Leigh Burke's Blog – make money online

Today we will be taking a look at the role of education in expanding your knowledge and achieving success.

Specifically, in this post you will learn:

- Why education and learning has been so highly valued and regarded throughout the centuries
- Why you should regard your education as a life-long pursuit
- How increasing your knowledge will increase your profits
- How to figure out what to study and when to study it
- How education should be considered an investment and not a cost
- Why teaching others is one of the best ways to learn

Let’s start with a few more quotes to get your juices flowing…

- “You teach best what you most need to learn.” – Richard David Bach

- “A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions.” – Anonymous

- “An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.” – Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

- “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” – Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

- “Experience is a great advantage. The problem is that when you get the experience, you’re too damned old to do anything about it.” – Jimmy Connors

- “Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.” – John Cotton Dana

What I’m talking about when I talk about education and learning are what some would term the school of life. That is, what you learn and absorb once you complete your formal education whether that finished after high school, college or university.

There are many ways that you can learn. There are structure courses and curriculums in formal educational institutions. These include certificate courses, diplomas, short courses and vocational training.

Then of course there is the school of hard knocks as they call it. Learning on the job, learning by trial and error, learning by reading articles, books, watching videos, documentaries, attending seminars, joining mastermind groups, joining clubs, reading and participating in forums.

All of the above methods allow you to continue a lifelong pursuit of adult learning. And from the sample set of learning methods above, you’ll see that a lot of the options are free – that’s right, they won’t cost you a cent, only your time.

There’s a good reason that education is so highly valued amongst our present day society and cultures throughout history. And it goes a long the lines of this. Have you ever heard the expression use it or lose it? This phrase often applies to keeping fit and active so your body doesn’t seize up as you get older.

This principle can also be applied to your brain. That’s right, your brain is a complex web of neurons and associated electrical activity. The more you use your brain, the better you will become at tasks such as memory recall, problem solving and creative thinking. By constantly supplying your brain with additional data to think and mull over, you are actually helping to not only keep your neural pathways open, but to increase their capacity and effectiveness.

Not only are their the psychological benefits of keeping an active brain, but as long as you are feeding your brain the right raw material – i.e. positive, motivating material that you can apply to your own life and internet business – then you will also reap the benefits of an increased knowledge that you can apply to your life and business for positive results. These positive results could come in the way of a reduced workload, greater output, increased sales, increased customers, greater customer satisfaction, a happy and healthier lifestyle for yourself.

If you were paying attention to the above paragraph you would have read “increased sales”. That’s right, by increasing your knowledge you can increase your sales, and in turn increase your profits. So how is this possible? Well have you ever studied copywriting? Copywriting could be summed up as the art of written persuasion. If you increase your knowledge and learning around copywriting, then you can increase your sales conversion – it’s that simple.

Think of all the topics you could study that would improve your business:

- Copywriting
- Traffic generation
- Public Relations
- Graphic Design
- Audio / Video
- Product Creation
- Email Marketing
- Web Site Design
- Business Automation
- Outsourcing
- Branding

What else could you study that would improve your personal situation, either financially, mentally or life-balance?

- Nutrition and exercise
- Stock trading
- Real Estate Investment
- Martial Arts
- Yoga
- Meditation
- Relationships
- Photography

There are courses, books, DVDs, youtube videos, articles, forums and clubs on all of the above topics. You could start small and free, and as you increase your education and learning, you could invest more money and time into advancing your skills and knowledge in your chosen area.

The bottom line is that nobody will ever know everything, but there are many topics that would be useful and beneficial for you to learn both personally and for your business.

So how do you decide what you should study?

You need to prioritise the list of topics you want to study based on your goals for 2010. If one of your goals is to save $30,000 for a house deposit, then you might need to look at teaching yourself some wealth generation techniques. Stock trading, basic budgeting, and maybe some topics to increase your revenue from your online business.

Don’t make the mistake of looking at the list above and saying to yourself “I want to know all of those, so I’ll just do a bit of everything.” The danger here is that you will jump from one topic to another and get a very broad knowledge, but you won’t master anything. It will also cloud your thinking. You need to be more focused. Choose 3-4 related topics from the list above, or from your own list of what you would like to study. Now you will need to write an action plan for your study for the coming year. Figure out how many hours per week you can spare, and when the time comes, lock yourself in a room alone and focus on the activity at hand. Your action plan for study might look something like this:

Monday – 1 hour reading book
Tuesday – 1 hour on forums
Wednesday – 1 hour watching videos
Thursday – 1 hour testing skills practically
Friday – day off
Saturday – 3 hours attending formal short course
Sunday – review weeks learning

With your action plan in hand, you will be able to be more targeted and focused and will achieve a lot more in a shorter space of time.

When you become more advanced in a particular topic, you’ll note that in the forum for the specific topic you are studying – you are the expert! That’s right, you will be giving more time to help people (which isn’t a bad thing), and taking away less for yourself from the forum. The other challenge with learning for free from places like forums is that all the information on the forum is often itself unfocused, sometimes rambling and unverified as factual.

At this point in your learning, you will want to start looking very closely at finding somebody you can model yourself on to achieve the desired learning, behaviour or outcome. That is, if you are overweight and want to lose weight, you can read all the books about weight loss, gain all the knowledge but you are going to come to a point where you will want to find somebody who has lost a large amount of weight so you can see how they did it, the fact that it is actually possible to achieve what you are planning, and to seek motivation and inspiration from the mentor by learning their story and following their advice.

Once you reach this stage, you might be ready to spend some money to gain the additional knowledge, motivation and inspiration. Often you will be paying money for the same knowledge you read in a book, or saw in a free post on a forum. That’s not the point here. The point is that this information is highly targeted, highly filtered, fact checked, proven to work and delivered by somebody credible who has taken the time to publish a book, a course or a dvd to help others.

If you’re motivated, intuitive, strong-willed, tenacious and willing to fail over and over again until you succeed, then you can probably continue learning for free without spending any money. But if you want results fast, want to avoid mistakes others made, want inspiration and motivation then you should definitely consider spending money on products, courses, seminars, DVDs and books to further your education. You definitely need to consider any money you spend on education an investment rather than a cost.

I’ll illustrate this with a few fictional sales figures – just to drive the point home:

You have a website which currently sells an e-book that helps golfers improve their golf swing.

You currently sell 30 copies a month for $10 each. As this is a digital product, apart from domain registration, paypal fees, hosting and some marketing, your profit is around $250 per month.

Your current yearly profit from this website is $3000.

You do some analysis on your website traffic, and realise that although you are getting a decent amount of targeted traffic to your site – the conversion rate is quite low. You decide to re-do the sales copy on your website. You can hire a professional copy writer to do this for you for $2000, but given that the results from this are unclear until you test the new copy – so you decide to take a copywriting course for $600.

After you finish the copywriting course, you implement your new sales copy on your golf e-book website. Sales increase 20% immediately. Not a massive jump – but lets do the maths and see when your investment in the copywriting course will pay off?

You are now selling 36 copies at $10 each per month. Your profit is now $310 per month, or $3720 per year. So after year 1, even after you subtract the investment of $600 for your copywriting course, you are still $120 ahead of your previous year profit of $3000. And this is just one website! If you re-do the copy on other websites you own, you could probably recoup your investment of $600 in just a few months.

Here’s something you don’t hear a lot about. If you are spending your money on educational items like DVD courses, classes, seminars, ebooks, software and the like that is related to your line of business, then often they will all be tax deductible! That’s right, you can write them off as a business expense. Obviously you’ll need to check what can and cannot be deducted with your accountant – keeping in mind also that the laws vary depending on which country you live in.

Remember that quote above? “Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.” – John Cotton Dana

That quote contains a universal truth. The best way to learn is to teach others. Why is this true, and how is it so effective? Think about it, if you are going to present a topic in front of a class, or on a teleseminar, or even just help people on a forum – you’re going to have to make sure you know what you’re talking about!

Essentially, becoming a teacher or mentor forces you to become extremely focused on your topic and ensure you remain up to date on all facets of your chosen topic. If you’re having trouble learning something, become a mentor for those younger or less experienced than you. Often explaining a topic to others will help consolidate your own thoughts and understanding of the topic. If you are unfit – become a fitness instructor! If you have to stand up in front of a class of eager fitness students, you better make sure you’re a shining beacon of health and fitness yourself!

The teacher / student relationship is not just confined to the formal classroom. You could volunteer your time at a local soup kitchen. What do you get out of it other than helping the needy? Increasing your social interaction, increasing your knowledge of social issues, networking with like-minded volunteers.

Becoming a mentor and giving your time and knowledge to help others also taps into the law of reciprocity. Give and you shall receive. The law of reciprocity is a universal law that I discussed in a previous newsletter, but in a nutshell you’re building good will for the community, others and yourself. This good will must be repaid in some way at some point in the future.

That’s it for this post. I hope you learned something that you can put into practical use in your business.

As we start 2010, you should now have your strategy and plans in place for your personal and business related goals for 2010. If you haven’t done so already – incorporate a learning action plan into your goals. Remember the more you learn, the more you earn!

Thanks for reading, I’ll see you on the other side.

To your success!

Leigh Burke.