PhotobucketAre you teachable? Yeah, this hearkens back a bit to my previous post but, I'm not kidding. As a Clickincome internet business mentor, this is a big deal to me.

At Clickincome, my job is to teach people about how to build a commercial website, and a lot about marketing that site. When I get a client that's teachable, it's amazing. They get it. They remember that they spent a lot of money with Clickincome and they're here to learn something. So they open their ears, and their minds, and they do what we talk about.

Being teachable is a big deal. If you want to be successful, whether it's with a Clickincome website or some other business venture, you've got to be teachable. The most successful people I know, in any business, are teachable.

"So, Clickincome mentor, what you mean by teachable?"

What I mean is that you're willing to learn. You aren't so full of your own knowledge and experience that you can't learn new things.

It's funny. It's kind of like the age old stereotype of teenagers. Teenagers think they know everything. "Dad, you just don't understand. That's not how the world works, anymore. You're such a dinosaur."

Of course, teenagers grow up. When they get out on their own and start trying to live life, it's amazing how smart their parent's suddenly get, isn't it? "Wow. All this time Dad was a dingbat, but now he's so smart! How'd that happen, I wonder?"

You might be surprised at how many people I've met in my line of work that know everything about the Internet. Well, they think they do, anyway. They've never built a website in their life. Some of them barely know how to turn on their computers. I'm not exaggerating. And yet, when I tell them about important things like, writing ad copy, the importance of content in their website, the growing importance of social networking and blogging, they argue with me. "Oh, that'll never work," they say.

It's insane. Didn’t they pay money to let me teach them these things?

Being teachable is only half the story, though. You also have to be willing to change. This is where many of my Clickincome clients fall down. They're not willing to change the way they think, or the way the do things in their lives. Why is that?

I got an email today from a client that was very teachable, but unwilling to change. She and her husband had put up quite a site. They'd built several pages of content but, there were no products to sell. Oh, they knew what kinds of products they wanted. They knew the basic kind of ecommerce store they wanted to build. But, trying to find product suppliers took them out of their comfort zone. And so they complained, “We can't find any dropshippers for the products we want to carry."

Let me explain something. As a Clickincome mentor, I teach people how to find product sources. Clickincome has its own dropshipping solution - the ClickClub - but, because we're not the only game in town and we may not carry all the products that people may want to sell, we teach people how to find other product sources.

Let me explain that one more time. We actually tell people how to find the very suppliers we compete with, just so our clients can find and sell the products they want to sell on their websites.

I had gone over all this months before with this client. So I checked the very resources I taught them to use. I found five dropshippers that carried the kinds of products they wanted to sell in less than a minute. In fact, it was more like 30 seconds.

How come they missed it? I did nothing more than what I teach and yet, this client somehow couldn't find dropshippers. I suspect it's because, like many other unsuccessful clients I've had, they just didn't do what I told them to do. They either didn't believe it, didn't actually try it, or both.

And then they blamed me for their lack of effort.

It's ridiculous, don't you think? How can you expect to make money if you don't have something to sell, even if it’s just your content? How can you expect people to know about your site, let alone visit it, if you don't market it?

"We've really worked this site," they told me. And yet the evidence was clear they hadn't. It wasn't that they weren't teachable. When I was in one-on-one mentoring sessions with them, they were very teachable. They were just unwilling to change their behavior. They were unwilling to give up a few hours a day to build and market an online business. They were unwilling to step out of their comfort zone. They were also unwilling to take responsibility for their own actions.

I've had other clients that are completely different. They're very teachable, and very willing to change. Guess what? They do very well with their websites. Sure, they don't make millions overnight, but they are actually doing it. They are finding success on the web.

Do you want to be successful with your Clickincome Website? Be teachable. Be willing to change. Be willing to work.

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