Choosing an internet marketing mentor isn’t a decision to be taken lightly. You’re going to be working with your chosen mentor for quite a few months, maybe even years. So you shouldn’t make a snap decision but equally you shouldn’t use choosing as an excuse to procrastinate and never take the leap forward to using a mentor.

1. What’s the format of the mentoring?

There’s no set format for mentoring.

So you need to find out what’s on offer.

Some mentors will make themselves available face to face, others will schedule chats on the phone or Skype, others will offer email support. Or it could be a mixture of these methods plus maybe some support material to cover any easier items – a bit like reading a text book at school except it’s likely to be a mix of PDFs, audios, videos and maybe mind maps and other teaching methods.

Having access to a library of material as well as access to a mentor can be attractive – you just need to double check any small print as, especially at the cheaper end of the market, it’s not unusual for the pre-recorded training to be the majority of the package you’ve bought.

2. What accountability is involved?

One of the biggest plus points of moving on from self-teaching or being a perpetual student is that you have a degree of accountability built in to a mentoring program.

It’s very easy to fool yourself about what you’ve done, it’s less easy when you have to account for your time and your results to someone else. Especially when that “someone” is a step back from your business and can give you the advantage of an outside pair of eyes.

The more accountable you are, the better the results.

Think about it for a minute – you’ve almost certainly bought or even attended courses that teach you certain things related to your internet marketing.

But once you’ve attended the course or downloaded the product, that’s it.

There’s no real “how are you doing” follow-up.

It’s up to you.

Which means that the ideas often get neglected.

Whereas if you have to report back at agreed intervals, you’re much more likely to take action.

If you’ve ever bought and listened to any recordings of round table or mastermind sessions, you’ll know there’s almost always at least one person who admits that they did the necessary work so that they could report back that they’d done it.

Otherwise it would have been left on a long to-do list, never to be done.

3. Are you prepared to do the necessary work?

Yes.

There is work involved.

Mentoring isn’t a “done for you” package that you buy and things miraculously happen.

You must either do the work yourself or hire people to do it.

Of course, which of those options you can take depends on precisely why you’ve bought into the concept of mentoring in the first place.

You may have decided that you needed to add to your skillset and couldn’t get to the level you wanted to reach without outside, personal, help.

That’s a rarely mentioned option in mentoring but can be really worthwhile. There’s a defined outcome and it may be that you only hire your mentor for an intense hour or two in order to take your skills to the next level.

Or you may prefer the regular “nag” of a weekly or monthly call where you have to account for the work you’ve done to someone who’s stricter than you’d normally use so that you can’t get away with weak excuses that don’t actually help your internet marketing business move forward.

Either way, you need to do the homework involved.

A good mentor will refuse to work with you if you don’t do that because they know that you’ll only get results if you do the necessary work that will almost guarantee you’ll get to where you want to reach.

If you think we could be a good fit, check out my internet marketing coaching here.