How much time should you be spending learning per week?

Hey Everyone,

I often get asked by people, "with all your projects going on online, how do you find time to keep learning new things?" 

Others ask me, "how much time each week should I spend learning?... It seems like there's a neverending path to what I need to learn, help I'm getting information overload"

So I thought I'd address those questions in today's blog post.

Firstly, when it comes to information overload, IF you have an issue with too many guru emails hitting your inbox, then I suggest you read this blog post here: Too many guru emails

So, with regards to the question of how I find time to keep learning new things, I don't have a perfect strategy, but it's probably better than most, so I'll share it with you.

I try my best to listen to 2 hours of training material per week. Most of this is usually done in the form of listening to audio interviews with marketing experts and audio books. I do this in my car when driving to and from work. 

One of the best audio books that I've listened to recently is The Cashflow Quadrant by Robert Kiyasaki, I recommend it to everyone. Another fantastic one is 'Mastering the Rockerfeller Habits' though I'd only recommend that to people who are already making 6 figures a year online.

If you're keen to listen to some really good interviews on the topics of driving more traffic to your websites, then I highly recommend you get a copy of Traffic Travis as currently we are including several detailed 90+ minute interviews with some phenomenal traffic generation experts as unadvertised bonuses.

When it comes to reading marketing books (as opposed to listening to audio), I usually find myself skimming them and taking in as much as I can in a 1 to 2 hour sitting. However, if I have a long flight, then I often read a good business book cover to cover.

I also learn from my peers as over my 12 years online, I've managed to become friends with many dozens of online millionaires from different niches and I've learned a lot from them over the years in private conversations. Networking is fantastic for learning as you learn things that sometimes don't get shared in courses as not everyone who does well online sells an infoproduct teaching their methods. Of course to successfully network you have to have something to bring to the table too.

I usually find that if you are making online within 10x of what the other person is making, there's a good chance they'll want to get to know you better. Otherwise, it is not going to be a mutually beneficial relationship between you.

For example, if you are making $10 per week online, then it's hard to get regular contact with someone who is making $1 million per year. They are making  100000 times more than you are. Once you get over 2k a week, you'll find you will have significant knowledge to bring to the table and it's easy to make friends with other successful people.

In the meantime, if you get yourself making $100 a week online, then it's not so hard to get to know others who are making a full time living, say $800-1000 a week. You will have learnt the ropes and will have moved from beginner newbie to advanced newbie.

If this doesn't make sense, don't worry about it, I'm just offering my thoughts based on how I've seen relationships in business be formed over the years. It is very hard for a good relationship to form based on one person only giving and the other person only taking. If you want to get to know successful people, then you need to get yourself on the path to becoming one yourself.

Now, I want to talk a little about information overload.

Aside from what I had to say in my blog post, getting too many guru emails in your inbox, I believe information overload occurs when you don't have enough of a base to work from while you are trying to absorb new information.

For example, if I gave you 30 new words in french to learn per day, it'd seem like overload (well for those of you who don't speak french). However, if you already know basic french grammar and you have a base of say 200 words, you'll find that a relatively straight forward task if you put the time in each day. 

With making money online, you need to focus in on a base starting with learning how to build one type of profitable website. Whether it be your own product or whether it be an affiliate site, or whatever. Then you need to stick to that plan, form your base, then take in new information IF it relates to what you are doing.

The worst thing is when you try to learn a whole new way of making money, that doesn't fit in with what you are doing. It's like a coffee shop owner, suddenly learning how to run a gas station. They would be better off trying to learn how to get more customers, or layout their shop for better repeat custom, or making better coffee, or how to turn their business into a franchise model, etc.

There's nothing wrong with learning new ways of business when you are ready for it, but if information overload is a problem, you are better off expanding your knowledge within one business model. E.g. if you are an affiliate site owner, then you might want to learn how to build a squeeze page, or how to get high search engine rankings, or how to profit from pay per click. Those will build on what you are doing, rather than say learning how to make money in mobile marketing which is a totally different business model.

I hope this post is of value to you guys. My simple plan, given that I already have an extensive base level of internet marketing knowledge, is to commit to 2 hours per week learning time and I do at least 70% of that by using my car as a 'university on wheels' when driving to work.

I'm keen to hear your comments.

All the best,

Mark Ling