How important is learning how to code/program?

I guess it depends on a number of factors. If your products have something to do with programming, you'll definitely need to have some skills. You will then be able to handle the problems that come up within the business.

If on the other hand your strength is in other areas like marketing, then learning to code is just another hurdle you're placing on your path. It is better to hire professionals to handle the programming bit while you concentrate on other more important matters.

Having said that, there is no harm in having some coding knowledge. It will come in handy when your programmer is not available and you are faced with an urgent problem that needs solving.

If you're interested in creating many sites, then I think it's helpful to know basic HTML and being able to tweak code in php and javascript. I lik eknowing that I can throw up a new site in no time at all and start monetizing it very quickly.

If you're just focusing on one main project only, then you may just want to hire someone to handle it for you and let you run it after creation.

I guess it depends on how determined the individual is. There are plenty of successful marketers who don't know the first bit about code, but can get by outsourcing and working their way around.
But purely from a time perspective, it is definitely beneficial to know at least enough to fix things here and there.
Put it this way, if something simple was needed to be fixed on your product launch day at 4am on the day of your launch, you'd rather know how to fix that problem yourself right away than pull back the launch...

Honestly it is very helpful to know how to code/program but it isn't necessary. Outsourcing is very useful and easy especially on odesk.

It's not an "excuse" not to take time and effort. If you consider it there are so many aspects to internet marketing and business. You can't do everything; it's like asking a television producer to know how to do make-up

It's about specialization. Why do something half-hearted when you can let someone who knows their stuff do it well while specializing in what you know.

On the other hand if you enjoy programming, you have a passion and a gifting for it by all means it is good to learn it and you can even do it yourself. I know many successful businesses who started as a passionate programmer with a idea.

It's good to have a basic so you know you're not being screwed around (outsourcing is a minefield if you don't do it right) and you know what is expectable and what isn't (so you can be reasonable employer)

Great question though Thanks for the conversation

Like anything, the more knowledgeable in the subject area you are dealing with, the better chances you are going to have at success.

I have been a professional software engineer for 10 years. I am actually a game programmer and I can tell you that my background knowledge has been invaluable in building my business.

I will say, however, that there are going to come times where things are going to need to get fixed, or people are going to try and sell you things like "SEO", and they are going to take advantage of you by using technical terms you might not be familiar with.

I would say knowing basic HTML, the internals of how the web works like setting up web servers like apache can be very helpful. You should understand CSS and basic php. From that point on it is all up to you but I would definitely say that the more you know, the better.

If you are going to outsource the programming work, you should know some basics.

I would suggest maybe a beginner programming boot camp if you are pressed for time.

You have 3 questions here now let's break them down.

With regards to your first question it's not really A MUST HAVE thing to learn to code to do internet marketing, just an UNDERSTANDING of basic jargons will do. If you really mean business then your mindset should be an entrepreneur not a hands on worker.

Actually most of successful internet marketers don't know programming at all. What the have are a bunch of project managers.

Even programmers are outsourcing their works why? because they only have 24 hours a day so, I don't think it's an excuse it's simply a way of leveraging your time.

Gama

I think most of us would say it is not critical to know coding, however it can be helpful to at least have a WORKING KNOWLEDGE of some areas such as HTML and CSS.

It all comes down to do you want to pay in time or do you want to pay in money?

If you know coding, you can save the money it costs to outsource, but, it costs you your time.

You have to ask yourself which is more valuable?

With programs like WordPress doing most of the "heavy lifting" it isn't as necessary to know coding as it used to be. That in a nutshell is the beauty of internet marketing as things stand now, you have options.

Jim

From the IM point of view, they are not important.

I focus my energies on finding the best offers, and getting traffic to my squeeze pages for list building.

Of course, I am heavily into building sites with wordpress, but it doesn't call for great coding skills.

In the Internet marketing and web 2.0 business, how important do you think it is to know how to code/program?

It is helpful to know coding or programming if you're in the field of internet marketing. If you know how to, you're more likely to be able to create your ideas to the fullest. Outsourcing it to someone else, no matter how competent they may be, is not the same as doing something yourself.

Do you think somebody without coding/programming knowledge can succeed?

No doubt about it. I know many people who couldn't create a basic website who are earning a decent living as internet marketers. It just boils down to how you use your resources. It is not a prerequisite for success

Also, do you think people use 'outsourcing' as an excuse to not take the time and effort to learn how to code?

No, I don't think so. I think it is alright to not know every component of internet marketing, since it can be a pretty diverse field. Some people don't know coding, others don't know SEO, others don't write. It's okay to outsource certain parts of your business. Coding can get quite technical and for a lot of busy internet marketers, time would be better spent doing other tasks.

Just my two cents

It helps if you know a little about html. For example you may want to add you own buy now button and make it work with Paypal code. It's not hard to do if you know your way around the basics of html. On the whole though you don't need to know it to be successful online especially with things like Wordpress sites which pretty much take care of a lot of the coding for you.

Its not.

Learn to delegate, and hire programmers.

It's important to have a basic knowledge of HTML. I like knowing how to fix my sites if necessary. It's not an excuse to outsource if you'd be better off using your efforts/knowledge/time in other areas. Plenty of successful internet marketers use programmers.

Unless you have some inclination to do it, I'd stay away from programming.

If you have no knowledge of HTML then it's not really possible to learn "a little bit" - you'd need to start right from scratch to get even a simple page together. So again I wouldn't bother unless you're really interested in it.

You definitely don't need these skills to succeed, you just need to find someone you can trust & is reliable to do the work for you.

I wouldn't say it is absolutely vital to learn programming/coding. I also see nothing wrong with outsourcing the work. If you really want your business to grow, you can't learn and do everything.

That being said, I think having a working knowledge of coding would be helpful. Then you would be able to handle minor problems on your own and also better communicate with your hired coders about what you want done.

Ryan - it's definitely possible to succeed without being a coder. Taking myself as an example, I have never really learned anything more than how to write a PHP redirect and a bit of very minor GET and POST function stuff for a script I worked on one time. But none of that was important to my business and could have easily been outsourced to another person. I was just interested to learn a bit myself, so I did.

Coding and all that ... you can either:

1) BUY the software you need
2) HIRE someone to write it for you

In the case of #2 you need to know enough about how to ask the right questions, or you can partner with someone who knows how to ask them and hire using their help.

It's no different than asking "Do you need to know Photoshop to succeed". or "Do you need a driver's license to succeed".

Of course not ..

Ryan,

I asked the asked the same question not too long ago on the forum.

You may want to check out the replies in that thread as well. There's a lot of great answers

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/578837-important-learn-html-php-css-internet-marketing.html

- Trevor

Not nearly as important as it was 15 years ago. That said, acquiring just a little bit of knowledge can go a long way. Over the years, I've acquired a fair knowledge of html and css, although I do sometimes have to look up exact syntax if i don't use something for awhile. I can also, with the assistance of reference materials, tweak scripts in Perl and php that others have done the heavy lifting on.

This does two things for me.

> It gives me a measure of independence from contractors. I'm not hostage to a programmer's client list and project schedule if I want to try something.

> It helps me communicate what I want better when I do look for professional help. Because I speak a bit of the "local lingo", I can be more accurate in describing what I want. I can also detect when someone is blowing smoke more easily.

Absolutely. Too much anecdotal evidence right on this forum to believe otherwise.

Doesn't matter. If someone doesn't want to do something, one reason is as good as any other.

As the others said, it depends on what you're trying to sell.
If you for example will be selling a physical product then you can do pretty well with a wysiwyg-editor and then sell the product on ebay/your own website.

As for the Web 2.0 design, this is far less important than the price your offering your product for and the product specification.
Make sure to emphasize in what context your product differs from the rest when trying to sell a product.

It depends what you are doing.

If you are going to manage a team of IT professionals, of course.

If you are just going to market products, and get someone to do it for you - and you have the funds, knowledge and street smarts to hire the right people, then not so much.

It's like saying 'How important is it to know how to drive a stickshift/manual when driving a car'? Well... are you driving a manual? If not, and you are driving an automatic, really doesn't matter. Both get you to the same destination.

Johnathan

I've been making a living for over 3 years and have absolutely no idea how to code/program at all.

I'm not proud of my ignorance, but I have to admit this really isn't high on my list of skills to learn.

I don't know.

I'm pretty opposed to outsourcing stuff rather than learning how to do it myself. (I think it's much easier to outsource stuff you can do yourself). But I've hardly ever needed any coding or programming in my business.

I appreciate that for people who want to build HTML sites and/or use Wordpress blogs, some sort of skills like this would be pretty useful, but so far I've got along without those, and I don't really see that changing now.

If I absolutely had to, I suppose I could just about learn how to use Wordpress (I think, at least in theory, that doesn't involve a lot of "programming"?), but it would doubtless be enormously time-consuming for me, and not something I'd enjoy at all. I can't help thinking, on balance, that it would be a comparatively poor use of my time to try to learn this stuff from scratch, given my inherent technophobia, incompetence and complete lack of skills/understanding in these areas. That's time and learning I'd rather spend learning about PPC and/or media buying, to be honest, if I wanted to "add skills".

So, in summary, I have to say that I just don't think it's very important at all. I get by without it and have no immediate plans to "correct" that, to be honest.

To me I'd say it's somehow important to know the basics...why?

Not longer than this week I set up a squeeze page to drive traffic to it with ppc, however iI struggled a lot just to find a good templates I can work from because I have no idea how to create one myself, even with wordpress if I want to make a simple squeeze page with an optin form and some pagess of information I struggle... so for me if I knew how to code etc..i would do things 100% faster than right now....

@ alexa, if you dont code at all and dotn know a thing about it... how do you build your sites?

Thanks

I don't know anything about coding and programming and I've been making a full time living online since 2007.

I've had to learn a few basics to be able to tweak Wordpress themes, and a few simple html tags, but honestly I'd really struggle if I had to make any real changes to a website's code.

Agree with you and i think you are right.

I would say that you need to know HTML and CSS. Nowadays it's been made so easy that you could literally learn it in 2 good days of studying it. You don't need to know PHP or any of the other complicated languages if you're going to hire others. You just don't want to pay $50 revisions for simple edits in HTML code that could be done in minutes.

I didn't know any coding or programing when I started and just learned how to use a WYSIWYG editor, aweber forms, FTP and wordpress and have money making sites that build lists and am creating new sites every month or so once the new ones take off.

I haven't really outsourced anything before now and I am trying that out just to see.

I've learned a lot but I still do not know coding at all, so I don't think it is required or even necessary depending on what you intend to do.

I could care less about coding/programming. That's what freelance boards are for ... to hire people to do tasks that you have no interest in learning or doing.

Knowledge of programming is valuable if you want to be a programmer. That's about it.

my friend I was in your shoes... I think if we were still in the 90's, I would want to know about programming and coding.. so unless you want to make a career out of it, then there are so many domains that is plug n go deals that you just create your site in real time using templates or what not and then you can spend the time doing more creative things like customizing those templates.

If you want to be a programmer knowledge of coding is must. It is a good experience to have a idea about coding in web 2 business.

I would say if you can learn it in a timely fashion then do it! I went to college for business wishing i new programming because its expensive to pay for i know basic stuff but not advanced. But i know business so I handle the business.

You could always find someone who programs and build a working relationship and work together. i.e. my partner is a programmer but you wont be able to do everything yourself anyways as I found out very early as a beginner you have to delegate the workload. I am now an intermediate so I am getting better and income is getting closer.

Coding and programming are things that you don't have to worry about. You don't even have to outsource your website design. You can put up a sales letter style website, or use a website template that alot of website building tools have to create your site.

I think programming is becoming increasingly important these days. I'm not an expert programmer, but nowadays I'm managing a project in which we outsource to East Europe programmers, and I can't highlight how important it has been for me to know how to write code from before.

Programmers have more pressure over them when asked for the way they're doing things, and subsequently, they deliver better results. If you have some programming knowledge, you're in great advantage around your colleagues in the marketing field.