use action learning.
As you may have seen on my Squidoo autobiography, this is
an area that I have been involved in since the early 1980's.
I have worked with managers in many organisations to help
them master the principles of action learning. The Top 500
companies in America use this method very effectively
to develop their managers and their businesses.
The fundamental principle is very simple but the application
is often difficult because of our ingrained, habituated
behaviors.
Action learning involves a cycle of plan-act-review. The cycle
is then repeated (similar to the quality improvement cycle).
Too often both managers and Internet marketers get into the
following vicious cycle: plan-act-plan-act-plan-act, with no
review.
So what are you working on now and how do you plan to
review its effectiveness? What aspect are you going to
improve?
Progress is achieved through these incremental
improvements day by day (unless of course you stumble
on the next big breakthrough in the process - and, in fact,
that's how these breakthroughs are discovered, i.e. by doing
the hard yards first).
Most of us fall into either the activity trap (where we repeat
the vicious cycle above) or analysis paralysis (where we
don't do anything at all).
I tend to fall into the activity trap because I love creating
new things - e.g. I made a commitment yesterday to help
a local charity gain support from Squidoo via the
not-for-profit program.
The value of the plan-act-review cycle was brought home
to me recently when I was reviewing the performance of a
PPC ad that I had developed for an Affiliate product.
Normally, I would just keep creating ads like most other
people and not review what was happening. However,
through the PPC Classroom I learnt the importance
of consolidating your PPC ad before moving on to
multiple ads for multiple products.
I was getting a good click-through rate (CTR) but the
landing page was not converting very well (...and I knew
the sales page itself converted very well).
So I reviewed the tutorial on creating landing pages on
PPC Classroom and re-worked my landing page - and
not surprisingly conversions improved.
So this little review action, using a resource I already
had, enabled me to save money and increase my affiliate
income.
So what resources - videos, podcasts, articles, e-Books,
e-mails - have you got to enable you to review what you
are doing online at the moment? It is useful to use
someone else's insights as a basis for your review.
In fact, action learning is ideally done with
someone else - a mentor, coach, a friend, a sponsor
or colleague. The value of this is that they are likely to
ask fresh questions and help you challenge your assumptions
about your product/program, marketing strategy,
target market or buying behavior.
Here's a further article I have written on this topic:
How to action learn your affiliate business
********************************************
Ron Passfield is a Top 100 Squidoo Lensmaster and
Giant Squid. He provides free resources
for Squidoo affiliate marketing on his Squidoo lens:
http://www.squidoo.com/squidoomarketingstrategies
To learn more about Squidoo Affiliate Marketing
Subscribe to Ron's free Squidoo Marketing e-course:To learn more about Squidoo Affiliate Marketing
check out:
http://www.squidooaffiliatemarketing.comRon is the author of the e-book:
********************************************
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