Who Is Your Mentor?
I’ve talked about mentors a bit in the past and how I believe you need to have a mentor if you want to achieve success in making money online.
When I announced my “retirement” from teaching how to buy and sell websites, I got a ton of emails from readers who were sad to see me go. A lot of the emails read “Please don’t stop teaching, you’re one of my only mentors that I can trust”.
It really got me thinking…
It’s true, many people who teach methods of making money online are in it for one thing, the money. And when you have that motivation, you can be sure the mentor you are following has THEIR best interests in mind, NOT YOURS.
While it’s also true, I’m retiring from teaching the buying & selling websites business anymore, I think its important for you to know what to look for in a good mentor so you don’t get burned.
Find A Mentor You Can Trust To Help You Make Money Online
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1) The mentor you are following should have a defined path to success.
In other words, your mentor should be someone who has made most of their money DOING whatever it is they are teaching others to do. If the person made just a few bucks using the technique and now makes the majority of their money from teaching the “how to”, STAY AWAY.
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2) The mentor you are following should help you stay focused.
Have you ever been on someone’s email list and you get offer after offer after offer to buy different products? This is one SURE SIGN that the mentor doesn’t care about you. All they are looking for is their affiliate commission, so they try to shove offer after offer in front of your face hoping you’ll bite on one of them.
It is impossible to be successful with an internet business if you buy a new training program every single week. By the time you learn the technique you bought, the next great “product of the week” comes out and you move on to the next one. You never have a chance to implement anything.
If you get emails from a mentor who offers you many different ways to make money than what you originally signed up for, chances are the mentor is abusing their relationship with you for affiliate commissions.
A lot of times these emails will “appear” to be genuine. Here are some common ones (since most of these marketers have no originality…)
a) My good friend Bob agreed to share his secrets with you on a FREE teleconference tonight at 9.
b) I just found this new way of making $300 a day, download this free report that explains it all.
c) I just got off the phone with __________ and got him to reveal his system how he makes $5000/month with no list, no website, no money, etc.
There are a bunch of similar stories, but the meanings are all the same….They are going to give you a free teaser, waste 45 minutes of your time, then pitch you on the latest and greatest money making technique for $997.
These are distractions to your main objective, and this type of mentor is HURTING your chances of success by throwing different business models at you every single week.
My advice, if you are on a list like this, unsubscribe immediately.
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3) The mentor should not depend on the income from his training course to survive!
If your mentor is coming out with a new product every single week or every month, chances are they are doing that because they NEED the money from these courses to pay their mortgage.
And if these people are that bad off financially, that’s NOT someone you should be listening to when you want help making money online.
You should only be following people who really don’t need your money because they became wealthy using the technique they are teaching. Sadly, there are few people who fit into this category.
You might ask, if the mentor doesn’t need the money, then why are they charging for the training? Well, one reason is, it’s not right ethically to use someone else’s time, knowledge or experience without compensating them. Do you work for free?
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4) The mentor should not sell “dreams”.
Making money online CAN be easy once you know what you are doing, but don’t let anyone fool you into thinking all you have to do is push a couple buttons and then it’s off to the beach to live a life of luxury.
That is physically impossible.
Anyone who tells you that you can start a business with:
a) no money
b) little effort
c) just a couple hours per month
is flat out lying!
Personally, I don’t think anyone should even consider starting an internet business unless they have at least $1,000 – $3,000 of cash in the bank that is not reserved for living expenses. If you don’t have at least this much, you don’t need to be in business because you are just not ready yet.
Internet businesses are dirt cheap to start compared to any other business in the world, but they are still businesses and have certain costs associated with them (ie – hosting, domain name, development cost, advertising, content creation, software, etc).
Compare this startup cost to a real retail business, where you can spend more than $150,000 just to open your doors, a couple grand for an internet business is nothing.
Not everyone is right for making money online. Lack of capital is one thing that keeps people from succeeding online. If you are always stressed about the decision between spending $50 for a website logo or putting $50 of food on the table, you will not do well online.
Advice – pick up an extra part time job and put all of that income aside for your internet business. Once you have a couple thousand saved up, then quit the part time job and focus on building a real internet business.
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These are the big ones to watch out for. You just have to think about the person you are following and ask yourself, “Are they really trying to help me succeed, or are they just trying to sell me their products and earn affiliate commissions from their friends?”
Sometimes it is difficult to know who to trust for advice and that’s part of the problem.
Personally, I like the school of hard knocks as a learning tool. Just go out there and try stuff. Learn for yourself what works and what doesn’t. Stop doing the stuff that doesn’t work and keep doing more of what does. Before you know it, you will be making good money online.
A lot of people are afraid of failure or losing money, but if you think about it, why not spend that $997 on testing a new business idea and see if it works rather than pay $997 for a training program. The money is gone either way, but at least if you invest in yourself and your business, you have a much higher chance of success. Worst case: you stick with your day job for the time being and learn about the all important job promotion interview.
So, who do you follow online?
My mentor should be Ben Cook!
Great post…and could be applied to a number of professional walks of life.
My thinking is that there is almost nobody you can trust as a Mentor online if you are talking about paying to be coached apart from you of course Max
I think I would trust Terry Dean though since he is transparent and a bible dude. He copied the idea of James Brausch to provide an Intern program where you follow proven procedures to promote their business and later copy the techniques in your own business.
I like your idea of testing a business idea and risking money on this instead of paying some dodgey marketer the same money.
On forums and blogs you can often find some bored successful person that spills the beans on how they make money online and quickly snap up the free info. I cut and paste it to a document and save it to disk as if it’s an eBook.
completely agree that you´re mentor should have made it in the field he is teaching and not made it from teaching it. Its like the hundred of real estate gurus teaching how to flip houses… yet the only money they´re making is selling courses on flipping houses.
personally that is why i always admired darren of problogger over jon chow…. darren made it big with his digital photography blog… jon made it big teaching how to blog… but then again… he made it really big.. so he must be doing something right.
Darren made it big as a blogger by spamming other blogs to the tune of 100 comments per day. And now he is spamming the web with whatever topic he can possibly imagine related to blogging. It’s all about thieving traffic from other blogs I think.
At least Jon has a more normal approach to blogging.
So I think there are good and bad ways to make it big online and hence make money online.
You are so right, especially about those lists. I used to read them all until finally unsubscribing.
I wrote up a detailed analysis of how list-builders can actually better their business by becoming mentors (though I never use that word). It doesn’t exactly fit with my website, which is geared towards beginners. I can send it over and you can have a look at it if you want, to see if you’d want to publish it as a guest post. I emailed you through the contact form, but I know a lot of the mail gets caught in the spam filters.
But anyway, you’re right. What’s incredible is that so many people will only read a few of those emails before unsubscribing. It’s just bad business to not add value to the emails, that I simply don’t get it. Ah well. 😉
Ah, I forgot to answer the question. I follow Ken Envoy, because I have yet to read anything that didn’t make sense. Seriously, the guy is one solid internet marketer. Plus, SBI is kind of awesome. 😉
What a great post, I too hate those emails that come in triples every day, so irritating and it all becomes meaningless.
And, I agree with you that you need to find solid information, BUT you have to actually apply it and then try, fail and try again!
Thanks,
JR
Max instead of entitling this who is your mentor you might have chosen how to determine the difference between an online marketer forming a relationship so he can get rich as opposed to a real mentor. The difference in my mind is a real mentor has their focus on the person they are mentoring.
Someone in one of their comments mentioned coaching. I think it’s important to understand the difference between a mentor and coach. To me a mentor is someone who has achieved success in an area I wish to move in. Now of course it is important that a mentors role is one of helping.
A coach on the other hand is a professional, someone who understands success principles, human psychology, and really needs to be a good counselor. That is why Tony Robbins perhaps the greatest coach around can coach people to achieve huge success in areas he himself is not successful in.
I would say that 90% of the so-called mentors out there in the area of Internet marketing are in for the affiliate commission and could care less about your success.
If you’re going to start something that you don’t know about, then it’s really great to get mentoring from someone who knows his stuff very well.
Actually investing in personalized mentoring program is worth every penny, if you’ve selected the right person.
Thanks for sharing useful tips.
I always try to look for the best in the business although that is not always possible as sometimes they are hard to pick. But I have a few different mentors depending on what I am doing – James Martell for niche website building and natural search, Kyle and Carson from Wealthy Affiliate for bum marketing and PPC and Yaro from Entrepenreurs Journey for his blogging techniques.
I am my own mentor. I kick my butt everyday to get out there and do something such as publish something on the web that could potentially lead to the utopia of the internet dream lifestyle.
Every day, do something that brings you closer to this blissful existence, even if it’s just a comment to Blogging Experiment
My mentor is the Noob from bloggernoob.com
Hello. It’s my first time to leave message here. Here is really a great blog and it gives me so many inspiration.
Like what you said, I believe “couple grand for an internet business is nothing” and I resigned my Programmer Job and want to put more effort on building my own website and blog.
Anyway, I am very new to blog, hope can get more blogger experience here.
This is a really good post. I am glad I am more for helping my readers than making money. My number one goal is to help my readers make money and everything in between. If I make money, then thats great, if not, then at least I no someone is.
Well I’ve always been my own mentor. I do learn from others online when I do my research I guess, but I have never had someone hold me by the hand through anything. 😉 Great post, thank you.
You are so right, there is not much you can learn from people out there!
But at the same time, it is hard to find someone like that. Some one who can take time off and give you a patient ear.
I dont have a mentor buy I try to use forums for help and encouragement…
Its hard finding a mentor. It seems like everytime I ask someone or send a PM in the forum I get no response.
Seems like no one is really looking to help or if they want to help they wanna charge a crazy fee.
If I had money to pay them $20,000 dollars I would rather spend it on my business.
Its a shame that its hard to find a mentor, but blogs like this always provide great information…
Thanks for sharing the post.
Max, I love your posting. Now it start making some sense to me in this internet marketing……esp mentors.
Hi Max! This is just the perfect complement to Zen Habit’s “Why You Should Think About Encouraging Others to Be Brilliant”
One of the things I love about working online is the the support of many generous mentors who just provide value with no strings attached. Blogs like these are a godsend to those living in remote places.
I can’t say I have one specific mentor, I have a few mentors, which I think is the key sometimes. That way, you are open to more than one idea. However, I must say that you have done a great job of outlining what a mentor should be
Very valid point about “The mentor should not depend on the income from his training course to survive”.
This is often so true with guys who claim to make money online. You honestly have to wonder how many of them would be making money if they weren’t telling you how to make money. I think it’s pretty rare to find one. I have yet to, but will keep looking.