I hate to tell you this, and I`m really sorry, but as far as I know, there IS no one-stop source to learning essential marketing skills, apart from school maybe, but I will TRY to answer some questions you may have from my own experience:

Let`s see, I started out with absolutely NO computer knowledge at all. Went to chatrooms, talked with people, got me some contacts, then one day I got a junkmail full of hype (that I believed...hehehe) and promptly started joining affiliate programs. I joined this one, that one and other one, all full of promises that I`d be mega-rich within a few months. Being a newbie, I swallowed it all. Hook, line and sinker. None of it ever panned out right though.

I lost some money, not huge amounts, but more than I`d care to remember, so I started with free stuff. I didn`t have any knowledge on building downlines and stuff, so that didn`t work neither. Then I started helping people I referred to various things, and things looked slightly better. It was all free stuff that didn`t make me any real money, but it gave me traffic to other free sites I was promoting, I got downlines, and I got contacts, so I knew it was working.

After that, I kinda concentrated on helping everybody I came across, to point where that was ALL I was doing, and funnily enough, I loved it. Still didn`t make me money, but it made me feel great.

That`s how my ezine came about. I wanted to help people as much as possible, teach them to steer clear of hype, stick dilligently to one thing, and build a good downline in it, whilst showing them how to help each other. You`ll find that any articles I`ve written to date(05/15/03) cover these things.

I will say that there are a couple of "skills" needed for anybody wanting to be an online marketer.

Firstly, you need a touch of "blindness" so you don`t even LOOK at all hype, because if it LOOKS too good to be true, then it more than likely is.

You need deep concentration, and dedication, to help you stick with one thing, and you need to be able to work really hard at getting that one thing to work.

Hannibal crossed Alps with his army and its elephants. He defeated Romans in battle after battle. Unfortunately for Carthage, Hannibal was wonderful at winning battles, but incompetent at winning wars.

After Hannibal’s death, Rome took its wrath upon Carthage. The Romans destroyed city, sold inhabitants into slavery and sowed land with salt so that no city could ever rise on that spot again.

The story of Hannibal points out two truths about developing a singular identity. First, it helps to choose a well-known enemy. Two thousand years after his death, Hannibal still ranks with Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon as one of most famous generals of all time. (Just as Hannibal had Rome as his enemy, Alexander had Persia, Caesar had Pompey and Napoleon had Wellington.)

Second, it is important to choose right enemy. By choosing Rome, Hannibal selected an enemy he could not defeat, an enemy he was force to fight on its home turf, and an enemy that was so ruthless that it wiped Carthage from earth.

So what is right enemy?

To begin, it’s important to realize there are two kinds of useful enemies.

The first is competition.

If you are anything less that No.1 brand in your category, then your competitive enemy is whoever is on top. For Pepsi, enemy is Coke. For Oracle, enemy is Microsoft. For Reebok, enemy is Nike.