“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.” – Mark Twain

It has been an age since I’ve been able to find the time to post on the blog and I feel guilty for the time that has elapsed. There are mitigating circumstances, of course, not the least of which were the Coming Home seminar in San Diego and completing the planning and implementation for The Challenge (formerly the Thirty Day Challenge – 30DC) which have absorbed all of my time and attention over the last few months.

Fortunately, even the greatest of Challenges come to fruition and finally The Challenge is about to commence and not a moment to soon!

A great deal of planning goes into The Challenge both throughout the year and at specific planning sessions. I am lucky to have a prominent role in managing the strategic planning and implementation of The Challenge but like all great enterprises, it couldn’t be achieved without the passion and commitment of a large team of people.

In 2010, The Challenge has undergone the greatest number of changes since we moved from largely teaching a paid traffic model to an organic/social media driven traffic model in 2007. These changes are motivated by two main drivers:

1. We develop our training modules to deliver the greatest value to the widest group of people looking to get started with Internet Marketing and hope to bring as many people through to the end of the training.
2. We want people to succeed. Success for us is to teach people to implement a sustainable and repeatable method of testing markets/niches online and to assess the potential commercial value. A successful outcome is the completion of the test whether the niche test delivers a dollar value or not.

This year we came to the realisation that a complete re-think of the structure of the training was required which has lead to development of the 7x7x7 model where we deliver 7 modules of 7 days duration interspersed with a break of 7 days between each module. By changing the delivery model in this way, we are able to reduce the daily time required to watch the content delivered and implement the tasks/actions that we ask throughout the program. Our goal is that each active day within the training modules will only require 30 minutes to complete.

The extra time afforded by the change in the delivery model has also resulted in two additional benefits:

1. The training program has been expanded to include additional content in 2010. I’m not at liberty to reveal what that content is, but I can assure you it’s going to be great!
2. There is now extra time within The Challenge program for the search engine optimization (SEO) strategies that we teach to work within the time-frame of the program. This should result in a proportionately higher success rate to the benefit of all.

As in all previous years, we are very hopeful that all of our participants, both new and returning, get the most out of the training we offer. I am absolutely confident, that if the training is completed then the participant will have received a wonderful platform of marketing expertise and strategy which can applied to a multitude of commercial activities on the Internet…and all for free*.

In closing, I want to refer to the quote at the top of this post. Mark Twain has encapsulated it perfectly, almost anything can be achieved it you break it into series of small, manageable tasks, GET STARTED with the first one and keep going. Well that is exactly what we have set out to achieve with The Challenge…and that first task starts on the 12th of July.

It is as it is.

GuruBob

* The Challenge is completely free to participate. During the training we do suggest that participants acquire their own (keyword focussed) domain name and hosting which results in a small cost.

Technorati Tags: 30dc, GuruBob, Internet Marketing, ppc, robert somerville, search engine optimization, SEO, social media, The Challenge, Thirty Day Challenge, traffic, training

“You see, in life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action.” - Anthony Robbins

A recent comment on this blog caused me to consider the question of how do you go from knowing nothing to developing expertise in a subject.  That is a challenging question and not easy to answer in one post…but I would like to begin meeting that challenge starting with this post.

Of course, I’m considering this from the perspective of Internet Marketing for obvious reasons which can be challenging due to the number of skills and strategies that can be learnt and the degree of choice available to all participants.

To begin though, I went back to my NLP training and renewed my understanding of conscious competence theory which is another name for the “Four Stages of Learning,” a theory put forward by psychologist Abraham Maslow.  This theory explains how people learn something, progressing from 1. Unconscious Incompetence (you don’t know that you don’t know something), to 2. Conscious Incompetence (you are now aware that you are incompetent at something), to 3. Conscious Competence (you develop a skill in that area but have to think about it), to the final stage 4. Unconscious Competence (you are good at it and it now comes naturally). Click on the image to the left to see an illustration.

Success, particularly significant success only comes for a person when they get to a Stage 4 level of competence and the challenge is how to get (and stay) there, in the shortest possible time. Now that you are aware of the competance model, you can judge which stage you have reached for all the things you wish to be successful at in your life. The reality is, that for all the things we think we know or have done, we will be at different Stages of Competence depending on our need, motivation, enjoyment and level of success.

But this post is about considering the competence model in relation to Internet Marketing…so here goes.

Stage 1 – Unconscious Incompetance

People that have no knowledge, understanding or awareness of Internet Marketing will be in this stage. My assumption is that most of you reading this post have past at least into Stage 2 and the thing that causes that is awareness.  For what ever reason, you have become ‘aware’ of Internet Marketing and have decided or consider the possibility that it is a subject of interest to you.

Stage 2 – Conscious Incompetance

The bulk of people that participate in the Thirty Day Challenge (30DC) start in Stage 2.  They are aware that they don’t have any competence with regards to Internet Marketing and are looking for a way to learn as quickly as possible.  We at the 30DC understand this, and do our very best to lead people from Stage 2 to Stage 3 as efficiently and as easily as possible.  Unfortunately, for many people, the desire to learn and experience a quick outcome are interlinked and if the outcome is not rapidly achieved, these people don’t progress ultimately to Stage 4 and stay trapped in Stage 2 or 3 simply swapping from one strategy or skill set to another without ever becoming truly competant.

The strongest determinant of whether someone passes from Stage 2 to Stage 3 is motive. Motivation is a VERY important subject but I would like to discuss that subject in more detail in a forthcoming post.

Stage 3 – Conscious Competance

Having participated in a training program like the Thirty Day Challenge or having bought (and read) an educational product, the person has progressed to a level of Stage 3 competance.  They know what to do but may not have ever implemented that knowledge or have only implemented once. This is where the most significant challenge in Internet Marketing raises it’s ugly head. This is the body of wannabe marketers who are constantly buying products to learn a different Internet marketing strategy or skill (Stage 2 activity) but who never implement or do implement only once or partially but don’t ever really become competant (stay stuck in Stage 3).

The reason is probably due to the fact that the person does not perceive that they can or will receive a short term outcome that is consistent with the motive that is driving them to learn in the first place. Consequently, the ‘grass is greener’ phenomenon kicks in and rather than take action and implement, it seems more attractive to go back to Stage 2 with a different strategy or skill set rather than push through to Stage 4 with what they have already learned (but not become expert in).

Or it may have just seemed all too hard and caused you to reconsider why you were bothering to learn in the first place!

The strongest determinant of whether someone moves from Stage 3 to Stage 4 is a preparedness to take action…to implement the knowledge they have learnt.

Stage 4 – Unconscious Competance

Some people either due to their particular psychological makeup (preparedness to take action) or luck in receiving a short term positive outcome push through Stage 3 into Stage 4. They begin implementing the knowledge they have learned and with repeated application gradually transition to Stage 4 competence.  This does not happen immediately.  For some people it takes implementing just a handful of times to achieve Stage 4 competence and for others it may take many times. But, over a period of time, the person suddenly realises they don’t have to think about it anymore and can undertake the tasks to implement the strategy automatically and easily. This is the place from which true success can happen. There are other factors that influence the ultimate outcome but it definitely won’t happen if you don’t achieve a Stage 4 competence with the strategy you are learning.

I am constantly reviewing this understanding of competence in relation to the 30DC. Our goal is that participants achieve a Stage 4 competence in ‘testing’ new niches on the Internet.  We don’t try and teach everything there is to learn about Internet Marketing (in the 30DC) but we do want people to acquire and be able to implement a sustainable and successful strategy for testing niches. Over time, we have tried to improve the ease with which people learn and implement the strategy by improving the quality of the education and by developing tools and services that offer leverage (making it easier and faster to implement the strategy).

I ask you all to consider what Stage of Competence you have achieved with the skills and strategies you are trying to learn. Have you ever stopped short of achieveing Stage 4 competence before swapping to a new strategy? Have you ever considered why you did that?

Given that true success will not occur unless you achieve Stage 4 competence in at least one Internet Marketing strategy can you see how important it is for you to push through and take action as many times as is needed for you to achieve that level of Competence?  If you don’t, the success that you seek will always remain elusive.

It is…as it is.

GuruBob

Technorati Tags: 30dc, abraham maslow, achieve success, competence, four stages of competence, GuruBob, Internet Marketing, it is as it is, marketer, Thirty Day Challenge

“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” – Oscar Wilde

It is very likely that most of the visitors to this blog, particularly at present, know me from my association with the Thirty Day Challenge (30DC).  So I thought I had better talk early on about how I came to be involved in the 30DC and the nature of my association.  This post will end up being a brief history of the 30DC which may be of interest to those of you that have not been a part of the 30DC right from the beginning (and maybe even for some of you that have).

At the beginning, I had only just agreed to work with Ed Dale back in 2005 when Ed travelled to the United States and came back and called an immediate meeting.  In that meeting he was extremely excited about an idea he’d had after he had suddenly been exposed to the National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo (as it is known) is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Ed’s idea was to replicate the training concept…by creating a course to introduce people to Internet Marketing and have them make $1 in 30 days.  The basic idea was to help people to get started online (learn the basic principles) but to give them a tangible result, hoping that if they could see that they could make $1 then they could go on to make as much money as they wanted depending on the effort they were prepared to make and the niches they choose to move into.

I could see that Ed was very excited by this idea…but at the time I did not share his enthusiasm. In fact, I thought he was crazy (although I diplomatically choose not to tell him to his face) as I couldn’t see how it was possible to make it happen in time.  You see, it was early-May when we were having this meeting and Ed wanted to start the challenge on the 1st July.  I came up with all these reasons why it wasn’t possible (no list, no website, no content) which I felt were all perfectly valid reasons for NOT doing it at the time.

Which, of course, Ed completely ignored!

You see the thing about idea focussed entrepreneurs is they don’t see the reasons to NOT do something, they only focus on the reasons to DO it.

The rest of course is history.  We did complete the challenge that year.  We had just over a 1,000 particpants and it was very successful, mainly I have to say because of Ed’s amazing ability to create the required content and videos just in time (often just a few hours before they went live).

During the first two Thirty Day Challenges (2005 & 2006), my role was very much in the back room.  I did record some of the videos but it was a very minor contribution mainly because I was still coming to terms with Internet Marketing and learning the ropes.  My strategy for learning, was to opt-in in to the lists of every marketer I could find and grab all their free content.  This is a very good strategy and one which still works well today if you have the time to read and absorb the material.  I didn’t see any difference between Pay Per Click Traffic (PPC) models and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) models so I learned about both even though I could see that Ed hated SEO (as a source of traffic) in favour of the cheap and easy PPC traffic available at that time. Suffice to say my interest in SEO was very much a private one at that time.

So the first two Thirty Day Challenges focussed more on finding a niche, and creating and selling your own product.  This was really only possible because back then, traffic just wasn’t an issue online.

During the latter half of 2006, however, Google changed everything by imposing a series of what we called ‘Google Slaps’.  In essence, it became no longer easy to get cheap, easy traffic and with every slap, it became even harder.

So during the Christmas break of 2006, I went back to square one and independently developed an SEO strategy based on Squidoo which at that time was ranking very well in the search engines for a range of keywords.  My motive for doing this was to reduce the reliance in the 30DC on PPC traffic on the assumption that we could teach people to drive traffic from the search engines within the 30 days and sell an affiliate product to test whatever niche they were targetting.  It took me a long time to persuade Ed that this would work…but to his credit he agreed to go foward despite his previously well publicised dislike for SEO.  Finally, I had an outlet for everything I had learned (and continue to learn) about SEO.  I was lucky too as by now, Ed had also formed a partnership with Dan Raine of the Immediate Edge, who was also very much in favour of teaching SEO as a strategy for acquiring traffic.

Never the less, this shift signalled a key change in the 30DC away from product creation towards traffic generation as we needed a traffic strategy that people could implement that didn’t cost too much money.  We were, of course, still motivated to teach people what we thought was the best way to get started online.

The 2007 30DC was again very successful (by now we had over 10,000 particpants).  And then Google decided it didn’t like Squidoo and began to seriously reduce the search engine rankings for Squidoo lenses, a situation which lasted for many months.

So for me…it was once again back to the drawing board.

For nearly 8 months in late 2007 to mid 2008 I tested nearly every content management and website design platform that was available.  I tested how easy it was to get pages ranked in the search engines and what strategies worked best to facilitate high rankings.  I knew we could no longer rely on Web 2.0 platforms for the main site (although they are still incredibly important for acquiring authority) and in the end I decided that WordPress gave the best SEO outcome while still being easy to publish and to implement features (through plugins).

I realised that we also need to give people assistance to apply and implement the concepts we were teaching and so Market Samurai and WordPressdirect came into being.  There is a lot to say about those platforms but I’ll leave that for future posts.

And so the 2008 and 2009 Thirty Day Challenges were focussed on testing niches/micro-niches using wordpress blogs.  We still teach the importance of researching the market before jumping in and creating a site but the current 30DC is focussed very much on creating a quality keyword focussed blog and then acquiring authority (backlinks) from other related websites to increase the probability that those blogs will rank in the search engines for the keywords being targeted. The goal is to try and sell something (initially an affiliate product) to the traffic coming to the blog as a test of the potential commercial value of the niche and the traffic associated with it.  If the traffic buys (something) at an acceptable conversion, then there is a motivation to expand the effort in that niche to get more traffic and sell more and possibly even develop new products over time.

The difference in 2009, is the scope, quality and maturity of the tools that are available now to implement the 30DC strategy (you just can’t believe what we can do today that we couldn’t do just a few short years ago).  These tools provide leverage (an important concept I’ll be blogging about soon) which makes it easier and faster to implement the strategy and also ensure that what should be done is being done.  My search for even greater leverage is never ending and continues to drive the evolution of the tools and the 30DC strategy today and into the future.

I am extremely proud of both my association and contribution to the Thirty Day Challenge (30DC) and am ever grateful to Ed Dale for both his vision and for the opportunity to be involved. To date over 100,000 people have benefited from their exposure to the 30DC training.  I hope there will be many more Thirty Day Challenges ahead…I still think it is easily the best free program for getting started with Internet Marketing online.

It is…as it is,

GuruBob

ps this post was never meant to be a serious discussion of the 30DC strategy as it is now (I will surely cover that in several posts in the future) more to give you, the reader, the context of my involvement and to set the scene for my future posting about the 30DC and the strategy and concepts we teach.

Technorati Tags: 30dc, challenge 30 day, dan raine, ed dale, google, GuruBob, Immediate Edge, Market Samurai, microniche, niche, search engine optimization, SEO, squidoo, thirty day challange, Thirty Day Challenge, Web 2.0, wordpress, WordPressDirect

“Everyone should have their own opinion and be able to voice it. No matter what it is. Of course, that does not mean your opinion is always right. But, you’re certainly entitled to your opinion.” – Tim McGraw

There comes a time in a person’s life when they feel that they have something to say. And for me, Robert Somerville (aka GuruBob)…that time has come. The amazing thing about the internet is how relatively easy it is to voice ones own opinions, in other times it was much harder.

All you have to do is to start blogging!

I have been many things in my life of 47 years (so far), I’ve been a student, university graduate, scientist (15 years as a Geologist with the Shell Company), business consultant, NLP Master practitioner, Franchise Manager, Marketing Consultant, Father, mad keen Kangaroos supporter (that’s Aussie Rules football), golfer, lover of inspirational quotes…

These are some of the things that I am but none of these things define me.

Probably the main reason I’ve decided to start blogging though is what I have learnt about the wonderful world of Internet Marketing which was introduced to me by Ed Dale in 2004 when he asked me to join him and look after the back-end of his business. I thought it was going to be part-time and a bit of admin and customer service…little did I know.

I knew nothing about Internet Marketing back then and it was a tremendous challenge to come up to speed. Ed decided to start the 30DC one month after I joined him and that was really a scramble (for me)…but more of that in another post.

Along the way I’ve developed a certain amount of expertise online and a certain way of looking at the challenge of Internet Marketing. I’m certainly no Ed Dale, but because of my scientific background and analytical personality I am constantly fascinated by the science of marketing online and ever searching for the reasons ‘why’. I love to find out why and how things work and you can expect my blogging to be dominated by that focus, particularly in relation to the Thirty Day Challenge (30DC). I have been privileged to be in a position to have a significant strategic input to the 30DC and the tools that we have developed over the last 5 years and I wish to discuss some of the reasoning behind what we teach and support.

But the 30DC is not the only thing I want to blog about. I’m interested in general Internet Marketing subjects and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I’m fascinated by the laws of influence and change and techniques like NLP for the implementation of such. I’m intrigued by the reasons that cause people to take action to get started. I love Movies, Apple products, technology and technological innovation particualarly on the internet.

I am constantly buying products, software and ebooks looking for what works and what doesn’t and hope to be able to discuss some of the better purchases.

I won’t promise you’re going to love everything I blog about but hopefully there will be something for everyone.

Many of you already know me from the 30DC so don’t be shy, if you have a question or a subject you would like me to comment on then let me know by leaving a comment or by sending an email to emailgurubob@gmail.com.

I would be honoured if you would give me your name and email address below to receive email updates when I post new content on the blog. For those people that do, I’m giving access to videos of my last major presentation at the $5,000 “Over The Edge’ seminar in Beechworth, Australia amongst other things.

Till the next time, It is…as it is.

GuruBob

Technorati Tags: 30dc, blogs rss feed, ed dale, GuruBob, Internet Marketing, internet marketing subjects, it is as it is, reasons for blogging, Thirty Day Challenge, who is gurubob8230and why is he blogging