aiming to “go pro” – or who are in the process of doing so. These aspects are certainly relevant to me as well right now.

Focus

First, focus. By “focus” Ed means concentrating on the task at hand, without being distracted. Getting on with the job, getting the tasks that make up the project completed. It involves efficient use of time. It’s not about being “full time” in Internet Marketing versus “part-time”. The total amount of time involved actually has very little to do with it.

It’s much more about effective use of your time. Too many people frit away their time when they are sitting in front of their computer. It’s not difficult to see why this is. A computer, particularly with the Internet, offers ample opportunity for time wasting, for putting off, for distraction, entertainment and diversion. You can “Google” endlessly – and tell yourself that you are researching. You can read other people’s blogs, you can visit and comment on forums. There’s practically no end to it.

But you have to realise and remember that you can use a computer with an Internet connecton in two ways: to consume media – or to produce media. If you’re running an online business – and running it professionally, then you need to concentrate primarily on being a producer of media – your own media – and not a consumer of other people’s media.

So I would say that a good way to deal with focus is first of all to remember this point about producing versus consuming when you are sitting at your computer.

Secondly to employ what Ed here calls “CFT” units – Critical Focus Time. Basically it’s a way of dividing up your available time into short periods of intense activity in which you allow yourself to “get into the zone” or “get into the flow” and in which you concentrate on one particular task.

The key point though is that you always time yourself and you allow yourself a break at the end of the period – in which, and this is the crucial point – you get away from the computer. Preferably get some fresh air, have a drink, take some exercise, go to the bathroom, whatever. But always always take a break.

Whatever you call your intensive working time periods – be they CFTs, Pomodoros, whatever – the fact is, you need to use some sort of time management and work focus system. The duration and number of CFTs you have available for yourself and your Internet Marketing business will depend upon how much time you can spare. The length of the CFTs will also depend on what you find works best for you. For myself, I’ve experimented with 45 minutes with a 15 minute break in every hour, I’ve tried 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes. I’m still not yet entirely sure exactly which works best for me, but it’s certainly not longer than the 45 minute one.

The other thing is that you must always time yourself. Use a kitchen timer, your watch timer, your mobile phone timer, a website timer, whatever. But make sure you set a timer for each CFT.

Also, in the CFT, you define advance exactly what you are going to achieve. Know which task you are going to tackle.

I used to keep a “tasks completed” log in a spreadsheet in Google Docs. I filled it in at the end of each day. It showed me what I had achieved for that day. It made me feel good. The trouble is, I was writing it down, logging it, after the event. I was emphasising what I had done – rather than what I had to do and what I was going to do. I wasn’t using the CFT concept correctly.

I no longer do it this way round. Instead now I set out my projects and the associated tasks. I then estimate how many of my CFTs I will need to complete each task. And I then execute the CFTs to complete the task. When the task is completed, I switch the background colour of the task line in the spreadsheet to green. It means I can see at a glance what I’ve actually completed and when it’s done.

Process

Ed calls it “process”. You may call it process. Or you may refer to it as procedure, system, systematization, work-flow, method, work routine. Whatever you call it, you need to have processes or procedures in place for dealing with the tasks that occur and have to be dealt with on a regular or irregular basis. This is something all businesses have to have in place.

It starts with project management. Google Docs and spreadsheets are ideal for this. It may take a while for you to get satisfactory, efficient and meaningful systems in place. You may well need to tinker with them for a while, as I have, before you find systems which suit your needs best. But you need them.

You also need a “process tree” or logical flow chart for each project. Internet Marketing is made of of projects and sub-projects of different extent and duration. I find it helps enormously to set things out on a whiteboard first of all.

I go on to define the projects that are involved in reaching the goal, and from there I go on to detail the exact tasks that will need to be carried out for each project. I then enter the details into my project management spreadsheet. In other words, for me the method is: Goal -> Projects -> Tasks.

You might prefer to use something like: Goal -> Projects -> Sub-Projects ->Tasks. Or maybe: Goal -> Projects -> Actions -> Tasks. But however you divide up the work flow and whatever you call the component parts, it’s basically the same idea: employing a process and sub-dividing your work flow.

These aren’t the only ways of organising your processes and project management; there are many software packages available for this both stand-alone and online, but these are the methods I use.

Measurement

This is essential to all businesses – it doesn’t matter whether they are online or offline. Yet Ed Dale said that he’s constantly amazed and astonished at the number of people who don’t measure in their online business.

With an online business, measuring means measuring traffic first and foremost. And from there, measuring the clicks you get for your product links. And from there the sales or responses you get. It means being able to use this data to work out your conversion rates.

It also means financial accountability. Do you know how much you are spending, investing, in a particular project? A particular website? And how much revenue – and from where – which products, which affiliate networks, these sites and projects are generating?

It’s basically about measuring your inputs against your outputs. All businesses – businesses that aren’t hobby pocket-money outfits that is, have to know this. If you don’t know these details, then you aren’t running a professional online business.

I would add a couple more aspects to the definition of “Going Pro”…

Learning

In other words, training and learning continually. Internet Marketing is a very new discipline. It’s basically comes down to good old sales and marketing techniques that are relevant to all business, whether online or offline.

But it also involves a new form of media – the Internet. And it involves applying those techniques to this new media channel. So there’s a lot that we have to learn and stay on top of. In addition to this, the sector is developing and evolving continually – and we have to make sure we stay abreast of all this.

Another thing is that the pace of technological and methodological change in this sector is practically breathtaking – and there’s going to be no let up in this in the future either. I don’t think we’re ever going to reach a point where we can say “the Internet is now as developed as it will ever be – it can’t go any further”.

I actually recall one person trying to tell me he thought the Internet had now gone as far as it could back in the late 90s. He was dazzled by 56kbit modems, ISDN, email and WWW. This was well before we had YouTube, smartphones, Skype, Facebook ,Twitter, iTunes, broadband and goodness knows what else. How wrong he was.

It can be practically almost a full-time job just keeping up. But if you’re aiming to be a professional Internet Marketer, it’s essential to keep up, to be informed, to keep learning. You can’t afford not to. Remember the old saying: “you don’t know what you don’t know”.

There’s also another old saying – the one about dog years. You could extend it to the Internet. One Internet year, like one dog year, is at least the equivalent of seven ordinary years – in fact probably more. Take a year or two out, let your Internet business run “passively”, like some of the books recommend – and then try coming back to Internet Marketing. You’ll see straight away what I mean.

The fact is, training and learning are always going to be ongoing for professional Internet Marketers. You will never reach a point where you are “fully trained” and know everything.

Implementation

There’s also implementation. This is absolutely essential. All the training, process, measurement and New Year’s Resolutions aren’t going to be any help to you unless you implement. In other words – Take Action. It’s all too simple to get stuck in the planning and research stage. It’s easy to catch “analysis paralysis”. But the problem is, this inhibits us from taking action. It’s those who actually take action who have a chance – not those who are still sitting there planning and researching and sniffing the air.

We have to carry out some research, we have to plan. But we have to keep this in perspective and not allow ourselves to get bogged down by it. Accept the fact that what you produce will probably initially be “crap”, at least in part. We can pretty well always improve on what we produce. But we have to produce before we have anything that we can improve upon. Don’t forget this.

I myself have created websites, designs, written blog posts, drawn up sales pages that have all made me cringe when I took a look at them later on. But at least I got started – and I learned from it. And my following attempts were always, pretty much without exception, so much better as a result.

Implementation also comes from focus. If you have the focus, if you plan your time and your projects professionally, in the ways I outlined above, or in some version of this, then you will be on your way to implementing, to taking continual action. A professional Internet business is about always taking action. There’s always something to implement, always something new, something different, some modification in methods.

You can never just leave an Internet business – or any other business activity for that matter – to run entirely on auto-pilot. Even if you’re just an investor in the stock market, you are still continually researching, modifying and tweaking your portfolio. At least you better be, else market movements might suddenly present you with an unpleasant surprise one day. So forget all about passive businesses and four hour work weeks. They’re not real. They don’t exist.

Another thing that’s absolutely essential to being an Internet Marketing Pro is of course Motivation and Desire. I’m not going to go into this now, because this is pretty well a basic prerequisite for all of the above. Without Motivation and Desire, we can forget all about Focus, Process, Measurement, Learning and Implementation. They won’t be necessary.

I’ll talk about Motivation and Desire in later articles on BreakingOut.NET.

So if you’re looking to go from amateur Internet Marketer to professional, if you’re seeking to “Go Pro” – then in my opinion you need to keep all these factors in mind and practice them every day in your business activity. Here they are again: