A perpetual student is someone who’s forever learning but rarely (if ever) putting their learning into practice.

Perpetual students are everywhere: our education system encourages it with ever higher qualifications and the daunting prospect of leaving college and having to get a real job.

But it’s not just higher education that attracts people who’d prefer to be learning more about things – so that when they do finally start they get it right – than actually doing them.

Internet marketing is another area that attracts this kind of behaviour.

The offers are everywhere – sometimes promising unheard of riches in days, just by pressing a few buttons or doing a handful of really simple tasks; sometimes showing a more realistic method that takes slightly more effort but actually works in real life rather than in the dreams of the copywriter; sometimes (and these sell the least copies) real world advice that takes weeks or months to come to fruition.

We buy the products.

Sometimes we read or watch them.

More often, we start reading or watching them and then get distracted by the next shiny penny. Acting like the human equivalent of a magpie – collecting as many shiny objects as possible. Just because we can.

Take a step back.

Analyse what you’re doing for a while.

If you buy your internet marketing things from places like Warrior Plus and JVZoo they both have a purchase history that you can go back through.

Doing that can be scary – you may not even remember all the products you’ve bought that seemed a good idea at the time and are now languishing on your hard drive or accessible only via a members area that you’ve forgotten the login details for.

There’s probably a trend in the things you buy.

It’s a common trait in perpetual students to think that there’s one missing piece in the jigsaw that you absolutely need before you can finally crack the puzzle and start making money.

And that’s true.

The missing link is doing it.

You’ll learn more in the handful of hours you spend actually doing something than you will reading about it and watching videos forever.

Think about it for a minute.

Let’s take something you’ve probably done as an adult: learning to drive a car.

You couldn’t have learned to drive simply from reading a book.

Watching videos would have got you a slightly better experience but they would still leave you unclear about what to do.

You could maybe even use a driving simulator if you could find one locally.

But it still wouldn’t prepare you fully for everything you encounter in the car and on the road.

You actually have to get behind the wheel, turn the key, feel the fear and do it.

Exactly the same goes for your internet marketing.

Until you produce your first video or write your first piece of content you won’t really know what to do.

Even the best tuition unintentionally leaves something out or skims over a seemingly unimportant detail that trips you up and causes you to stall.

That’s not because the product creator set out with the intention of doing that.

It’s because some things happen so automatically that we forget to tell other people every single step necessary.

I once read that McDonalds had over 20 steps laid out in their staff manual to tell them how to cook fries.

Which set my mind thinking what those steps could possibly involve. I didn’t get close to the number but figured it would include locating the freezer with the fries in it, opening the door, taking out the bag, closing the door, walking to the frier, checking the oil temperature was OK, lifting the pan out of the oil, putting the fries into the pan, lowering the pan into the oil, setting the timer, going off to do another task, returning to the fryer when the timer bleeped, turning off the timer, lifting the pan out of the oil, shaking the pan to remove excess fat, checking the heater above the holder was on, tipping the fries into the holder, putting the pan back in place, sifting salt over them.

Something like that.

And I’ve probably missed some steps or not explained them well enough. For instance, I know I haven’t included a “check they are consistent with the colour chart photo” once cooked in the list.

Product creators have to go through the same kind of process.

And something that seems obvious to them isn’t obvious to everyone else.

The best way to find out the missing link(s) is to actually do the process.

Just as you couldn’t learn to drive a car purely from books and videos and maybe a simulator.

You need to put all the things you’ve been learning into practice!

The cliché is feel the fear and do it anyway.

And that’s precisely what you need to do in order to break state and switch from being a perpetual student into someone who actually does stuff.

There are a few really big plus points when you do this:

• There’s often a feeling of relief – you’ve actually done something
• You realise this is easier than you thought, even though there are still some bits that don’t quite make sense
• You realise that the products you’ve bought about this method were all telling you near enough the same thing but with maybe the occasional slightly different approach or one more/one less step
• You find out whether or not this is an technique you actually want to do on a regular or irregular basis. Sometimes things sound appealing and you think “yes, I’d really like to do that” only to find out that in real life they’re as appealing as watching paint dry. You don’t know that until you actually do something.
• You find out whether the technique you’ve got information works as promised or even works at all. That’s not a given – the internet changes so fast that a method that worked recently may no longer work. Google tweak their search algorithm at least daily, Facebook change how their site works on a very regular basis, YouTube inherits some more of Google’s technology, new things like Vine and Kik change how we watch videos or contact each other. And that’s just a glimpse of the things that affect how techniques work in the real world.

But you won’t find any of those answers if all you do is study PDFs and watch videos.

The best approach is to set aside some time on a regular basis – daily if you can, several times a week if daily is too much – and work on your internet marketing.

I find that an hour a day is a good target.

If necessary, get up an hour earlier – I’ve been doing that for the last few weeks to get some regular exercise and it works nicely.

The good part about taking that approach is that life doesn’t get chance to get in the way. By the time I’ve found an excuse to procrastinate on exercise, I’m walking back in my front door.

You could take the same approach with your internet marketing.

Try it for a few weeks (contrary to the time stated in most self-help products, it takes around 8 weeks to form a habit) and prepare to be pleasantly surprised at how much more you get done.

You’ll quickly find out which techniques work for you.

If you’re not yet sure, pick a different technique each day for a week.

I did that on my walking routes – a friend suggested that I did a different route each day for a week and then reversed the route the next week. I’ve actually not done the reverse routes yet – I’m still discovering new ones.

There’s a good chance something similar will happen with your internet marketing.

Challenge yourself to try a new method each and every day for at least the next week.

If a method takes more than an hour (or whatever time you’ve allocated), carry it over to the next day and finish it before going on to the next method.

That alone could make the difference – actually finishing something rather than leaving it languishing.

Then move on to the next method.

Keep a few notes about which methods you enjoy, which are so convoluted that they’re like a Christmas 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle that never gets completed, others of which are so much simpler than the hours of videos or pages of PDFs made them out to be.

Then work out which methods you enjoy doing and which methods get results. And do more work on the handful of methods that meet both those criteria.

Easy? Probably. And almost certainly easier than you first thought.

Simple? Almost certainly. Because simple is almost always better than complicated. Partly because simple methods have less parts to break and you’re more likely to do them.

And at the risk of keeping you in perpetual student mode a bit longer, if there are any gaps in your internet marketing knowledge there’s a good chance one or two of my products will help fill those gaps.

There’s nothing like going public with your goals and commitments to help nudge you in the right direction.

So feel free to add your comments below – but don’t let doing that stop you from finally putting an end to being a perpetual student.