Should people write about making money online before they actually do it? This is a question I often used to ask myself. I personally think some people should, and here’s why.
Teachers Should Teach Making Money Online
I’m acquainted with a Professor of Law at the world famous Columbia Law School who has never in his career practiced law. He went straight from getting his juris doctorate degree to teaching without ever representing a single client. Is he a great teacher? I think so—I love hearing him speak (I was going to be a lawyer). Is he a great lawyer? I don’t know. Some people have the gift for teaching, and some people have the gift for making money online—but rarely does anyone have the gift for both. That means most students who want effective teachers will always depend on teachers who have not made much money using the methods they teach.
Can You Trust Someone Who Doesn’t Make Money Online?
You don’t want to waste your time learning from someone who doesn’t know how to make money online, and experience is a good way to separate knowledgeable teachers from fools. But experience making money online doesn’t make one wise—it can actually do the opposite. If you wanted to know about monkeys, who would you ask: a monkey or a zoologist who has spent her life studying monkeys?
One problem with so-called experts who have made money online is that they made money online using a particular technique which may no longer apply. For example, I could teach you all about link buying—after all, it was working great eight years ago. But anyone who uses link buying today will be sorely disappointed. To teach how to make money online I would have to scrub this experience from my memory.
To avoid outdated information, maybe you want to read information about making money online from someone who is making money right now. But they too can offer bad information. The problem with success in any area is that, once you achieve it, it’s easy to maintain, so you get disconnected from the hard work it takes to acquire success in the first place.
Most people reading this don’t need to know how to maintain their success—they need to know how to become successful in the first place. Successful people can learn how to optimize their website from other successful people, but new website entrepreneurs need to learn how to get started building an income-generating business. That’s where a dedicated teacher can help, even if that teacher isn’t a successful online entrepreneur.
But Where Do Teachers Learn About Making Money Online?
The best part about learning basic online marketing from a teacher focusing on helping new entrepreneurs is that your teacher gets to see what works for his students, and what doesn’t. It’s kind of like Google Analytics for real life success. The successful website mogul learns primarily from his own successes and failures, but a teacher can learn from all of his students’ successes and failures.
For example, the website mogul may have an incredible talent for writing effective sales copy which helped make him successful. Most people don’t have that talent, so a teacher who sees his students fail to write effective landing pages can tell his students to consider outsourcing their copywriting. More important, a teacher can help students deal with the number one barrier to making money online: making that first few hundred dollars of recurring monthly income. The person who is already successful at making money online doesn’t have to work a job to pay the bills and he can focus his time on increasing his profits. But the novice still trying to build his first website or adwords campaign doesn’t have that luxury.
I remember about two years after a friend of mine started his business. He was several thousand dollars in debt, so he took a full-time job for six months at a software company. It was a good job, but eight hours of work and two hours of commuting each day left him so tired that he didn’t have any energy to work on his business. In fact, for those six months he didn’t get a single truly effective thing done on his business (except pay his credit card bills).
I’ve read and know hundreds of people who are successful at making money online (including me) and they all acknowledge the challenge of earning enough money to quit your job, but when it comes to actually helping people make that first bit of income, most of them just wave their hands and say “just do it.” I am probably guilty of this sometimes because I have owned my own business for more than 25 years and do not understand the concept of leaving a secure job for something unsure.
On the other hand, teachers focused on new entrepreneurs know the tricks to help you use your spare time to build a small, un-optimized, ineffective, ugly, and piss-poor excuse of a website and still have it make just enough money for you to cut back your hours at work or even risk quitting your job because you now know you can make money online.
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