I have been closely tied to the business of advertising since I was roughly 19 years old. I believe that makes it 14 years almost since I first started working in the field of marketing.
Of course the capacity in which I have played various roles in marketing varies but because of the fact that I have worked in printed advertising as well as online advertising and in software development field I am pretty sure I have somewhat of a unique perspective on this world of Internet Marketing.
The particular perspective that I refer to is essentially the experience that allows me to see things that non versed marketers don’t. Oddly enough though, since I have spent at least half of my career teaching and training people in software development and marketing (usually from a more technical perspective) I rarely spent time actually teaching what i find to be the “make me or break me” aspect of marketing.
This is why i write this blog with a special kind of pleasure. I get to express things that I observed with 100% certainty to be the real culprits in causing people to fail at things they truly want to do.
As i mentioned in one of the previous blog posts, I can accept that life circumstances can influence the course that your life takes, but only to an extent. The severity of circumstances coupled with your will power and determination to accomplish something will finally result in what you actually accomplish.
Let me make something clear.
I come from a small and loving family of modest means. Considering where they started without me and where we are today all together, by all accounts measurable, we accomplished things that most people only dream of or vaguely speak of.
We lived through 6 years of war and were lucky to not be as severely affected by it as some other people were. And we are thankful for that. There is most certainly no need to tell individual horror storied about it here.
English is not my first language and the country I live in only recently started feeling like home to me.
The reason I am telling you all this is to make you understand that faces of adversity come in various forms and the difficulty levels of your obstacles are in large just a matter of what you perceive to be true. There are personal realities and global ones.
It is the averages of all circumstance that then can be defined as more or less difficult on a global scale.
Why is this important and what does it have to do with Internet Marketing.
Almost every day I spend some time answering questions about IM business or a particular branch of it. The most common and repetitive question I come across is something that can roughly be translated into “But Kristina HOW do I really have to do xyz to make money?”. In most cases this question is actually intended as “Where do I have to go? What do I have to click? What do I have to say?”
The truth is that even though there is a set of usable guidelines that can be given to ease some of the pains of overcoming the learning phase of IM, there is only one,,, and this is an exclusive truth in this matter,,, characteristic that you need to develop in order to differentiate yourself from other average aspiring marketers.
This characteristic is not something that can be understood simply by giving it a descriptive one word name. Therefore I will do my best to explain it.
Wealthy people do not follow blindly. They follow only what is sensible to follow. Wealthy people OBSERVE, assess, emulate and adapt to their own needs.
What I am essentially telling you here is that you need to learn to observe yourself in the things that you do. It means the world to me to push you that one extra step in order to teach you what really matters in IM or in any “M”.
What I am about to start teaching here will contain a lot of technical information and that’s ok. You need to know these things, but really,,, and read that again,, REALLY,,, clicking buttons, uploading files and filling forms is only the techie backbone of your business. Business ,,, the real deal,,, happens somewhere else. And that elsewhere is in your head. You must learn to think like someone who will finally understand to make money online for real.
I am quite sure you already read a bunch of sales pitches promising go spill the beans and uncover some secret Jedi moves that will open the 19th chakra in your head and make you pretty wealthy pretty quick.
Are you sure that there are such things as unobservable secrets? Think about it? I know you are smart enough to know better than that.
There are no techie secrets, special secret buttons,, magical web traffic from a source you are not aware of… So on.
What there is, is a tried and tested, good old, smartest kitten on the block business mindset.
I can teach you the click here and click there stuff. Let’s just clear that out of the way right now. You will learn the technicalities,, but far more importantly I will drill down a very deep hole of what is missing in most of your aspirations.
In short it is called “power of observation”. And by that I mean, hard core, analytical, cold headed way of thinking that removed the haze from your eyes and uncovers a whole new world of wonder in the business world around you.
You need to develop a skill that we can simply refer to as power of observation. No matter what the circumstance, what the adversity, what the background or how strong or weak your financial background is.
When you learn what to observe, and what to do with what you observed the globe becomes a smaller place and easier to navigate through and it will be my pleasure to explain as much of this as I can through example and guidance.
So there you go. Give this some thought. Comment if you need to.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
True marketing involves more than just observation but it is a very important part from which you can learn so much.
I am reminded of an anecdote from my own marketing studies…
A shoe company wanted to expand its market and spotted an opportunity with an isolated island community.
They sent the sales director to investigate. He found that the people didn’t wear shoes at all so there was no market for the product.
They then sent the finance director to investigate. He found that there could be a market but the people had no money to pay for shoes.
They then sent the marketing director to investigate. He found that there was a large potential market as the people suffered from a lot of foot problems that shoes would help to resolve. While the people had no money they did have a large amount of minerals/coconut oil/whatever that was not much use to them but which would have real value in the outside world.
Of course it involves more than just observation. But from my training experience with a range of people from inexperienced to very experienced, lacking the power of observation in the context I am putting it into is what breaks them.
I find that most people tend to blindly follow steps given to do business without assessing them. You obviously don’t do that. Some people get it, but the vast majority doesn’t. And by changing only that one aspect in approach to IM for so many, their lives would suddenly change.
My context is different but your anecdote is great
Thanks.
Let me just clarify the context of what I’m writing about.
I am not talking about observing loopholes. I am talking about observing own actions. Majority of aspiring marketers seem to fall in the pattern of “Buy a book and follow instructions blindly” or “buy software and use it without a shred of creativity and exactly as taught by the vendor, without giving much thought to how to best or differently leverage it”. Vast majority of aspiring marketers don’t stop to plan what they will do and rarely stop to observe how THEY actually purchased something.
By developing the skill of observing the steps that successful one take a lot would already change for the better if these observations were placed into their own business adequately.
Vast majority of aspiring marketers do not realize that marketing is a creative job/work. That just following what you are told to follow is not enough.
Hope this sheds some lite on the angle I took while writing about this.
I look at this from the perspective of an educator. I developed my career around teaching and observing the reasons for why something happens in this or that way. So i wasn’t talking about ti from the “observe opportunities” angle at all. I speak of it from “observe what really happens as opposed to what you are told should happen” perspective.
Just as an aside – The 19th chakra isn’t in your head – it deals with the connection to the higher self and the universe. This chakra sits way above your head and very few people will ever be able to connect with it.
Marketing – or self marketing in this case – to me is as much about belief in oneself and a never say die attitude. It’s a mind set. However having said that, it is still difficult to know where to start and who to listen to so I’m very much looking forward to hearing what you have to say.
It’s also easy to fall into the trap losing focus and running around in ever decreasing circles. My secret, which I often forget to apply, is list writing. Write it down – do it, cross it off the list, do the next thing and so on.
Bring it on Kristina!
“This chakra sits way above your head and very few people will ever be able to connect with it.”
Way, waayy above ,, lol
“it is still difficult to know where to start and who to listen to” – very true, and there is a cure for that,, I will explain
“My secret, which I often forget to apply, is list writing. Write it down – do it, cross it off the list, do the next thing and so on. ”
Believe it or not,, MOST do not do this. I have been guilty of it in the past too.
I like to contribute my 2cents if I may.
1- Chakra has to be located some where within the body that is why it is called chakra. Everybody can connect to their highest self because it is our birth right. We are born with it and the only problem if there is any, is to be silent enough to hear it.
2- The power of observation is absolutely neccessary to win in any life endeavors. Nect to it is the power of action. You have to act. Then the cycle repeats. But I also must say — there is an X factor in all of life decisions. There is something you must learn and until you do, you may not go another step.
So sometimes if success eludes you it is only because you have not learned the essential requriements of your being. I guess the one rule of success in my personal experience is to help others to succeed.
Also I feel that even a millionaire hands you his success recipe, it is not always true that you will make it. The power of obsservation and the desire to serve will lead you to do the things that are right for your very own circumstances and no one else.
So although we have to learn and we have to read — it is your love, your desire to help others will get you to your final destination.
So you ask, why the desire to help others is so important in your success formular? Because when you desire to help others, you will then find things, articles, websites that are useful to your readers thus – making your website the more appealing and the cause for future repeated visitors. Thus translate into money at the end and job satisfaction I may add.
Again guys, it is only my 2 cents.
Hi Kristina,
Have you read the Pomodoro technique? It is the list building of the most high.
It is advised that you set out a kitchen table clock and set with each activities for 25 minutes. You can’t leave your task until the alarm rings. If you are disturbed and stop the action, you must start it all over again.
Then you must get up and take a 5 to 10 minutes break and cross off your list to the next item.
Here is the link: pomodorotechnique.com
It is a free download. I think it is one of the best self help tools in the whole cosmo
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Steve.
The bit on the chakra was an intentional exaggeration with intent to emphasise the point. It’s not to be taken literally. It’s a matter of expressive freedom.