Prepare Yourself
I see a lot of people on the various marketing forums trying to do something with internet marketing without being willing to aquire basic skills.
It’s true, that this business can be started and a basic amount of success can be had, with a basic set of skills. But that is the end of it. You can’t outsource everything, forever.
Here’s a list of basic commitments in knowledge that have to be made.
- HTML or XHTML The basic language of the web. A must have.
- CSS Cascading Style Sheets. The thing that pretty much makes the place look like it does. Yes, a site can be thrown up with Wordpress or Joomla and a theme used right off the shelf, but do you really think you need to look just like everyone else that grabs things ‘off the shelf’? Even basic color changes and font adjustments take a small amount of CSS handling.
- Image Editing I know, images can all be bought or scraped somewhere, but there comes a time when they need resized, cropped, or whatever to make them more effective.
- PHP Familiarity with a server side language will need to happen eventually. Sometimes a tweak is all some plugin needs to be made more effective. If you don’t know how it works on a basic level it’s hard to be creative with what you need to get done and communicate it to your outsourced programmers.
Understand that some of the brightest competition in this space are people that have been in this game (internet) since they were kids or are college trained computer geeks. It’s hard to come into this battle arena and fight to win against such opponents.
The good news is that you don’t have to have those skills to get started. Wordpress on shared hosting is so simple. Getting offers to promote at various networks and buying some clicks is not hard. All it takes is a bit of cash to get you rolling. But before too long you will find out that, ultimately, the learning curve is steep.
Be prepared to invest in yourself.
Eric
Affiliate Summit West ‘09–What A Concept
Robin Williams said in a stand up thing several years ago, “Reality, what a concept”. The same goes for Affiliate Summit West.
The Summit 09 was in Las Vegas again. For someone who had neither been to Vegas nor an Affiliate Summit, it was a grueling 3 days. I’ll be posting more in the next few days about different aspects of the summit and the various people I was able to meet and what I perceived to be the value of the whole experience.
Til then,
Eric