Riding In The Car With Boys...

lesson number 47…

As soon as you try categorize any group of people via personality type, you head into a world of pain.

Making sweeping generalisations, is a bad idea. But as it’s Monday morning, and I'm already in the “I hate writing mood” I’ll tackle the subject and make a big sweeping bunch of them!!

In the first 12 months of mentoring I learned many, many, things. One of the most fascinating - the type of work people who join mentoring programs should do (and perhaps more importantly - what they shouldn’t!).

This became brutally evident, when we looked at the vital, yet at times, soul destroying, task of backlinking.

Backlinking is the most vital of a SEO tasks.

There's no question anyone joining my mentoring program is by definition, entrepreneurial. It goes without saying. What did become obvious, with these driven, clever, people is they struggled to backlink with any sort of consistency.

They were working very significant and intensive jobs during the day. They were smart enough to realise everyone should have a plan B. However...

To get on the front page of Google for your chosen phrase you can't get around the fact you need to perform a significant amount of backlinking.

As Guru Bob would say “It's about the backlinks–stupid".

Typically, if you're working a mentally intensive job during the day, coming home and doing even half an hour of this crucial work is a very, very hard task for anyone to take on.

Now - Before you think I’m giving you an excuse to give up - stay with me to the end….

You see, there is a way forward.

(Remember - The Challenge is all about starting, Mentoring is all about finishing - Well, as Zuck said in the “Social Network” - online business is like fashion - it never “finishes”)

Here's where the horrific stereotyping comes in.

In my simple world, there are two types of people. The first type, and I'm 99.9% certain you fit into this category if you're reading this right now. The entrepreneur.

The other, the worker.

There's nothing wrong with being in either category!

However, since time immemorial, we've needed both classes of money earners to make commerce roll.

To ask an entrepreneur to do repetitive tasks, is to crush their soul...

There's nothing more heartbreaking watching someone who has really worked their guts out and done everything asked finding out a market is just not going to work. Imagine, if you've spent the past six weeks diligently backlinking half an hour every day. It takes a special kind of character to bounce back and move on.

Incredibly, a lot of the mentorees from last year fitted into that category! My role as an educator, however, is to teach the 99% not the 1% of exceptions.

There was such a clear difference in attitude, approach, and downright enjoyment, of starting an online business when a mentor employed their first team member.

The difference was extraordinary!

Side note–just before you think hiring your first team member is the path to enlightenment and the land of milk and honey. Be warned, this too is a very tricky process and takes on average eight weeks to successfully complete. Not something all the outsourcing courses really cover.

If you look at this as an outsider, it makes absolute sense. If you have half an hour a night for five nights a week testing one phrase you have spent 2 1/2 hours doing backlinking. It takes extraordinary effort. Doing anything regularly for half an hour is beyond 99% of most of the population. When I saw the incredible difference hiring a team member for three lattes per day made… it all came together.

It's simple, if somebody is spending 40 hours a week testing phrases and baclinking, by definition, they are going to be test more phrases than somebody who is only spending 2 1/2 hours.

It’s not rocket science!

When you realise any person who is successful in any creative endeavour must create a lot of “coal” to find the “diamonds"- it becomes so obvious.

This to me was one of the biggest lessons from measuring 1.0 and has indeed really guided me creating Mentoring 2.0

Ed

Sent from my iPad