Learning Dreamweaver!

Today I attended the first session of a short course on Dreamweaver. As I consider myself to be still a little "technology challenged" I was surprised to realise just how much I have learnt about the Internet by research and experiment over the past two years.

There were several people on the course who are in exactly the same position I was in not so long ago - small business owners who understand the potential benefits of having an Internet presence but don't know where to begin. The problem for we middle aged folk is that computers and the Internet are not second nature to us - yet we stand to benefit the most from using them! There is so much information online that it's overwhelming - particularly when you realise that a percentage of that information is either inaccurate or outdated. Once you begin to get a grip on it however, you progress much faster.

I have to admit to being quite pleased with my progress at this point. Perhaps because I chat to affiliate marketers and successful online business people who know so much more that I do, I still feel like an Internet dummy. So today I'm going to pat myself on the back for having learnt stacks about online marketing, Google Adwords, search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, social networking, blogging, Twittering and the importance of website content in general!

And I'm going to completely ignore the fact that there still may be teenages out there who know more than I do!

Learning new skills is exciting. I find it quite incredible that in just a few weeks I'll be able to build my own websites from scratch. I highly recommend putting in the extra time to learn how to do your own online marketing. As a small business owner I have asked the advice of many "experts" over the years and often a little personal research has revealed that those "experts" are trading on very little expertise! Recently an IT chap give me advice about "tricky ways" to optimize my website - and I promptly told him why those techniques didn't work long term and gave him a mini-lecture about "black hat optimization" and the best ways to optimize! He was clearly stunned that a small business owner knew anything at all about search engine optimization.

Learn as much as you can yourself I say! Besides the obvious benefits, it's exciting and challenging.