This post is about marketing -- not religion -- but the Bible sure put it well.

Something Seth Godin posted today got me thinking:

The naive farmer farms as his parents, grandparents and great grandparents did. She plants, hopes and harvests...

The professional farmer measures. She tests. She understands how systems work and is constantly tweaking to improve them. When failure happens, she doesn't rest until she understands why.

...

Before you can sell a service, a product or an insight to the naive, you need to sell them on being professional.

Applying the first two paragraphs to internet marketing, you're probably saying, "yeah, yeah. I know. You've got to test." My real point comes from the last paragraph. In internet marketing, there are three groups: you've got the naive, the professionals, and the "monkeys in the magistrates robes" -- the naive who superficially act like professionals.

They're half-way sold on being professional, meaning that they'll buy your eBook training or business opportunity. But they're not all the way sold. So either they don't read it, of if they do, they think, "great, I really learned something there," but then just turn around and buy another eBook rather than doing anything with their new knowledge.

Or if they do put it into action and it doesn't make them rich, they simply drop it and fall for the next big promise that comes their way.

To be a professional, as Seth says, you've got to figure out what's going on -- what works, what doesn't, and why -- and adjust what you're doing on that basis. "That didn't work, let me try something different" is as naive as "that didn't work, let me try it again."

"Ever learning, and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth." (2 Timothy 3:7)

Like I was saying last week, the naive trend-hop. The professional pivots.