The Way We Learn Online Marketing Needs to Change

I first stepped into the world of online marketing about 8 years ago. I was newly widowed, living the ex-pat lifestyle and my kids had flown the nest to start their adventures in the world of work. I started, not because I wanted to make money, but rather to fill empty days that my circumstances had created now that my responsibilities as a wife, mother, and business partner were no longer required.

(My husband was my business partner in a small audiovisual company that we had run together for a few years.)

At the time, blogging was all the rage, and I set about to learn how to do it and stumbled across a program from New Zealander, Mark Ling. I started with the free courses and moved on to his business-in-a-box offering, which, if I'm brutally honest, was just too overwhelming at the time for a newbie like me to really get my head around.

(I recently returned to the materials, and it makes complete sense to me now and blogging will probably be back on the agenda for me very soon.)

But I enjoyed the learning experience, and it was giving me a focus and a new direction for my life and helped me through my grieving process. It also opened up a new online community, which I enjoyed being part of.

It was through Mark Ling that I was introduced to Anik Singal, who was promoting his new enterprise through his book The Money's in the List. I jumped on a seminar, read the book from cover to cover, and began the journey of creating lead magnets, designing optins, setting up autoresponder sequences, buying solo ads, and finding affiliate products to promote.

You get the picture, right.

There was so much to learn and although I've been around technology all of my life, this felt like I was trying to get fluency in a foreign language in just a couple of weeks. The more I learned, the more I needed to learn, and I began to dive into SEO, dropshipping, content writing skills, Facebook Ads, WordPress, freelancer sites, and automation software. Eventually, I found my way onto Shopify and Amazon and discovered Alibaba.

All this time, I was still playing at online marketing, keeping it in the hobby zone just really to keep occupied, build up my skills, and enjoy celebrating the commissions that had begun to drop into my bank account.

It was only a couple of years ago that my attitude changed and I decided to take this all more seriously. I put an investment budget to one side and sought out some mentorship to help me put everything I had learned so far into a more coherent process to turn this hobby into a proper business. I was friends with a guy from Germany who had been in the social media marketing business for a long time working for an agency. I reached out and asked for advice, and he directed me to Russell Brunson's One Funnel Away Challenge. 30 days of pure torture as I struggled to watch the videos in the early hours of every morning, complete the tasks, battle the frustrations of the Clickfunnels platform, and find suitable products to promote. After the month was over and my first funnel was launched, I had gained a lot of skills, fallen in love with funnels, and all I needed to do next was to relearn Facebook advertising.

It was a never-ending process! And I was beginning to see how much Facebook advertising had changed since I had tried it way back when I first had success with dropshipping (before my advertising account was frozen). The value in finding organic ways to find traffic rather than paid was blatantly obvious.

I knew mentorship in organic marketing would not come cheap, but I felt I should bite the bullet and dive in once and for all. I had so many pieces of the puzzle and simply needed someone to help me pull them together and identify gaps that needed bridging. I started out with Dave Sharp, then moved on to Jacob Caris, the Wong Brothers, and Aaron (who's Polish surname I am not even going to attempt to spell let alone pronounce), but there were still missing pieces of the puzzle. I attended seminars by Francesca Moi and Peng Joon, and a course by Martina DeGiovvani, and it was only then the penny dropped and I started to understand exactly what I should be doing.

The missing piece of the puzzle had nothing to do with the actual processes involved in social media marketing, but everything to do with the psychology behind the way it's being taught.

When that penny dropped, you could say "the rest is history!"