Today I want to talk about the importance for being mentored or part of likeminded communities, especially for bloggers.

As you know, I’m a member of several membership programs and mastermind communities. The most important ones are Internet Business Mastery Academy, Fizzle, and the Quick Start Challenge (yes, QSC is great for beginners, even though the site looks spammy!).

Being part of those communities, I want to emphasize that they helped me a lot to build my internet business this fast.

When you’re starting your business, you don’t want to make all the mistakes other beginners make. You’ll want to build your business as fast as possible, you’ll want to skip unnecessary steps and you’ll want to use the most efficient methods and tools out there.

Often you don’t know what step to make when you’re all on your own. Come on, building a business can be damn overwhelming, especially when you’re working on your own.

You need somebody to tell you, what to do next in order to build your business fast and successfully.

In fact, if I hadn’t joined Internet Business Mastery, you’d most likely never read this.

That’s the time to say a big THANKS to Pat Flynn for mentioning Internet Business Mastery in his book Let Go.

Internet Business Mastery Academy, Fizzle and the Quick Start Challenge played (and are playing) a huge role for me, because they teach step-by-step how to build an internet business.

I know that entrepreneurs want to do everything on their own and solve problems with their own expertise and not by using other people’s knowledge.

But that simply takes too long when you’re starting an internet business! You don’t have the time to figure everything out on your own, because most mentors and creators of training programs have years and years of experience in what they’re doing.

For sure you don’t want to wait years before your business starts making some money, do you?

But how do you decide which training program to join or who to ask for mentoring?

Know Where You’re Going

In my experience, it’s most important that you know where you’re going before you get a mentor or a training program.

When you clearly know what you type of business you want to start, search for a training program that teaches exactly that business. Look for a mentor who successfully achieved what you want to achieve.

Make sure that both the creators of the training program and the mentor are making a living with the business they’re teaching and not with their training program or their mentoring service.

Learn Step-by-Step

When you decide whether to join a training program or which mentor to hire, take a look at the methods teached.

You’ll want to learn step-by-step, one thing at a time. For example when you want to start a blog, the first thing is to actually create the blog and content and not how to optimize non-existing content for SEO. Of course SEO is important, but it’s simply not the first step when you want to become a blogger.

That’s why I used recommend the Quick Start Challenge or Start A Blog That Matters, when you want to launch your first blog and when you plan to make some money with it!

But now that training program got some serious competition!

I found out that my good friend Sergio Felix is starting a training program for bloggers called Authority Blog Profits.

Following Sergio’s blog about internet marketing for a long time, I know that he always comes up with high quality stuff and lots of valuable information.

As you know there are hundreds of training programs online that claim to teach you how to earn money.

To make sure that Sergio’s program is high quality, I’m going to create a review site for Authority Blog Profits. On that site I’ll talk about my experiences with Authority Blog Profits right from the beginning and will keep you posted on my successes or failures.

Excuse me, back to finding good training programs and mentors.

Offer Value To Your Mentor

Lots of mentors suck, because they are too busy maintaining their own businesses.

The best thing you can do, is not to be in the position that you need to be mentored, but to help the person you want help from.

Let’s say I want to get tips directly from Pat Flynn, because I admire what he’s doing. What I should do is try to figure out, what need I could fix for Pat. Maybe he’s scared of losing his recorded podcasts, so I could offer to setup a backup system. Maybe he’d like to answer all the emails he gets more efficiently. Why not try to develop a system that allows him to do that?

As soon as you can help the person you want to be your mentor, you immediately grab the attention!

Imagine the situation when you’re successful and busy and a young entrepreneur you’ve never heard of before asks you to be a mentor.

Would you accept? Most likely not, because you simply don’t need to.

But what happens if that person can offer you a service that you need?

Of course you’ll accept to help and stay in touch with that person!

Get In Touch

This is the most important advice I can share with you!

Just get in touch with your eventual mentors, start doing research to figure out how to help them and then contact them!

Most likely not every contact request will be answered, but the persons who answer will be interested in what you have to offer and will be willing to work with you.

So that’s my challenge for you:

Find 5 – 10 persons that you’d love to get advice from, do your homework to find out how you can help them and contact them!

It’s easier than you might be thinking 🙂

All the best,

Jan