What means mentoring?

Online business mentoring or ‘e-mentoring’ is an interactive, remote relationship between a mentor and mentee. Some mentoring relationships are exclusively online, while others can involve a mixture of face-to-face and online contact.
This type of mentoring is popular with people who prefer a more informal mentoring relationship. It also works well when it’s difficult for mentors and mentee to meet face to face, like for geographical reasons. Websites that provide this sort of mentoring often call it networking and forum advice.

What a mentor is not?

Be aware that a business mentor will not sort out all your problems for you, he will not tell you how to do your business, it is YOUR business after all. They do not act as consultants or take the place of any existing professional advisers.

Why to use a mentor?

So you want to be successful in your online business? When you begin online you are overwhelmed by the things you must learn.You need someone to select from this huge amount of information the knowledge for you and to help you to understand deeply all these knowledge.
This mean to seek the expertise of an online business mentor to improve your online tactics and presence in the World Wide Web. Many individuals prefer to go solo when it comes to running their Internet-based business. But little do they know it is more advantageous and beneficial for them to join a mentoring program that focuses on the success of their business online.
Many people believe that they can easily start earning money online because of the notion that the Internet provides an easy way for anyone to begin an online venture. However, most of these people tend to fail in their online ventures because of the lack of additional knowledge in this field. Yes, it is easy to create an online business but it is also difficult to turn it into a profitable one. Having the training provided by a skilled online business mentor would be very helpful in determining the success of a Internet-based business.
The help of an online business mentor is important, particularly in providing expert advice related to online ventures. Most of the times, working by yourself on the Internet can be a lonesome experience, but the aid of an online mentor will give you comfort because he knows your needs to make your business successful.
Here are some benefits of having an online business mentor:
- It is extremely important to have a somebody to answer your questions in the moment when you need it most.
- He will learn you how to choose the most proper keywords for your web site and will teach you how to optimize it. In this way, search engines will able to rank your web site in higher position because it will now receives more targeted traffic.
- He will teach you in building quality back links so that you can drive targeted traffic to your web site.
- A mentor can help you develop important business skills, support you in making important decisions and put you in touch with useful business contacts.
- He will give yours detail on Internet marketing tactics and teach you on how to implement it. In this way, you will save extra money and time and build you a lucrative online business at the same time.
- He will present the information on an organized, systematic and step by step manner.
- He can help you with ideas for new products or services.
- He will be an expert critique for your squeeze page or entire website. He will provide you professional advice if there are some things to be fixed in order for you to increase your conversion rate.
- He will provide you several free online resources. In this way, you will save extra money intended for software and e-books purchase.
- He will teach you to add significant stuffs that matter in online business which includes putting up a free blog, creating pages in social networking sites, setting up a stat counter to your web site, using webmaster tools from Internet and many more.
Therefore, the expertise of an online business mentor is really important to build a successful Internet-based business.
- Very important: a mentor will build your confidence!

How online business mentoring works?

Business mentors use online forums and websites – similar to social networking sites – where they share their knowledge and experience. The mentor is vetted by the website as a mentor and then has his profile viewed by potential mentee. Sometimes mentor fame is enough to attract a very large number of mentee, in such cases the website is dedicated to that specific mentor and to a specific educational program graduation. After the mentee join the mentoring program is no reason why once this relationship is established it cannot turn into a more formal mentoring relationship.
Many websites exist that will let you search by topic or industry sector to find a mentor. You can also post a request and invite mentors to respond, so that you can identify those who are best placed to help you. Some will offer much information about your potential mentors, while others simply match you with whoever is available. That doesn’t mean they are any less qualified, of course.
If you are a first-time online entrepreneur, you are going to have a lot to learn from any mentor. You of course want to be compatible with them, but it doesn’t have to be a lifelong commitment. If you have already started your business, it is more important that you go ahead and get a mentor and get started, rather than spending much time searching right now. As your business takes shape, you can always move on to another mentor.

How to choose an online mentor?

The first decision you need to take is to decide if you will follow a free or a paid mentor.
A free mentoring has just one benefit: it is free. But to be free means usually (not just literally) that has low or none value. Remember that we are involved on business and that mean it is about economic values, about money. If a someone claims to be a mentor on Internet Marketing area and offer entire his knowledge for FREE what kind of BUSINESS mentor is he? How can he help you to make MONEY? If you are not willing to spend money for your own business (and that mentor is not willing to ask for money for what he knows) how do you expect to EARN MONEY? Definitely the only viable solution is paid mentoring.
But how to choose the right mentor? To be honest, you cannot! Why? Because the Internet is so huge and you have an enormous number of options. Attention, I do not say that you have an enormous number of correct choices. To make an appropriate choose you need a lot of knowledge about mentoring you just do not have yet. So, what you can do?
Just choose! Try to use a minimum guideline likes bellow to choose your mentor:
1. Avoid that paid mentoring programs you do not afford and find one according your budget. Stay away from free mentoring and you will not regret.
2. Research available information about 8-10 mentors and their programs. If little information is available avoid to follow.
3. Select the top three candidates who are aligned with your goals.
4. Prepare a short list of questions regarding mentor feedback on your current situation.
5. Try to meet them online or face-to-face, depending on which arrangement is best for both parties and ask about them history, current situation, and goals. If they do not even respond to you go away: they are already too busy or they are frivolous about own businesses. If somehow respond to you and their answers are flagrant different with what you already knew from previous research, just go away.
6. Choose you like most and propose a mentoring relationship. Be sure to spell out your goals and expectations, as well as your commitment to them. A written agreement will show you are serious about the commitment. If they reject your proposal move to next mentor.
7. If on the mentoring processes you are unhappy with your choice do not hesitate to choose another one. After all you have not signed a life contract, do not you?

If you are not yet ready for a mentor you can try a Step-by-Step online lesson about Internet Marketing and after that to go to a mentor program.

After I tried myself a lot of online mentors finally I find the right one for me (I hope for you too): Chris Mentor Me!

I received the following movie from AWeber (the best online auto responder of this day) and I liked it so much that I decided to share with you. It’s about the people behind technology, it’s about our humanity and how you can do all with pleasure.

“We have a lot of fun here and we love coming to work each and every day, and we wanted to take a moment to give you an inside look not only at the office over here at AWeber, but into the AWeber culture as well. Check it all out in our Tour Video!”
  Amanda Gagnon
  Education Marketing Associate – AWeber

Have fun!

Defrauded by this attitude I wrote the following ticket on Ezinearticles.com:
“I was surprised to found on your TOS (in editorial guideline in fact) that your site consider that email safelist [...] are not a honest business.

I’m an email credit based safelist owner and I never felt until now that I am doing something wrong. I HATE spam (check my site if you are so kind). This is why I decided to create a new safelist. This term, safelist, mean in fact “safe from spam”.

I kindly ask you to tell me if possible, why you consider safelists as not desirable. Maybe I will start to reconsider my business and my believes. I will really appreciate any answer.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Adrian Ilias”

I was really surprised to get an answer and I was even more surprised by the responder: Christopher M. Knight the CEO of Ezinearticles. But what really shocked me was the answer content:
“Hi Adrian,

We’ve been involved in the permission-based email list management business prior to our current media/platform business (EzineArticles.com) since 1996.

EVERYONE, and I mean everyone involved in the permission-based email newsletter hosting industry knows that “safelists” are dirty. It’s just the way they are. There is nothing safe about them. They might as well call them “spam lists” because that’s what they mean to us.

It’s like me saying, ‘to be honest’ before I make a statement. Why do I have to say ‘to be honest’ if I already know that I am?

If an email list is permission-based with confirm and/or double-opt in, then why call it a ‘safelist’? That makes no sense to us. Sorry, we will never reconsider our position on this. Safelists will always equate to us to be ‘spamlists’…and therefore, wrong.

Sincerely,
Chris Knight”

Coming from somebody with so huge experience on e-mail based advertising methods I must take its answer into consideration (look here to find more about Mr. Knight: http://christopher-knight.com/about/).

But I cannot figure why safelists have this extremely bad reputation since was created special to offer a “safe” place to advertise. It is this just “a case” or we have a general bad look on safelists? Judging by my above experience and by the way that a lot of online payment systems, classic advertising systems or classic magazines are looking to safelists the situation is not good.

Where is the true? I know I don’t do anything wrong on my safelist, at opposite I can say.

What can be done to change this situation?

I will appreciate any answer here or on the following discussion:

http://www.imfaceplate.com/index.php?a=groups&b=disc_view&disc_id=1072&gid=2

But the second choice is Traffic Exchange sites. Many peoples think that this is a simple concept and an easy to use tool. Maybe at a first level it is so, but to use the true power of this mean a deeper level of understanding of the way it is work.

Concepts like credits, splash pages, auto-assigning, rotators, frame breaker or attempting to advertise on the same time web pages, banners and text links can be overwhelming for beginners and not just.

A lot of peoples have no idea what to promote on TE to have a good results, a huge part just posting as website the selling pages of own products or affiliate products.

To help to surpass these drawbacks I offer a free eBook: “How To Use Traffic Exchange To Increase Your Sales“. Download it, read it and post here your remarks or ideas about it. You can post about how you find TE as marketing tools or on which one you have better results.

What is a safelist?

Credit safelists

MinLevel Credit Safelist

Everybody who think that I am right are invited to put some work on my safelist. Others are kindly invited to try the traditional way.

How it works

On every month start admin set the MinLevel for that month. Each member must earn by reading received email this number of credits. At the beginning of the next month every member that does not earn enough credits will be stopped to send messages until recoup the different from previous month MinLevel  and the total of earned credits on the same month.

The rest credits are cumulative, that mean that if during a month a member do not recoup all rest credits from previous month, at the beginning of next month the MinLevel for current month will be added to the still resting credits (not recouped during current month).

How MinLevel is established? When the number of members of safelist are small (aka the number of sent e-mails are small) the MinLevel represent approximately 10% from the  total number of sent messages by members during a month. This method will be used until the day average of e-mails that must be read to earn the monthly MinLevel  will be equal with ten. I think that reading 10 e-mails every day to stay active on a safelist is a reasonable request and can be easy achieved by any member.

Adrian Ilias

I started this blog with the idea to make from ISL not just an advertising tool but a community of active Internet Marketers or just simply peoples with interests in this area.

I think that traditional safelists are too impersonal and this anonymity is not helping anybody. We all trend to trust people we know, real persons with good character and good actions, somebody with acceptable imperfections that make them more humans.

I intend to offer a place where ISL members and others can express their ideas, suggestions and of course critics, where they can interact one with one another (the name of my safelist is deliberated choose so) regarding programs they are promoting or they intend to do.

Anybody can post free if respect the blog theme where they post, show respect to others and don’t write about adult/sexual, racist or religious themes. I will accept back links to programs or sites only if I like what are promoting. I don’t tolerate any kind of spam.

I must apologize about my writing, I am not a native English speaker (I live and work in Romania), so certainly I will make a lot of mistakes.

Adrian Ilias