The Importance of Applying What You Learn, UNIQUELY
There are many ways to make money online and no shortage of resources to help you learn. The trouble is, most people don’t know how to apply what they learn in their own unique way and as a result, they are usually doomed to flounder in obscurity.
Technique v ‘Business-In-A-Box’
When you learn a technique, the next step is to go and apply that technique to your own business and it is in the second step that people tend to fall over because it not only takes work, but requires some creativity and individuality as well. A growing trend that I am seeing over and over is for marketers to not only provide you with the techniques, but give you the entire system ‘in a box’ so that all you need to do is fill in a few blanks, press a few buttons and then sit back and watch the money roll in.
Let me give you some examples of this shifting trend:
Keyword Research
Good keyword research has long been essential education for anybody who wants to get some traffic to their website. Whether you are trying to rank in the search engines for organic traffic or are looking to purchase traffic via PPC, you need to know how to pick suitable keywords.
In addition to learning how to do good keyword research, there are now services that simply provide you with keyword lists instead so all the work is done for you.
Niche / Market Research
Similarly, when starting up a new website the first step is usually to do some market research to determine a good niche. Does the market have traffic? Is it a buyers market? How much competition is there? Is the market suitable for my product and so on?
There are lots of ebooks and courses that teach you how to research profitable niches, but you may as well just sign up to one of these services that just gives you them on a plate. PLR sites are good for this - they not only give you the niche but they even give you the content to put on your site! Easy money right?
The Product Launch Formula
I’ve been working through Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula for some weeks now and I think it’s great. He teaches a ton of techniques but I’ve noticed that there is a huge emphasis on not just giving people techniques and showing them how to apply those techniques to their business but he goes as far as to give out tons of very specific sales copy. Use this email at this time and just substitute your market and product and it will work for you… apparently.
The 30 Day Challenge
In last year’s challenge the basic technique was to get your content ranked quickly and highly in Google by hosting it on third party sites such as Squidoo and Hubpages that tended to do well in Google. Ed told the members that there were dozens of such sites out there and urged members to do their own research to find good ones to use rather than all just flooding to the same ones. But no, members were not happy with that - they wanted to be told exactly which sites to use.
Oh and of course, members were also keen to avoid doing the basic research too and groups quickly formed to allow people to use other people’s niches and keywords.
What’s Wrong With This ‘Business-In-A-Box’ Mentality?
I’ll ignore the fact that it’s lazy and that lazy people don’t usually enjoy long-term success and instead I’ll focus on the practicalities of it. In every single one of the examples I gave above, by using the exact same system and content that other people are using, you are competing directly with all those other people and have no way of standing out from the crowd.
What happens when 10,000 people purchase the same keyword list? They all compete on the same keywords and none of them can win! This is even worse if they are buying those keywords because they all bid against each other and raise the price for everybody!
What happens when 10,000 people purchase the same set of PLR articles? All of those articles compete with each other for exactly the same keywords in exactly the same niches and once again, nobody can win. Sure you can now pay a premium for ‘exclusive’ PLR clubs that have limited memberships, but unless you inject some uniqeness into your venture you’re still up against 100 people doing exactly the same thing as you.
What happens when 10,000 people purchase PLF? I seem to recall Jeff restricting memberships to only 5,000 members. Well we’re all safe then aren’t we! I know that in my case if I was to use the sales copy that Jeff recommends on my own readers, anybody who had spent more than 5 minutes reading my work would know instantly that I hadn’t written that copy and thus that would expose me as a liar, especially when so much of the copy is about ‘your personal story’.
What happens when 10,000 people all hit exactly the same website to create content for the 30 Day Challenge? The site can’t handle the response, the site owner gets extremely upset and deletes accounts by the thousands, the challenge gains a lot of bad publicity and the event goes down in history with the name ‘TumblrGate’!
These Problems Are Made Worse in the Internet Marketing Niche
Let me go back to the Product Launch Formula and give you a more concrete example. Jeff has an email called the ‘34 minutes to go’ email which is obviously designed to be sent out a short while before the launch of your product. The technique behind the email is sound - you tell your prospect that you spent a long time writing out all the details of your offer and you apologise for the length because there’s so much in it. Okay that’s fine but Jeff encourages us to use that exact email and simply substitute certain words for our own product.
The email talks about how the author was up nearly all night, sleeping only for a couple of hours and so on… Is there any harm in using this email? Well, there is now because anyone who has read this blog post and read’s that email will know that it came from a PLF owner was too lazy to write his own copy or even hire a copywriter :-)
Joking aside, many PLF owners are working in the IM niche and we will be competing against each other. How many prospects are on the mailing lists of several marketers? In the last few months alone there have been several big product launches and if those guys had used the exact same copy then it would soon come out and it would hurt their reputation.
Applying is Learning
Ignoring for a moment the problems that I have already mentioned, there is a more profound underlying problem with the desire to have a complete system just handed to you on a plate and that is that you never really learn anything by pressing buttons on somebody else’s system. Learning is doing and if you don’t do anything then you never really learn anything.
Ed Dale teaches the 30 Day Challenge in a way that always tells you what to do but holds back on the ‘why’. He wants people to actually go and do the work on their own so that they learn and he is a wise man indeed.
The main reason that you learn by doing is that you will learn far more from your mistakes then you ever will from your successes and you usually make plenty of mistakes the first time (or first few times) you do something so that is where the real learning experience comes from. You won’t learn all that much from reading an ebook but if you follow the process in the ebook to your own business you’ll learn a lot and then you can take that knowledge and continue to apply it over and over.
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Stumble it!
Hunter Nuttall
June 11, 2008
Couldn’t agree more, Caroline. Standing out from the crowd is so important, and I hate it when someone uses copy that was clearly lifted from someone else.
Many of the sales pages I see look very similar. They’re usually one long page, have today’s date and “from the desk of [name],” are a bit overhyped, have some big fonts and bold colors, etc. Whenever I see one of those, my first thought is that it looks like they copied and pasted it from somewhere else, and made some tweaks. I trust pages like these a lot less than pages that were clearly written by who it says, in their own voice. But that’s just me as a buyer; I have no idea what kind of sales page is more effective in general.
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