Internet Marketing Skills - what is required?

In most professions, there are a recognised set of skills required if you are to perform the daily tasks proficiently… Internet Marketing is no different.

Or is it?

In fact, Internet Marketing is different. Unlike most professions, Internet Marketing requires input from a complete variety of disciplines and skills, and our performance in the field will be hindered if we don’t either supply it ouselves, or outsource it.

When you try and sell something online, its actually quite similar to selling something offline. You need a shop window, a point of entry, a welcoming face, a shop interior which satisfies curiosity, and all the follow-up service which visitors expect.

This sounds straight forward. Its a process we take for granted every day of our lives when we go shopping in the high street. But to pull it off successfully on the Internet requires a careful application of knowledge and skill. Some can do it well, and get spectacular results very quickly. Others can’t and don’t.

So what is it that some have, and others don’t?

I have been researching this recently to help with my series of Freedom Classes.

In these classes I am teaching people how to market successfully online. I am offloading much of the knowledge I have gathered, about what works and what doesn’t, and - hopefully - inspiring my participants to discover for themselves what the best way is for them.

A difference about The Freedom Class is that I am conducting it by Action Learning. This means that participants not only learn directly from me, like in a classroom, but also learn from each other’s experience. It is a method of learning particularly suited to Internet Marketing because we’re all doing it all the time, and there is no right or wrong way, only ways which work and ways which don’t.

One of the characteristics of Action Learning, which is also a characteristic of successful Internet Marketing, is working in groups. It is no secret that I owe much of my own success to the Mastermind group, formed in September 2006, which brought together Bob Jenkins, Glen Hopkins, Matthew Glanfield, Dan Kelly, Scott Tousignant, Martin Salter and myself.

In the time since then, we have devoted an hour each week to a conference call, on which we can air what we are doing, express any difficulties we’re having, ask for help, and offer advice. We do this through a freely available conference line, and even though between seven of us, we are in 4 different time zones and 3 different countries, we still do it every week.

No matter how good we are at some things, we can never be good at everything. And I honestly believe that anyone seeking success with Internet Marketing who doesn’t form a mastermind group such as this, is holding themself back.
Recently I undertook an exercise to identify 5 characteristics which I believe are important to Internet Marketers. With these, I created a questionnaire for my Freedom Class attendees aimed at providing a visual display of which characteristics they possessed, and in what quantity.

The aim of the exercise is to help them find other group members for creating an effective team.

Much of the work in The Freedom Class will be conducted in groups and it is important, I believe, that each of the characteristics is represented in each group.

Here is a list of the characteristics I identified:

1. Writer
2. Artist
3. Co-ordinator
4. Marketer
5. Technician

My theory is that a team conducting Internet Marketing activity, in this case to provide each member with their own Internet Marketing business, should possess each of these characteristics… and - for best results - in equal measure.

We will discover if I am right from the experience of my first set of students on The Freedom Class this weekend… you can be sure I’ll keep you posted.

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