When we started our first online business in 1997 there was relatively little information about how to market online. We translated what we knew about offline marketing into online marketing and picked up what we could from all the other Internet businesses around at that time.

Boy, is it different now. There is an enormous amount of how-to Internet marketing information available these days. Much of it is free too. In fact, if you devote yourself to learning all this information, you’ll undoubtedly acquire a huge knowledge of online marketing.

But, I wonder, who is really better off: the Internet marketer with a lot of knowledge… or the Internet marketer who has no choice but to learn by doing?

No question, we made a lot of mistakes in our first online business. A lot of those mistakes were due to not knowing how to fully exploit and monetize the assets we had. Assets such as a considerable level of knowledge in our particular niche (IT security), a website that got tons of traffic, advertisers that readily advertised on our site, and a pretty good-sized (and growing) email list.

Because our ignorance caused us to leave so much ‘money on the table’ we now put a lot of effort into continually increasing our level of Internet marketing knowledge. To that end we put considerable effort into staying on top of Internet marketing trends, strategies, tactics, and so on – to the point where we even publish a daily newsletter on Internet marketing. (Yes, the truth is that our daily newsletter is as much for us to keep on top of the latest news in Internet marketing, as it is to share such news with others!).

For these reasons, I’m convinced of the value of knowledge. Nevertheless, I still believe that knowing what to do doesn’t lead to business success. Applying that knowledge is what leads to success.

You’re probably nodding your head right now. I’m not telling you anything new right? Well, what if I told you that knowing what to do on the one hand, and doing it on the other, are not theoretically exclusive from each other… but are literally exclusive from each other?

In fact, recent brain research indicates that there is no necessary relationship between knowing how to do something and actually doing it. This research indicates that while our conscious mind controls our understanding, our subconscious mind controls our doing.

This means that while we can feed our conscious mind all the information in the world… and we can store all the knowledge in the world… unless we feed and, essentially, recondition our subconscious mind… we won’t actually do anything with the knowledge we have.

The upshot of all this is that we literally can’t rely on either learning or knowing to succeed as Internet marketers. As well as acquiring the necessary knowledge, we must also internalize it at a subconscious level.

How do we do that? Well, that’s a big topic in itself, but a variety of experts seem to agree that communicating and reconditioning the subconscious relies on achieving certain mental states, namely the alpha and/or theta states which are associated with, respectively, more relaxed/meditative and deep meditative/hypnotic states.

There are a lot of ways to train the subconscious mind, and the Internet is full of information about how to do so. And while it may seem somewhat confronting to think that we can learn all we want, and still not end up acting on that knowledge, we need only consider how many times people make New Year’s resolutions to adopt new habits… only to end up abandoning them… to know that there is a reason why we don’t act on what we know.

It’s because we can’t just train ourselves to know… we must train ourselves to do.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Feature, Leadership and Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.