Distributing your energy is a key component of not only knowledge absorption, but taking action. All too often people see education as purely informational, when the actual application of what you learn is what leads to success.

Applied education! What a concept.

Let's look at an example of this. Say you want to become an "expert" Article Marketer. You read everything you can about Article Marketing. In fact, you spend weeks going through everything that is taught here at Wealthy Affiliate, do a good deal of reading online, and research keywords and industries that you may want to promote. You know everything. Are you an expert?

NO (emphatically!). An expert is someone who is skilled at applying what they learn. An expert would be someone who not only knows how to write a good article, but actually writes good articles. An expert is not someone who "knows" how to get articles ranked high in the search engines. An expert is someone who actually gets their articles ranked.

To be a successful brain surgeon, you need to be able to use a scalpel. To be a successful marketer, you need to apply what you learn. And this brings us to the 50/50 rule.

How the 50/50 Rule Works

The breakdown of the 50/50 rule looks like this:

50% of your time is invested in "learning" and "research"

This includes any training or research that you do. This could be going through tutorials, taking courses, reading relevant blogs, researching keywords, researching competition, or researching industries.

50% of your time is invested in "taking action"

This is the DOING part of it. Without applying what you learn, success will never take place. This is the part that leads to the most failure out of anything else. People fail because they don't take action! This could be building a web page, writing an article, building a campaign, putting together ad groups, writing a post on your blog....essentially anything that is "applied".

Think of it this way. You can go to school for years learning something, but you never become an expert until you "apply" what you have learned. This real world experience leads to success. The same goes for Internet marketing. You can't become a Pay-Per-Click expert by reading a few tutorials. The real education begins when you start creating your campaign or start building your targeted landing pages.