Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Are You Cooking Up Success for Your Online Business?
There really are no one-size-fits-all solutions to our Internet marketing needs. Each situation is unique and requires unique perspective.

I'm not trying to make Internet marketing seem like all is hopeless for the new marketer, though. The problem is that we often look for magic recipes for success. We look for things outside ourselves that will work 100% of the time for anyone in every situation.

The truth is that there is no such recipe. Certainly, there are techniques that have a proven track record of success, but even they need to be applied intelligently in concert with other techniques. Just doing one proven technique will not guarantee success.

I like to compare Internet marketing to cooking and the success of marketers to my wife and me.

I can handle myself adequately in the kitchen. I'm never going to starve from lack of ability to cook. I can follow a recipe and have it turn out. I can fix a limited number of favorite foods from my bachelor days long ago. I can even do some simple experiments to create an occasional new dish (although my kids still razz me about some of my more notable failed experiments from their younger years).

My wife, on the other hand, is a maestro in the kitchen. She's always looking for new recipes to try and pulls them off flawlessly. But more than that, she can take a recipe and improve on it as she makes it. She knows the ins and outs of cooking expertly enough that she can look at a recipe and use it not as something to slavishly follow, but as an inspiration for further creativity.

She substitutes freely in ingredients and amounts to create something entirely different, suited perfectly to our tastes. Sometimes, the final result bears little resemblance to the recipe with which she started. But it is excellent nonetheless.

Internet marketing is the same way. When you slavishly follow techniques that you read, you can get good results. But the real art of marketing comes when you can take the techniques you've learned and improvise with them, like my wife does with cooking.

Now, what she does didn't come naturally to her. She draws from years of experience and experimentation. She started by slavishly following recipes, like I do. But the more she learned, the greater her skill grew. And she didn't just read about cooking; she did it.

And that's the way you can become a successful marketer—not by merely reading about it, but by doing it. You won't succeed on the basis of how many facts about marketing you know or how many techniques you can copy. You learn by trying and finding out what works in your specific situation and then experimenting further to come up with even better results.

And as you learn, your skill grows not just steadily, but exponentially. But you have to get in there and do it. Chefs are not made in an easy chair, curled up with a recipe book. They're made in the kitchen. In the same way, marketers are not made by collecting ebooks on marketing; they're made by putting what they've learned into practice.
Jeff