If you’re looking to grow your internet marketing business then, aside from the tons of reports and how-to products that you’ve doubtless bought, you may well have considered investing in coaching or mentoring to help take your business to a new level. Which is a great idea but brings with it the question of who to choose? And whether you should use an internet business coaching service or a mentor. But what’s really the difference between the two? Aren’t they almost interchangeable?

Business coaching – whether in the internet marketing field or not – can take on many different forms. As with any business, it comes with a variety of levels of experience.

Sometimes, people can decide to set themselves up as a coach because they’re been made redundant by the firm they used to work for. Which means they may bring a wealth of experience with them to their new career or they could equally bring about a lot of baggage. There’s a big difference between how companies with employees operate compared with how small, often one man band, entrepreneurial businesses carry out their trade.

This is especially true for internet marketing businesses where it’s common to operate on your own, buying in experience such as article writing or video creation or whatever on an “as needed” basis.

So, regardless of whether you decide you need a coach or a mentor, you need to check out their past history and their success.

In the internet marketing world, coaching is often a thinly disguised information product. Even the higher priced so-called coaching may actually just be a series of PDFs and videos with the occasional mass teleseminar thrown in for good measure. The chance of you getting individual advice in this kind of scenario is low!

But if you can cope with that and still achieve your objectives, you need to read between the lines on what’s being offered and, if necessary, ask questions about how personal the access is likely to be. Unless the $17 price tag gives you the necessary clue of course.

Mentoring is generally a more personal experience. Whilst this is not always so, it’s certainly more often the case.

An internet marketing mentor won’t be on offer for peanuts. Their time is too valuable for that. Because a large part of what you’re buying is personal access to your chosen mentor for a set amount of hours or emails or whatever each month.

Over the time that you work together, you’ll get to know their style and they’ll get to know your business.

Which is probably the biggest advantage to being mentored.

The personal attention from someone who looks at your business with a fresh pair of eyes is worth its weight in gold.

Chances are you’ll have experienced this if you’ve ever watched a business makeover television show and been shouting at the screen, wondering why they haven’t done something that – to you – is totally obvious.

Yet you can’t usually do this in your own business, which is where a mentor comes into the frame.

They operate in much the same way as you shouting at the screen, except you can actually hear what they are saying and challenge it if needed.

At the end of the day, it’s horses for courses. Coaching will likely be a lower outlay but the work probably won’t be as tailored to your precise business needs as mentoring.

I’m probably biased but I’d suggest if you’re in two minds about this, going for a lower number of (higher priced) hours with a mentor will actually be better than a higher number of (lower priced) hours with a coach.

And naturally I’d be delighted if you decided to contact me for a no obligation chat to explore how I could possibly be your internet marketing mentor.