Forget The Hype!
So you`re new to the internet, and want to learn everything you can about internet marketing. Or at least the essential basics, and you want a place to go to find the answers to all of your questions?
I hate to tell you this, and I`m really sorry, but as far as I know, there IS no one-stop source to learning the essential marketing skills, apart from school maybe, but I will TRY to answer some questions you may have from my own experience:
Let`s see, I started out with absolutely NO computer knowledge at all. Went to chatrooms, talked with people, got me some contacts, then one day I got a junkmail full of hype (that I believed...hehehe) and promptly started joining affiliate programs. I joined this one, that one and the other one, all full of promises that I`d be mega-rich within a few months. Being a newbie, I swallowed it all. Hook, line and sinker. None of it ever panned out right though.
I lost some money, not huge amounts, but more than I`d care to remember, so I started with the free stuff. I didn`t have any knowledge on building downlines and stuff, so that didn`t work neither. Then I started helping people I referred to various things, and things looked slightly better. It was all free stuff that didn`t make me any real money, but it gave me traffic to other free sites I was promoting, I got downlines, and I got contacts, so I knew it was working.
After that, I kinda concentrated on helping everybody I came across, to the point where that was ALL I was doing, and funnily enough, I loved it. Still didn`t make me money, but it made me feel great.
That`s how my ezine came about. I wanted to help people as much as possible, teach them to steer clear of hype, stick dilligently to one thing, and build a good downline in it, whilst showing them how to help each other. You`ll find that any articles I`ve written to date(05/15/03) cover these things.
I will say that there are a couple of "skills" needed for anybody wanting to be an online marketer.
Firstly, you need a touch of "blindness" so you don`t even LOOK at all the hype, because if it LOOKS too good to be true, then it more than likely is.
You need deep concentration, and dedication, to help you stick with one thing, and you need to be able to work really hard at getting that one thing to work.
You also need a lock and key on your wallet. It`s real easy to buy into this that and the other program, and before you know it, you`ve used a LOT more money than you can afford to lose. There`s always a risk that any money you use, could be lost forever, so always keep that in mind.
As for computer jargon, I`ve been online for 4 years, and I`m STILL learning. Actually, I`m only just now starting to learn
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HTML so that I can publish my ezine without having to rely way too much on my programmer, who by the way, is the greatest teacher on earth. There`s a page here full of "jargon" and links to more info, I find it pretty useful: http://www.imagescape.com/helpweb/history/define.html
When it comes to suggesting a starting point, that`s a real hard one. I think I`d say chatrooms personally. Without my programmer, and my other friends that I`ve met in chatrooms, I wouldn`t be where I am today. So I`d say THE most important thing when it comes to marketing is your contacts. Get as many contacts as you can, and learn from their mistakes.
Also, subscribe to a few ezines that really cover the "newbie" things. Read everything you can that`s relative to what you want to do. You`ll suffer from information overload, there`s no doubt about that, but some of the stuff WILL stick in your head, and you can start learning from there.
If you find the ezine isn`t giving you the information you need, un-subscribe and move on to the next one. There`s hundreds of thousands of them out there to choose from, just don`t subscribe to too many at once, or you`ll be so inundated with mail that you`ll end up not reading any of them at all.
In closing: Read, read, read, and read some more. Take all promises of "instant wealth" with a pound of salt. (A pinch isn`t enough). Question everything that seems to "over-promise". Learn as much as you can before starting out, be prepared, and remember: There are no stupid questions, just stupid answers ;-)
Anna-Marie Stewart
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About the Author
Anna-Marie Stewart has been involved with internet marketing since 1999. She has always tried to help people "make a go of it" online, by sharing her own experiences with as many people as possible. She now publishes "Not Just Another Ezine" a FREE weekly newsletter at http://annamarketing.com - dedicated to helping newbie and semi-pro internet marketers avoid the pitfalls BEFORE getting burnt.
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