One of the advantages of being a “Pioneer” in any field is growing up as the topic does. It means that as you learn new things, new things are developed. So you can keep learning, but aren’t overwhelmed.
That’s exactly what happened as I was “growing up” in Internet Marketing.
For example, when I started the only shopping carts that were available were heavy duty, lots of custom programming required, use at your own peril types of carts. I tried one or two – but they were WAY beyond my capabilities. And I was a “techie!”
Then in the early 2000s a new user-friendly cart was introduced – 1ShoppingCart. I missed the Superconference where they sold private label licenses (darn!) but I signed up with the Cart in May, 2001.
As I mentioned in Pioneer Days, I interviewed the original founder of the cart, George Tran, in 2002. And I was friends with Rob Bell, who purchased it from George. Cliff VanDyke was in charge of customer service and we saw each other at least twice a year at Big Seminar.
So it was that I had direct access to the team at 1ShoppingCart. I made recommendations about what worked and didn’t. I was asked to beta test new products before their release. In short, I got to use the cart and all of its tools as they were created.
That type of “growing up together” not only makes it easy to learn a new capability, but it also gives you the feeling of mastery and “ownership” of the technology.
So it was no surprise when I created the One Hour Shopping Cart training program – designed specifically to help people use the cart more easily. Based on my more than 10 years of experience with the cart and lots of use of it for my own business, it was a natural extension of teaching others how to create their own Online Success.
I went one step further when I found that although they were paying for it, many people were not using the affiliate program capabilities of 1ShoppingCart. I can understand that. It is NOT intuitive. So I created One Hour Affiliate Program – to walk them through how to set it up in the cart, create specific toolbox pages for each product, then put together a training program for their affiliates. Pretty much soup to nuts.
The concept of Growing Up Together wasn’t restricted to just 1ShoppingCart. Since the co-founders of Wishlist Member are in my mastermind group, I was one of the original beta testers of the software. I had been using aMember for several years at that point for my membership sites, but was open to trying something new.
And within a few months, they had won me over! They matched and surpassed every capability I enjoyed about the other software. So naturally, by the time I had set up 30 different membership sites for my own business, not to mention those I did for clients – it seemed only logical that I create One Hour Membership Site!
Again I showed people how to use a tool that I grew up with. What was easy for me was difficult for others. So by putting it into a logical step-by-step program, based on my own experience, it was suddenly a more valuable tool to the students.
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