BCA

From: e-Marketer

Even busy executives want to do more than just read on the web. Executives with no time for fun and games do have time for the sound and motion of video, according to findings from Forbes Insights. In some cases, they may actually prefer it to text for learning about products and services.

A majority of businesspeople surveyed by Forbes in October 2010 said they watched more online video than a year earlier. Nearly 60% of all respondents said they would watch video before reading text on the same webpage, and 22% said they generally liked watching video more than reading text for reviewing business information. Three-quarters of all executives said they watched work-related videos on business websites at least once a week, and more than half did the same on YouTube.

Video can be highly effective for merchants. The executives surveyed reported taking a wide variety of actions after watching online videos, with about two-thirds visiting vendor websites subsequent to viewing and more than half searching for more information. Especially among younger executives, likelihood of making a purchase was high.

A split in behavior at age 50

Generational differences ran throughout the Forbes research, with a split in behavior at age 50. While the youngest executives were most interested in video across the board, baby boomers in their 40s had comparable participation levels. It was older executives who had not yet gotten on board with video, and business-to-business marketers must continue to reach them through other means.

But video has only become more important for the younger set, and marketers can depend on them to watch, pass along, recommend—and often, enter the purchase funnel.

For complete story and data charts, go to e-Marketer.com

From Leading Effectively, Center for Creative Leadership

Influence is the power and the ability to personally affect others’ actions, decisions, opinions or thinking.

Ultimately, influence allows you to get things done and achieve desired outcomes.

At one level, influence is about compliance — getting someone to do what you want them to do (or at least not to undermine it). But genuine commitment from other people is often required for you to accomplish key goals and tasks.

Early in your career, or in individual contributor roles, influence is about working effectively with people over whom you have no authority. It requires the ability to present logical and compelling arguments and engaging in give-and-take. In senior-level or executive roles, influence is focused more on steering long-range objectives, inspiration and motivation.

The Center for Creative Leadership has found that influencing tactics fall into one of three categories: logical, emotional or cooperative. We call this influencing with head, heart and hands.

1.Logical appeals tap into people’s rational and intellectual positions. You present an argument for the best choice of action based on organizational benefits, personal benefits or both.

2.Emotional appeals connect your message, goal or project to individual goals and values. An idea that promotes a person’s feelings of well-being, service or sense of belonging has a good chance of gaining support.

3.Cooperative appeals involve collaboration (what will you do together?), consultation (what ideas do other people have?) and alliances (who already support you or have the credibility you need?). Working together to accomplish a mutually important goal extends a hand to others in the organization and is an extremely effective way of influencing.

To maximize your personal influence, you’ll want to become skilled in all three styles of influencing. Decide which tactics will reap the most support for a specific task or strategy and employ one or more approaches. To understand which tactics might work best, consider the following:

Assess the situation. Why are you involved in this work? Why do you need this person’s support? What outcomes are you trying to achieve by influencing this person? Be clear about whom you need to influence and what you want to accomplish.

Know your audience.
Identify and understand your stakeholders. Each will have special concerns and issues, plus his or her own agenda, perspectives and priorities. Various groups and individuals will require different approaches for influencing. Tailor your influencing strategy for the particular person, considering individual personalities, goals and objectives, as well as organizational roles and responsibilities.

Review your ability.
What tactics do you use most often? Which seem to be most effective? What new tactics could you try in this situation? Draw on others for advice or coaching, too. For example, if you always focus on the logical appeals, have a co-worker who is a strong collaborator help you think through your collaboration tactics and arguments.

Brainstorm your approach.
What tactics would work best? Which logical appeals will be most effective? How could you make an emotional or cooperative appeal? What specifically could you say and do to use each type of tactic? Anticipate possible responses and prepare your reply. What counterarguments could you use? What additional influence tactics might be helpful?

At first, you might want to try out new influence tactics in low-risk situations, practicing these skills one-on-one. As you become more versatile, you’ll gain new confidence in your ability to influence teams and larger groups and to persuade others in higher-stakes situations.

But also consider changing tactics right away if you have a pressing issue that has stalled due to lack of buy-in or support. Would a more logical, emotional or collaborative approach make a difference? If so, go ahead and try out a new angle — you might be more influential that you realized

From Leading Effectively, Center for Creative Leadership

Even the best and brightest can fail and falter. In spite of intelligence and drive, expertise and experience, many top executives arrive in their high-impact roles without being fully prepared to meet contemporary challenges, according to the editors of a new book on executive development.

Businesses and institutions around the globe seek to innovate, adapt to change and forge a path to success. Yet almost two-thirds of change initiatives fail and turnover and turmoil at the top levels of leadership are commonplace. What is going on in the process of developing senior leaders that prevents them from effectively facing the demands of today’s leadership?

In the book Extraordinary Leadership: Addressing the Gaps in Senior Executive Development, editors Kerry A. Bunker, Douglas T. Hall and Kathy E. Kram have worked with a wide range of authors to address the “powerful learning gaps in executive development that can derail otherwise talented and successful managers.”

Today’s senior executives — as well as those in the leadership pipeline — must master complex and ambiguous business demands, but they must also face the human and relational challenges associated with leading in such an environment.

“More than ever before, successful leadership hinges on learning agility and the experience necessary to navigate and lead others though complex situations,” the editors write. “It’s not about the perfect pedigree or knowing all the answers anymore. It’s about resiliency and openness. Sheer intellect, savvy business sense, bottom-line focus, and solid management skills are necessary, but they are clearly not sufficient for meeting the demands of leadership in the 21st century.”

There are development gaps
Many top executives, though successful, have missed out on the more “elusive factors of leadership effectiveness” that have been overlooked by traditional development programs, systems and mindsets. As a result, their developmental gaps are likely to involve:

•Interpersonal relationship challenges.
•Difficulty adapting to rapid change and spiraling complexity.
•Problems partnering and sharing responsibility and accountability.
•A leadership style that not only fails to inspire and motivate the masses but may actually foster a culture of fear or risk aversion.
What can be done to re-invest in top leaders and build much-needed leadership capacity in our organizations? The 20 scholars and practitioners who contributed to Extraordinary Leadership (including Peter Vaill, Naomi Marrow, Jay Conger and Frances Hesselbein) evaluate the gap and offer solutions in four key areas:

1.The gap within: Intrapersonal learning and development issues within an individual.
2.The gap between: Interpersonal and relational issues that operate between individuals.
3.The gap in the system: Organizational issues that operate among systems, organizations, groups and individuals.
4.The gap at the institutional level: External and contextual issues such as cultural differences, dramatic change, paradigm shifts and economic fluctuations.
A tailored approach to assessment, feedback and development — with opportunities for reflection and experiential learning — is required to help individual leaders identify and overcome their personal gaps. Guidance and support are generally required and may take the form of a professional coach, a savvy HR advocate, a mentor in senior management or some combination of those roles.

“We realize that the world we now live in is more complex than ever before, and it is ever changing. As a consequence, our approaches to leadership development must offer certain opportunities for leaders to learn, reflect, experiment and dare to be vulnerable,” write Bunker, Hall and Kram.

“Only with such opportunities will individuals, groups and organizations generate the capacities to effectively respond and adapt to changing conditions as they unfold.”

This article is adapted from the Introduction to the book Extraordinary Leadership: Addressing the Gaps in Senior Executive Development, edited by Kerry A. Bunker, Douglas T. Hall and Kathy E. Kram and published by the Center for Creative Leadership and Jossey-Bass.

From Leading Effectively, Center for Creative Leadership

Last April, noted futurist and author Bob Johansen was giving a keynote presentation on leading in a volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) world when a volcano erupted in Iceland.

As if nature were listening and decided to help Johansen make his point, the volcano Eyjafjallajökull spewed ash across Europe, halting flights and grounding about 10 million travelers worldwide. Commerce stalled, and routine business operations suddenly seemed vulnerable and volatile.

Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity are the realities of today and will continue to be so in the future, Johansen says. “It won’t be getting easier and leaders must accept this reality.”

But even the expert Johansen found the disruption hard to take. “The weather in London was clear — it looked fine. But I was stuck in London for a week; all my plans changed,” he recalls. “It is much more difficult to experience VUCA than talk about it! I thought: I can’t believe what a wimp I am about this! The point is that we have to experience these things — over and over — to learn and grow as leaders in a changing and uncertain world.”

Leaders will face challenges that have no solutions
In his new book, Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World, Johansen says that leaders increasingly will face challenges that have no solutions. Of course, they will have to make decisions anyway.

The VUCA world will also have both danger and opportunity, he explains. “Leaders will be buffeted, but they need not allow themselves to be overwhelmed, depressed or immobilized. Leaders must do more than just respond to the whirl of events, though respond they must. They must be positive change agents in the midst of chaos, creating the future. Some things can get better, even as other things get worse.”

To make a better future, leaders must seek out experiences and opportunities to learn and apply 10 new skills:

1.Maker instinct. Ability to exploit your inner drive to build and grow things, as well as connect with others in the making.
2.Clarity. Ability to see through messes and contradictions to a future that others cannot yet see.
3.Dilemma flipping. Ability to turn dilemmas — which, unlike problems, cannot be solved — into advantages and opportunities.
4.Immersive learning ability. Ability to immerse yourself in unfamiliar environments and to learn from them in a first-person way.
5.Bio-empathy. Ability to see things from nature’s point of view — to understand, respect and learn from nature’s patterns.
6.Constructive depolarizing. Ability to calm tense situations where differences dominate and communication has broken down — and bring people from divergent cultures toward constructive engagement.
7.Quiet transparency. Ability to be open and authentic about what matters to you — without advertising yourself.
8.Rapid prototyping. Ability to create quick early versions of innovations, with the expectation that later success will require early failures.
9.Smart mob organizing. Ability to create, engage with and nurture purposeful business or social change networks through intelligent use of electronic or other media.
10.Commons creating. Ability to seed, nurture and grow shared assets that can benefit other players &msdash; and sometimes allow competition at a higher level.

“The VUCA world of the future will be formidable and loaded with opportunities,” says Johansen. “The biggest danger is not being prepared — and you can control that by preparing yourself as a leader and readying your organization for an uncertain future.”

From Leading Effectively, Center for Creative Leadership

Oliver was recently promoted to lead a business unit at his company. He has been in management and leadership roles for many years, but, for the first time, he’s responsible for much more than short-term results and team-level execution.

Chloe, too, is balancing the trade-offs between today’s needs and tomorrow’s priorities. As director of operations for a region that is strategically important for the company’s growth, she needs the ability to envision the future, effectively communicate her ideas, and turn them into a strategic plan for execution.

Both Oliver and Chloe know that they are at a pivotal point in their careers: skillfully leading a function or division is not only critical for their own personal success, but also to the success of the organization.

“Leading at this level has unique challenges,” says Stephanie Trovas, global portfolio manager of CCL’s Leading for Organizational Impact, one of several CCL programs for senior leaders. “Employing strategy, prioritizing and managing others are done on a much broader scale by working across multiple boundaries.”

“Whether their scope is local, regional or global, managers of functions and divisions have to set a vision and build toward the future. At the same time, they face very real and challenging short-term pressures,” Trovas continues. “How can senior leaders balance the trade-offs between the short and long-term, make the tough calls and build alignment within the organization?”

Leadership success is rooted in what CCL calls The Fundamental Four: self-awareness, communication, influence and learning agility. If you are an experienced leader, you have developed these skills during your career. But as you advance in your career, you need to know how these four skills are applied differently at the senior level.

Self-awareness is critical for senior leaders in the organization. It goes beyond knowing your strengths and weaknesses, your preferences and patterns, and the effect of your behavior on others. At this level, you need to really understand the impact your leadership behavior has on organizational outcomes.

Being an effective communicator becomes more complex as you lead a function or division. The logistics of sharing information, often across time zones, cultures and operations, is one challenge. Effectively communicating the goals of the business while at the same time inspiring trust is the larger challenge for many senior leaders.

Learning agility involves learning from your experiences and applying that knowledge in new ways. For many seasoned executives, this has become second nature. But over-relying on what worked in the past or assuming you have what it takes to be successful in the future can spell trouble. For you, the challenge may be knowing when to change course and having the tools to learn and adapt (and helping others to do the same).

The process of influencing others takes on new dimensions as well. More than ever you need the ability to influence across vertical, horizontal, stakeholder, demographic and geographic boundaries.

As you manage a business unit or division, you also need to have (or develop) seven additional competencies that address the breadth and complexity of your role:

1.Being visionary.
2.Driving results.
3.Strategic thinking and acting.
4.Creating engagement.
5.Identifying innovation opportunities for new businesses.
6.Working across boundaries.
7.Leading globally.

While this checklist just touches on the complexity of your job, these leader competencies are key to meeting the goals of your organization. “Organizations suffer greatly when senior leaders falter or fail,” says Trovas. “In spite of this risk, leader development at this level is often overlooked.”

“By strengthening these seven competencies, as well as the four fundamentals of effective leadership, even very experienced managers can accelerate their effectiveness. They begin to see their strengths and weaknesses within the context of the organization and the demands of their role,” Trovas continues. “They can then work on the specific behaviors that will have the greatest impact on their success and on the success of the business.”

Leading for Organizational Impact
As a senior leader, you are no stranger to setting strategy, prioritizing and managing others. But leading a large function or operation requires something more — it requires that you drive organizational-level results.

Whether you are taking on a top job at a small firm, managing a function of a mid-size business or running a division of a global company, you must lead in ways that build on your experience, but also go beyond it. To be effective you need to:

•Develop the ability to recognize opportunities and avoid pitfalls,
•Balance tactical concerns with strategic possibilities, and
•Leverage leadership to impact organizational outcomes.
“One of the best ways to make the transition to leading at the functional level is to gain a deep understanding of your strengths and development opportunities,” says CCL’s Stephanie Trovas. “It is critical to understand how your leadership behavior impacts organizational outcomes.”

From Learning Effectively, Center for Creative Leadership

Career setbacks can be demoralizing but they don’t need to be debilitating.

In fact, CCL research shows that many executives look at setbacks and mistakes as turning points or important lessons in making them effective or successful leaders.

“Early setbacks represent a key developmental event that successful executives cite when they look back over their careers,” said CCL’s Ellen Van Velsor in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal. Van Velsor, a CCL Senior Fellow, has been involved in the Center’s “Lessons of Experience” research for more than two decades.

In the May 4, 2010 article, Three Who Thrived After Early Gaffes, columnist Joanne Lublin described setbacks of Jeffery Hollender, co-founder of Seventh Generation Inc.; Peter G. Peterson, the billionaire co-founder of Blackstone Group LP; and Myron E. Ullman III, chief executive of J.C. Penney Co. Each of these executives used their stumbles as learning experiences. They reflected on their missteps and mistakes and, as a result, made important personal and career decisions.

Learning from hardships important to growth

CCL’s Lessons of Experience studies show that the ability to reflect on and learn from hardships is important to the growth and success of leaders around the globe. The research, initiated in the United States in the early 1980s, looked at the key developmental events in male executives’ lives and the lessons learned from those events. Over the years, CCL conducted similar studies with women, African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, as well as with international executives, including senior leaders from China, Singapore and India.

Adverse situations — such as crises, mistakes, career setbacks and ethical dilemmas — are important developmental moments. Tangible business losses, loss of confidence or loss of control are all powerful experiences. And, while adversity is not something to seek out, it can be a powerful opportunity to learn.

Many leaders — across cultures — believe that the experience of hardship prepared them to thrive in better times. As one Chinese saying puts it, ”First bitter, then sweet.”

This article is adapted from “Learning from Experience” in The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development.

Learn more about surviving setbacks and hardships:

•Return on Experience: Learning Leadership at Work
•Adaptability: Responding Effectively to Change
•Building Resiliency: How to Thrive in Times of Change

From Learning Effectively, Center for Creative Leadership

Leaders everywhere need to develop and adjust their behaviors to work in a global environment. But what works well in one setting may not in another.

“If you are generally an effective leader in your home country or culture, but find yourself literally working in new territory, you need to understand that good leadership is in the eye of the beholder,” says CCL’s Regina Eckert. “What made you successful up to now may not matter as much. Or worse, those strengths may become liabilities.”

Various studies about leadership styles have shown that different cultures have different definitions of leadership and different expectations of leaders. How we evaluate leaders — good or bad — is largely dependent on the values and practices we have grown up in.

“We need to be aware that culture has an impact on how leaders are perceived by others. People have set ideas about leadership and they judge others as to how well they live up to them,” Eckert explains.

Many leadership attributes are seen as effective in some cultures and not in others, or neutral or negative in some cultures and not in others. The well-known GLOBE research — which examined the relationship between concepts of effective leadership and national cultural values in 61 societies around the world — solidified this idea that culture impacts our view of effective leadership.

Refine your leadership style

If you are working in a culture different from your own or working on virtual teams across countries, Eckert suggests the following steps to refine your leadership style:

•Appreciate the boundaries of your own approach to leadership. Know that your view of leadership is only one view and it has both strengths and weaknesses.
•Assess the relative importance of a particular skill or competency in the eyes of the people you lead and work with. Ask questions and listen carefully to try to understand what they expect of you as a leader. Even common assessments or feedback tools might not be sufficient. If you’ve recently been given a 360-degree feedback assessment, for example, you may have been given a low rating on a particular skill and feel you need to improve. But it may be worth considering cultural context. A low rating on something that is seen as unimportant in a particular setting doesn’t seem like a problem.
•Consider how well you are living up to others’ leadership expectations. Where is there a mismatch between what they value in a leader and how they perceive you? What could you do differently? How could you work to better align the two? Of course, the goal is not to constantly change or adapt to meet each person’s or each culture’s every expectation. However, you’ll improve collaboration and build better relationships when you manage these different views in an authentic fashion.

Leading Afghanistan: Lessons from a Four-Star Resignation

When General Stanley McChrystal resigned last month amid controversy over an article in Rolling Stone, it raised many questions of politics and policy. But lessons of leadership were front and center for CCL’s Clemson Turregano as he observed the events.

Turregano, a former U.S. Army officer, works with government and military agencies as a senior faculty member at CCL. His column, Lessons from a four-star resignation, recently ran on WashingtonPost.com. He noted powerful leadership lessons, taught by General McChrystal, President Obama and General David Petraeus, who was tapped to relieve McChrystal:

•From General McChrystal: the importance of accepting responsibility for our actions.
•From President Obama: when a handpicked, high-profile, high-potential subordinate acts out of accordance with established rules of conduct, it’s important to take the same actions we would with a more junior employee.
•From General David Petraeus: when duty calls, a positive response is required. We need to grab the reins and do the best we can.

From all three men, we can learn the value of humility.

“All modeled real humility in their responses — and that’s a quality we can never see too much of in our leaders,” Turregano writes.

Of course, the leadership lessons — as well as the politics and policy matters — have crucial, real-world implications. For Turregano, reflections on leadership are not academic. He is no stranger to the complex realities facing the military in Afghanistan and the leaders of Afghanistan. Prior to joining CCL, Turregano worked in the Initiatives Group for the senior U.S. staff in Kabul, Afghanistan. As the deputy director for Strategic Initiatives, Clemson developed international agreements and training plans, in addition to mentoring senior Afghan and coalition officials.

Last year, he returned to Kabul to bring CCL-style leadership development to Afghan military leaders. Read about the creative leadership work that the CCL team brought to a group of seasoned Afghan leaders in Turregano’s series of blogs: Learning Leadership in Kabul.

From Learning Effectively, Center for Creative Leadership

What do you do when teamwork doesn’t work? You can’t afford the loss of productivity, the depletion of energy or the drain on the bottom line.

The solution is collaboration — which may seem impossible if your team is struggling. But CCL’s Edward Marshall says true collaboration is about ownership and, yes, it is possible.

“Collaboration is about creating an ownership culture. If you want your team to perform better, the members need to take care of it. People take care of what they own,” explains Marshall.”

Marshall, author of two books on collaboration in the workplace, says that building a collaborative team requires the leader to address what isn’t working, view trust as a must-have resource and insist on behaviors that support collaborative principles.

Understand why teams often don’t work. The list is long but probably not surprising, including: the history of the team, poor relationships, ineffective meetings, little transparency or inadequate sharing of information, no team governance processes, conflicting styles of decision-making, behind-the-scenes conversations and processes, competition, turf wars, poor ownership or engagement among team members, it’s all about “me.” Your team will not be effective as long as these are the team dynamics. Take a good look at what is going on in your team and diagnose what isn’t working. Better yet, get team members to look at what’s going on and start to think about how true collaboration would replace or resolve their problems.

Commit to building trust. Trust is essential for collaborative teams and is the foundation of a collaborative culture throughout an organization. Many of the reasons teams don’t work — see above — are tied to lack of trust. Without trust, people operate out of fear. “Trust is the tie that binds — if I trust you, we can do anything; I will subordinate my self-interest to the good of the whole,” Marshall explains. “With no fear, team members will give it everything they’ve got. As a result, teams gain productive energy, creativity, speed and better results.”

Bear in mind, however, that trust can’t be trained into a team. It takes a leader who is willing to show integrity, change behavior and take on the hard work of dealing with differences.

Operate on principle. Lead a team based on principles rather than structures, politics or personality. Marshall’s “Principles of Collaboration” are ownership, alignment, full responsibility, self-accountability, mutual respect, integrity and trust. Your job as team leader is to help the team turn these values into agreed-upon behaviors or operating agreements. “Operating agreements are the conscious choices we agree to 100 percent as a team, which define how we will work with each other. They are the foundation for mutual trust, respect and high performance,” says Marshall, who developed the Collaborative Team Governance Process®, a time-tested best-practice method for establishing team norms.

“When team leaders don’t value and support collaboration, they are undermining their teams and sub-optimizing performance,” says Marshall. In contrast, when teams embrace an effective governance system and leaders commit to a culture of trust and collaboration, the building blocks are in place for success and strong performance.

What are the benefits of collaboration?

•Organizations collaborate internally to compete externally.
•Decisions are faster, of higher quality and customer-driven.
•Decisions are made on the basis of principle rather than power or personality, resulting in greater buy-in and impact.
•Cycle time is substantially reduced and non-value-adding work eliminated.
•The productive capacity of the workforce doubles.
•Strategic alliances succeed, while building trust and producing extraordinary results.
•Return on investment increases dramatically.
•Span of control increases substantially.
•The workforce takes on full responsibility for the success of the enterprise.
•Conflict is reduced as work relationships open up and build trust.
•The fear is gone — change is seen as a positive opportunity.

Stepping into a management role isn’t just a change of task — it’s a fundamental shift of identity.

“To be successful, first-time managers must make the transition from a person who gets the work done themselves to a person who gets work done through others,” says Kim Leahy, global portfolio manager of Center for Creative Leadership’s Maximizing Your Leadership Potential (MLP) program for managers of individual contributors. “It requires a different definition of success, a new level of self-awareness and an additional range of skills.”

Your definition of success must now include the success of others. Rather than focusing on your own performance, you need to be asking, “How does the group or team accomplish its work?” “Are they effective as individuals?” “Do they collaborate?” “Are team members committed and engaged?” “How are individual motivations and needs connected to the work and the organization?”

At the same time, you should take stock of your own strengths, weaknesses and patterns. “Who you are drives how you lead,” Leahy explains. “Even though the emphasis is no longer on your individual performance, you need to understand your behaviors, preferences and tendencies — and consider that the most effective way to lead others may not always be your default approach.”

For example, you might be a person who thrives on the pressure of a tight deadline and, as an individual contributor, earned a reputation as someone who will roll up your sleeves and get the job done. As a manager of others, these same practices and preferences could lead to poor planning, micromanaging or inadequate use of resources. If you assume everyone operates the same way you did as an individual contributor, you won’t see or leverage the array of talent on your team.

Build a foundation of four leader competencies

To make the transition from an individual performer to leading a team, you’ll want to build a foundation of what CCL calls the “Fundamental Four” leader competencies: self-awareness, learning agility, influence and communication.

Other key competencies for leading others at this stage of your career are:

•Delegating.
•Building and maintaining relationships.
•Resolving conflict.
•Leading team achievement.
•Coaching and developing others.
•Confronting problem employees.
•Embracing change.
•Innovative problem-solving.
•Adapting to cultural differences.

“In today’s flattened and downsized organizations, many skilled people are put into team leadership or management roles with little preparation and support,” says Leahy. “But these emerging leaders are crucial for the implementation of the organization’s day-to-day work. When they understand what is required to manage others and learn — in a practical way — how to be effective leaders, they can be powerful agents for organizational success.”

From Leading Effectively Newletter, Center for Creative Leadership

By Ernie J. Geeting

Every day thousands of people decide to enter the world of internet marketing. They have heard the stories of others earning fortunes online and hope they might be able to get a piece of that pie themselves. Most have no previous background in sales or marketing. Some will succeed but many will fail. In this article I will expose the main reason people fail and then I’ll reveal to you the single most important thing you must do before promoting any product or service online.

Here’s the most important thing you must know about internet marketing…it is all about the MARKETING. Forgive me for stating the obvious but most people really don’t know what marketing really is or what it involves. So what is it exactly? Marketing is the process of promoting a product from a producer or supplier to a prospective customer in a manner that persuades the prospect to buy. It’s about matching products and services with people who want, and will pay for them. The marketing process requires study of the product itself, researching the potential market, testing, presentation, and promotion. Most people who want to make money on the internet know nothing of the process of marketing, fail to do proper research and are unwilling (or too broke) to do testing. It has been said over 95% of people who try doing internet marketing fail. Now you can understand why. You wouldn’t try flying an airplane without proper knowledge and hands-on training but yet hundreds try to start a home business in marketing without having a clue as to what to do. They are destined to crash and burn.

Making money on the internet comes from making sales, nothing more. This is done by advertising. The NUMBER ONE REASON why people fail as internet affiliate marketers is that they have insufficient knowledge and experience in selling and advertising. The cause for their lack of success isn’t the product they represent or the companies they choose to affiliate with, the problem is with the prospective marketers themselves. If you want to succeed online you need to understand the sales process and need to be willing to always be learning sales and copy writing techniques. While there may or may not be such a thing as a ‘born salesman’ (or copywriter) there most certainly are personality differences that allow the concepts of selling to come easier to some than others. However these concepts can be learned and applied by anyone desiring to do so. I urge you to seek out good books and courses about selling and copy writing. This knowledge will be extremely helpful to you when writing the content for your advertisements, capture pages and sales pages. Fortunately, most publishers or network marketing companies will provide you with a professionally written affiliate sales page and advertisements. However….

A frequent temptation newbies fall into is taking the shortcut of using a publisher provided affiliate sales page as the landing point for their visitors. A sales page is the main website page for a product that contains the advertising copy (aka: sales pitch). This is a grave error that will cost them untold wasted hours and advertising dollars. Never link directly to a ‘stock’ sales page. Did you get that? This is an important key to success: DO NOT link directly to an affiliate sales page. Why not? Because that sales page is the exact same sales page that everyone else is using. You offer no more than anyone else advertising the same page so customers have no reason to buy from you over someone else. This is the most important thing you must do before you try to market anything online. Fail to do this and you will sabotage your chance to succeed. The same goes for ads and for the same reason. Never use company provided ads exactly as written, but rather reword or rebuild them while keeping the main points emphasized

So what should you do? Here are some options…

1. Make a Capture Page. On you capture page offer a free report series or e-book about a topic closely related to the product you wish to sell. The idea here is to give away some useful information, not a sales pitch. Deliver it via autoresponder in a series with each installment having a recommendation at the end (with a clickable link) for the customer to purchase the item you wish to sell. That link can be to your company provided sales page (embedded with your affiliate id). This approach works the same way for network marketing. Give first, sell second.

NOTE: Sometimes a product you might sell might be from an online store with multiple products. Always link to the sales or catalog page specifically for that product. If you are promoting a business opportunity such as MLM, link directly to the recruiting presentation page.

2. Build Your Own Sales Page. If you are savvy at website creation you can create your own sales page. Sometimes companies will allow you to copy and paste, or even provide you with images of their product or components of their sales page for the purposes of building your own sales page. Sometimes publishers of digital products will offer a Resale Rights package you can buy that contains all the essential graphics and ad copy for creating your own pages. If you do create your own sales pages reword the advertising copy and somehow personalize your pages so they are ‘branded’ to you. Finally, make sure the finalized page is in compliance with the publisher’s rules for such pages.

3. Create a Review Page. This has become a popular way to promote products. You simply write a review (or do an audio or video review) of the product you are selling from your own perspective and then link that page to your sales page. This can be done as a stand alone website or even a a blog. Just a caution here the FTC is really cracking down on sites like these because of their covert approach. You need to make it clear to the reader that you are an affiliate and will profit from the sale of the products reviewed at your site. Be sure to visit the FTC website for the details and play by the rules. Don’t turn your ‘review’ into a sales pitch. The only reason people will read your review is to get an honest opinion and some further detail about the product. While you want to be careful not to give a detailed description of every facet of the product, you do want to give the reader enough information so they will know whether this is the type of product they are looking for and would like to see the sales page on. By the way, it never hurts to also put a link for your autoresponder capture page on your review site, perhaps you could send them review alerts when you’ve done a new review or listings of other products you’ve reviewed, etc.

4. Use Lead Capture Drop-ins. Drop-ins are nifty little tools that allow you to turn any web page into a capture page. You simply use this tool to create an opt-in form that ‘drops in’ on top of the web page you are promoting. You then link the request form an autoresponder for follow up emails. You can use these much as you would a capture page, offering a free report, ebook or just ‘further information’. These are much faster to create than capture pages and work great with company provided sales pages as they allow you to offer something personally that others aren’t while also helping you build your contact list, just like the gurus do. They are the closest thing to a short-cut.

Having read this article you now know why so many fail online and exactly what you must do to set yourself apart from everyone else. Start putting this information into practice today and you will be positioning yourself for internet marketing success.

Ernie J. Geeting is an internet marketer and writer. He loves helping people to experience more success in their lives. You can see his blog and get a free course with insider secrets to internet marketing success at http://earnonlineincomenow.info

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