Time Wasted Learning Internet Marketing
Posted by admin on September 22, 2011 under Activities, Education & Tools | 
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As I start this post I want to be clear that I am a big believer in education and feel that if you aren’t learning than you will become a dinosaur faster than you could ever imagine. This is especially true in the digital arena because technology changes each and every day which has a dramatic impact on your earning potential. To give you an example, just two years ago, PPC and autoblogs were the absolute best way to go to earn massive income online. Now, thanks to the change in technology and price of paid clicks, those methods are extremely difficult and rarely make a good profit. To put a finer point on it, I spend about ten hours per week listening to various courses online.
With that being said, what do I mean by Time Wasted Learning?
Well, when I was just getting started, and I am still occasionally guilty of this now as as well, I spent hour after hour just learning as much as I could. I read posts, lived on the Warrior Forum, bought courses, and listened religiously to each and every seminar and webinar that was presented. For a short time I became a true subject matter expert in SEO and internet marketing.
Strangely enough, during this same time my average daily income (this is really how I track my progress) dipped well below $100. I just couldn’t figure it out. Here I was working my but off, sacrificing sleep and all of my free time working on affiliate marketing, but I was losing more than I put in. It felt like I was working my tail off, but I just wasn’t seeing the reward. I was aware of every new traffic technique, I knew exactly how to optimize a site to get it onto the first page of google, and I was making early inroads into the mobile arena. But nothing was paying off.
After doing this for some months, I had to step back and look at exactly how I was spending my time and what needed to change in order to change the direction that my business, health and relationship was headed. I asked the simple question, what am I doing wrong?
It didn’t take but a few seconds for me to realize that even though I thought I was taking action and making things happen, most days I just wasted time listening to webinars and checking to see if my Adsense revenue had increased. Even though I felt like I had devoted my entire life to making money online, I had just decided to spend time learning and stopped taking any action that would actually result in making a profit. I was truly suffering from lack of action in favor of learning.
Obviously the solution to this problem was simple. Dial back the time spent on my SEO and affiliate marketing education and spend time actually doing instead of learning. Spend time implementing a technique on a few sites and optimizing my results, and be sure to take definitive and quantifiable action each and every day.
In addition, stop going after every new shiny object, technique and system. Instead, find a hand full of projects, bring them to an expected level of success, then move on to the next project. This one is a little tougher than it sounds. I love to learn new things and have trouble setting them aside in favor of working on an existing project. As such, the shiny object sydrome still distracts me and in truth hinders my progress by sidelining priority projects.
So what is the moral of this story?
If you are new to affiliate marketing, or feel that your progress has slowed, focus on taking action and use what you know to make your project successful. Don’t forsake your education in this field, but spend more time doing and less time learning. If you take action each and every day, even if it is only for three hours, you will be amazed at your success.
Good luck, I wish you WEALTH.
-Brian
Use Your Time Wisely
