When it comes to making mistakes I have made enough for you and me together.  You don’t need to make the same ones that I made.  When my wife and I got started in internet marketing we were really green and gullible. I had been an avid reader of Robert Allen for a number of years.  His first book “Nothing Down” had made me a lot of money.  To this day I have not made a down payment with my own money to buy any real estate that I have purchased.  His book “Multiple Streams of Income” made a lot of sense and I used it to good advantage.  In fact if I had not followed this line of thinking I would be in a world of hurt today.

Robert Allen than put out a book called “Multiple Streams of Internet Income”  again it was a great book with great advise,  If I would have left things there I would be about $10,000 richer today.  I followed up on a squeeze page about generating lots of money from various sources.  The Company was Prosper Learning a Robert Allen owned company in Provo, Utah.  I thought that since his books were so great his coaching program should make me a millionaire in less than 6 months.  This is also what his sales people told me.

The rest of the story.  I signed up with Prosper Learning to learn Internet Marketing.  The coaching program was made up of a text-notebook and a once a week coaching call.  The people doing the coaching were really sincere but did not know much about the business world.  I think that I knew more about marketing at that point than the coaches.  To be fair my first coach taught me a lot about Ubuntu and some about bloging.  He did not have a clue as to how to help me make it in my chosen niche.  He quitProsper Learning in the middle of the program.  My second coach was a young lady that sold dresses etc on line and on a blog.  She knew a bit about bloging but darn little about internet marketing.  She quit Prosper Learning before my coaching program was done.  The paper work showed that the course was complete but this was not the case.

To end this story.  A year later I was still being charged a recurring fee for a service that I did not sign up for. The gurantee was that they would work with me until I succeeded.  How ever any attempt to get past the hurdles that I had were canned answers that you could find any where on the internet.  I asked for my money back but never recieved a reply.

What is the point of this story.  All beginning marketers are going to be pestered and annoyed about joining a coaching program or a mentoring program.  Many of these are good and they are expensive.  If you can afford it as a beginning internet marketer you might cut six months of the time necessary to make a profit with a good mentor.  Here are some things to consider when getting into one of these programs.

• Is the guarantee still good at the end of the program if you have not meet the goals that were established between you and your mentor or coach.  Written expected outcomes are an absolute must for this type of a program.  These should be complete with dates and measurable outcomes.
• Will the program take you step by step from where you are to where you want to be.  Many mentors are like consultants–they give fuzzy answers rather than direct answers to you question or they ignore hard questions completely.  That has been my experience even from the top of the line coaching programs.
• Check their history with the Better Business Bureau in the city of their home office.
• Check to see if they are a registered business in the state from which they conduct business.
• Check them out on RipOff Report.  You can google them.
• Make sure that any recurring payment program is up front and that you know what it is.  Many of these recurring payment programs are extreemly hard to escape from.

I learned these lessons by the school of hard knock or was that hard earned dollars.

See ya soon,

Bud