Welcome to The Truth About Internet Marketing - Internet Marketing Solution

I got an email a couple of days ago from someone who read a post that I wrote some time ago under the Internet Scams category on this website. The Internet Scams category is the most viewed area on this website. The question was if a particular program was a scam or legit.

I’ve decided to answer the question here for the benefit of anyone else who may question if a certain program is a scam or not. I will warn everyone that my answer may not be desirable to many.

Let me start by saying that the biggest resource that you have and most never even consider it, is you. If you haven’t read the tutorial on this website yet it would be a good idea to do so when you get the chance. It will give you answers to many of your marketing questions. You can find the link marked ‘Internet Marketing Tutorial’ at the top of this page as well as every page on this website.

Here’s my answer to this persons question. Create a website and write about something that you know a lot about and put it on your website. If you know what your website is about, making money from it is the easy part. If you have a website that provides information about computers then it is a no brainer that you would want to sell computer related products on your website.

You don’t need to get involved with the next great deal out there to make money online. Most digital, as well as membership sites are total garbage. They hype these things up to put money in their own pockets, not yours. They could care less whether you make money or not. Take care of your own business and to hell with everyone else.

While there are basic things that you need to learn and understand about doing business online before you can get started, the only way to become successful online is by doing it the way that is best for you, not the way that is best for someone else.

We all have our unique way of doing things. If you try to do things the exact same way as someone else does it, I will guarantee you that you will be so confused that you will never get it done. You must do things online in a way that you understand. Reading an e-book that tells you to do this or that will not work. You need to work in your own way. Not in a way that someone tells you to work.

If you want to be a business owner you have be a leader, not a follower. Stop taking everyone else’s advise, and run your business in a way that you feel will work the best for you. Learn what you need to get going but then put into action what you have learned. They may say that knowledge is power but it is totally useless if you do nothing with that knowledge.

Stop looking for that pot of gold. You already have it within yourself. No one will take care of you better than you will. Stop chasing every garbage product out there and start making your own decisions.

Creating controversy is a great way to get noticed on the web because its very nature will cause a stir and can drive a lot of traffic to your website.

There is always something on the net that a lot of people are talking about and is very popular. Find it and write something about it that goes against the grain of what everyone else is saying about the particular topic.

It can be about almost anything as long as it fits in with the general topic of your website. Don’t dispute something about Internet Marketing if your website is about tropical fish because it will hurt the relevance of your website.

One of the best places to find popular topics is in the blogosphere where word about something popular spreads very quickly. If a big named blogger wrote about it, it will spread like wildfire throughout the blogosphere. Bloggers love to write about things that are really popular. Take advantage of this medium to find some articles that can be made controversial.

Keep in mind that when writing about something that goes against the grain of the masses is that what you are disputing are opinions and not facts. It’s impossible to dispute a fact and you will come off looking like an idiot if you try to dispute a fact. Stick with topics that you can’t possibly be proven wrong.

Not only is the blogosphere a great place to find topics that can be made controversial it is also a great place to write your controversial post. Because bloggers run in the same circles as other bloggers your controversial post will be more likely found in the blogosphere and the very people that are talking about the topic are more likely to respond and add fire to your controversial post.

I remember an article a while back that eMOMS AT HOME jumped on this and ran with it. That one statement by Aaron Wall supplied plenty of ammunition to write a controversial post. Maybe Aaron was taken out of context which really doesn’t matter because there was no way one way or the other that Wendy could be proven wrong in what she had written.

I can tell you that her post created a huge stir with not only the mommy bloggers but with a lot of male bloggers as well. Everyone loves a good fight and everyone wants to join in no matter who they are.

As you can see in this true life controversial example that it doesn’t always have to be about something that everyone is talking about. If you find something that someone says that can be exploited you can make it controversial like Wendy did.

You want to go after well known people or topics when you write something controversial because it won’t hold much weight otherwise. The bigger the name or the topic, the better response you will get.

Writing something that is controversial will not only get you noticed by people it can also get you noticed with the major search engines as well. If approached right you could end up on the top of the search engines.

I know that this is not an easy thing to do when you’re not making any money but it is very important to do if you expect to have any level of success at all.

Here’s what generally happens to most marketers. They setup an online business do some work on it and when the expected money doesn’t come they decide that there is no way that he or she can make money online and they usually give up. This is not the attitude to have with your online business approach because you will never succeed because you won’t stick around long enough to find out what the outcome will be.

In contrast the marketer who is making money will approach their Internet business with a different attitude because he or she is making money and will be motivated to do the things that they need to do to keep their Internet business thriving and moving in the right direction.

You cannot approach your online business with the attitude that it’s not worth putting in the time and effort when you are not making money.

It takes time to get an online business off the ground and making you money and that is why it is important to approach everything that you do as if you were already making money. Approaching it in this way will not only help keep you motivated it will also help you visualize what it will be like be successful and hopefully you will learn a lot in the process.

Moaning that you’ve spent all of this time and done all this work is not going to get you to where you want to go. It takes months to get a solid foundation built and if you don’t hang around long enough to build it you will end up with nothing.

You have to ask yourself this, do I want to stay where I am right now or do I want to have control over my life? It seems to me even if it were to take a year or more to get it there that it would be worth it. You have to decide whether or not you want to end up with nothing or be working for yourself no matter how long it takes.

My advice is to stop buying into the hype and build a solid online business that will support you for many years to come and approach it as if you are already successful because it is what will keep you motivated and will keep you going until you attain that goal.

Make a list of the things that you need to do on a daily basis and make sure that they get done. If you do what you are supposed to do consistently you will get there. Don’t put unnecessary pressure on yourself because it will cause you to make poor decisions and most importantly don’t ever stop learning. If you are persistent and consistent there is no way that you will fail.

That’s a question that you have to know and need to answer if you expect to have any kind of success at all. If you don’t know where you are there is no way that you will recognize when something changes and chances are nothing will change if you don’t know where you are at this moment.

If you are trying to get your business off the ground whether it is an Internet business or any kind of business at all, if you have no idea where the starting point is there is no way that you will ever get to where you want to go. If you currently have a business it is to your advantage that you stop whatever it is that you are trying to accomplish and evaluate where you are at this very moment in your life otherwise no matter what you do nothing will change until you know where you are.

You can’t truly start if you don’t know where the starting line is and you most certainly can’t finish if you haven’t yet started.

I know that what I’ve just said may sound a bit confusing so bear with me here. What you have to do is define your life as it is today. (not your business) You need to look at your entire life as it is now.

You have to ask yourself what would I change? For example if you are living in a small apartment at the moment you probably want to upgrade your living situation to a house Using this example you want to be very clear as to what kind of house you want. How many rooms, what style etc.

You need to evaluate every aspect of your life and what you would change about it. Most importantly you must do a self-evaluation and be brutally honest. If you are known to procrastinate you will need to change that. You can’t succeed by doing nothing.

If you can’t change the things that you need to change about yourself you will never be able to move forward. Be brutal but don’t dwell on it; just change it.

You must understand that you got where you are by doing the things that you have been doing and you will stay there if you don’t make the necessary changes in your life. If you want to be somewhere else, you have to make changes in your life. You can’t possibly get to where you want to go if you have no idea where you are.

The choices that we all make in life are what make our lives what they are, good or bad. If you have not gotten what you want it is up to you to make changes. Simply put, if you continue to do what you have been doing you will get what you have been getting.

I know that self-evaluation is a very hard thing to do but it is imperative to your success. All successful people have had to do this at some point otherwise they would not be successful today. There are no exceptions. We all have to do this if we want to change our lives for the better.

It’s nice to want more out of life but you must realize that there will be a price to pay but the end result will be well worth it because you will learn a lot about yourself and will be a better person for it and you will know that anything is attainable.

The last important ingredient in the equation is that you have to put into action what you have learned about your present life otherwise it is useless information. You will never get to where you want to go if you don’t take the necessary steps to get there.

I read an article over at ezine articles called how to get rich online. While I agree with some of the points in this article there are some things that I don’t agree with.

One of the points of this article states that you need to find a problem and solve it or improve on a product that is already out there. Let’s face it, most of us are not capable of doing this and it is totally unnecessary. You can make a lot of money online without having to reinvent the wheel.

Another thing that the article says is to start an affiliate program of your own so that others can promote your newly created product.

While all of this sounds great it’s not very realistic. As I said before most are not capable of creating their own products on their own. Unless you have a lot of money to invest so that you can hire someone to create a product for you, this is something that you probably don’t want to consider.

Staring your own affiliate program is a lot easier said than done. I ran my own affiliate program several years ago and can tell you that there are a lot of headaches associated with running your own affiliate program. The biggest problem is that you have absolutely no control over how an affiliate will promote your product. You can set all kinds of guidelines on what an affiliate can or cannot do however, it is the final decision of the affiliate marketer as to whether he or she will follow the guidelines of the affiliate program or not.

The problem is that many affiliates will do anything to make a sale. You will have to deal with your affiliates spamming people. If the spamming problem gets back to your hosting provider you will be shutdown without notice. There are many other problems with running an affiliate program, spamming happens to be the biggest problem.

The article goes on to say that you can’t make a lot of money without the help of others. That couldn’t be further from the truth. If you find a product that is not very competitive that pays a high commission you most certainly can make a great living online.

Research, dedication, and hard work are what it takes to do well online. You absolutely do not need to depend on other people to get you there. No one will take better care of your business than you will. The biggest problem is that everyone is looking for the easy way out. Do a little bit of work and you will be amazed at what you can accomplish in a relatively short period of time.

I just read this article over at Ezine Articles. You can find the article here.

I’m about to rant a little. When are marketers going to learn that there is no secret to marketing. It seems that everyone is looking for an easy way to make money. I can tell you that it doesn’t exist.

The Gurus are the absolute worse because they are the one’s who build people up to buy the garbage that they are selling. They have one thing and one the only on their mind and that is to STEAL YOUR MONEY!

Marketing online takes a lot of patience, desire, and hard work, if you intend to have any success at all.

People would rather just keep on wasting their money on crap than actually do some real work. If these lazy marketers expended the same energy on doing some real marketing as they do chasing, one garbage marketing scam after another they would actually see some real success.

What kills me is that some of these marketers will chase this crap for years rather than actually making their own success. If these people did the things that are required, they would be seeing success today.

What annoys me even more is that these very same people are the first to whine and complain that they are not making any money online. The worst part of it is, given the chance, they would rip off people just the same as they have been.

The online Gurus do joint ventures with each other. In fact the gurus that do a joint venture for another guru don’t even write their own email spam. The guru who is selling the next incredible digital product is the one who writes it and sends it off to the other big named marketers so that they can send it off to their list.

A good example of it is day job killer. Chris spun that thing as all of the gurus out there are going to be pissed at him for releasing the day job killer ebook. Yet the biggest named marketers on the Internet were promoting that garbage ebook to their lists. Doesn’t make too much sense does it. The only thing that these marketers care about is how much money they will make. Guess What? They are doing it at your expense.

I often watch the traffic that comes to this website. I can tell you that a fair amount of the people who come here are people who are looking into the next best thing that will make them millionaires.

Most of these visitors stay a few seconds when they see what is written is not what they want to hear. These people deserve to get ripped off. It actually serves them right.

So you have to ask yourself this. Are you going to chase every get rich quick scam all over the Internet and hope that you get lucky or are you going to make your own luck? If your answer is yes to the first question quit now and save your money.

I think that so many Internet marketers are so fixated on digital or service related products such as software, ebooks, seo services, etc that they really don’t bother looking into physical products.

To start with most of these types of products are so saturated in the IM market it is almost impossible to find anything worth promoting that is potentially profitable. Have you run keyword searches for digital or service related products? If you have I’m guessing that you haven’t found much that will be profitable or isn’t super competitive.

There are a lot of gems out there when it comes to physical products because most people that do promote physical products are business owners promoting their own products. I can tell you that if you are an Internet marketer who is worth your salt you can blow these business owners out of the water because they don’t know crap about promoting their products online.

I have a couple of products that I have recently found that has very little competition that appears to be extremely profitable. I’m not going to tell you what they are at this time because I just started to promote them and I don’t have any real data at this time. From the early indications it looks like I’ll be able to get on the first page of Google in no time for my main keywords. It only took me 72 hours to get the website that I’m promoting this product on indexed.

If you are having the same problem that most Internet marketers are having of finding decent products and good keywords for those products promoting real physical products is definitely an easier game to play because the playing field is a lot more level and the supposed Gurus don’t seem to like playing on that field.

I can tell you from the research that I’ve done you can find some really nice keywords that are not very competitive at all.

Here’s the key. Find a bunch of physical products that you may consider promoting. It’s important that you find the product that you want to sell first because that’s what you want to build your website around. You will want the type of product that you promote in your domain name if possible as well.

Find a main product and build a niche around that product. For example: If you ran a search on chairs and recliner proved to be a good choice you could build your online business around recliners. Let me say before I go any further that I have no idea whether or not if recliner is a profitable choice or not because I haven’t checked to see if it is or not. I’m using this as an example and nothing else.

Here’s how to determine if a product choice is profitable or not. Run a keyword search with the yahoo keyword suggestion tool. In the above example you would run a search on chairs. You would look at the results that sit under the main keyword of chair and check to see if there is anything there that has a decent amount of searches. In our pretend search above we found that recliner has a decent amount of searches. Let’s pretend that we found 20,000 searches for this keyword.

The best thing to do when running a keyword search is to copy and past the results to a spreadsheet such as excel so that you can further analyze each keyword or keyword phrase result.

Ok. We’ve run our search and have found that recliner looks like it may be a good fit. To see how competitive and profitable the keyword recliner is we will run an allintitle search. Don’t worry, an allintitle search is a very simple process that takes less than a minute to run. Go to Google and type in allintitle:recliner

In our pretend allintitle search we find that recliner is found in the title on 5,000 website web pages. To determine how profitable and how competitive a keyword or keyword phrase is simply divide the search results by the allintitle search results to get your answer. In our recliner example you would take the 20,000 searches and divide it by the 5,000 allintitle searches which would give us a 4.

What we have done is ascertained the supply against the demand for our fictitious keyword search for recliner. In our search we found that the demand is 4-1 against the supply, which is an excellent ratio and a product that is well worth pursuing.

What our keyword search has told us is that there aren’t too many websites that we need to beat and that there are plenty of people out there who are looking for what we want to sell.

I’ve rambled on long enough with this. I’m certain that you get the idea. If you want to see real allintitle search results check out this post to get a better idea of what I’ve been talking about here. http://the-truth-about-internet-marketing.com/2007/03/30/the-all-important-allintitle

Here’s the link to Yahoo’s keyword suggestion tool: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

If you are a webmaster and Internet marketer and don’t use Google’s webmaster tools you are missing out on a great resource that Google provides for free to all webmasters.

You do have to signup to use this resource. It takes less than a minute to do so. I am not going to go into too much detail of what features are included with Google webmaster tools. You can get that information yourself after you signup with Google.

The nice thing about Google webmaster tools is that you can run diagnostics to check for any potential problems with your website. You will need to verify your website in order to use this feature and any other features before you can start using the tools. This is all explained in Google’s webmaster member area.

If you don’t have a sitemap for your website you can create one using one of the webmaster tools. If you already have a sitemap you can submit it in the webmaster tools member area to ensure that Google crawls and indexes all of the web pages on your website.

Another nice relatively new feature that Google webmaster tools provides is a crawl rate report that tells you the number of pages that Google’s bot crawls a day. This is nice because it will tell you what pages Google is looking at and more importantly what pages they are not looking at which can tell you that there probably is a problem with the web pages that Google’s crawl robot is overlooking. This is an important feature because it will allow you to go back and revisit these pages and make whatever corrections that are necessary to get them indexed. The more web pages that get indexed on your website, will give people more ways of finding you.

Those are just a few features that Google webmaster tools provide for webmasters. There are many more. You can learn about them yourself after you have signed up for Google webmaster tools. You can find the signup page here. Click the Create a Google Account to signup.

When visitors come to your website how difficult is it for them to get around and follow the links on your website? Does your website make it difficult to navigate? These are important questions that you need to answer or you may find that your visitors are one shot wonders that won’t spend more than a few seconds on your website.

If your website is not relevant to what it is intended for you will find that what visitors you do get, will not stick around for long. For example: If you have a website that is about pet products you don’t want to be writing about the vacation that you just came back from. That’s not what your visitor came for. They came for something that is related to their pet. Always stay on topic with what your website is about.

Are you giving your visitors too many choices? I know that this sounds like a ridiculous question but it really isn’t. If you are selling information about fitness and you offer 10 different products on fitness chances are that you are giving people too many choices and all of those choices tend to confuse people because they won’t know which product is the best and will cause indecision. Not being able to decide equals no sales for you. Do not sell more than a couple of products that are of the same type. If you do sell more than one be sure to give some information about each product to help your potential customer decide which product is best for him or her.

Do you have a mission statement on your website? I can tell you right off the bat that no one gives a crap about your mission statement. A mission statement should be an outline of what you want to accomplish for you or your company. A mission statement should be written for you and the employees of your company to help keep you both on track. It doesn’t belong on a web page. No one will ever read it. That’s not what your visitor came to your website for. Don’t bother putting a mission statement on your website. It’s a waste of time and can be a distraction to your visitor.

Do you have small print on your website that contains legal information or a disclaimer of the results of what you sell that only a lawyer could understand? I see this on just about every over hyped website out there. If you are going to provide a disclaimer be sure that it is easy to understand and why you are providing the disclaimer in the first place. eg. ‘Since everyone’s level of knowledge and expertise is different and the amount of work that any, one, person, will put in is an individual thing therefore we cannot guarantee what you will earn or whether you will earn anything at all.’ If you have small print of any kind at all on your website change it so that it can be easily seen and easy to read. Providing information that is difficult to read or can’t be read all, gives the impression that you have something to hide resulting in your visitor not trusting you and the product or products that you sell.

Do you give the price of your products on your website? I’ve seen this on so many websites. The only way to get the price of a product that I may be interested in is to click on the order form to get it. I can tell you right now, unless I can’t get the product anywhere else and I really need or want it, I’m not going to bother with your website any longer. I’ll just go elsewhere where I can easily get the price because it is clearly written on their product page. Keep in mind most will do the same. Make sure that you clearly display the prices of your products on your website. Don’t rely on people clicking the order form to get it because most won’t.

Is the content on your website easy to understand? I run across this so often that it’s ridiculous where the information is written in a way that only a rocket scientist could understand it or the information is written poorly because of bad grammar and bad spelling. Nothing will drive your visitors away faster than a website that is impossible to read. Remember that there are literally millions of websites on the web. If your website is hard to understand for the average person they will go somewhere else to get the information that they are looking for.

Do the above things and watch your traffic dwindle down to nothing in no time at all.

Most business owners fail to see the benefit of using press releases as a way to get their online or offline businesses known. Because of this very fact those who do use them will drive a lot of new business to their online or offline business if done properly.

If you think that your business is not newsworthy, think again. Go to Google news or any news related website and you will find many well-written, business related, press releases.

A press release is simply unknown news. It doesn’t have to be breaking news. It only needs to be newsworthy. If you have a product or service that no one knows about then you have newsworthy, press release material.

Here’s what happens when you submit a press release. Your press release is submitted to news sites, big and small. The news site will look at your press release and decide whether or not your press release is newsworthy or not. Most of the smaller sites will pick it up if it is properly written and easy to understand. The big guys such as CNN will look for unique information. Sites like Google and Yahoo is where an online business can do well because they are more apt to pick up a well-written release that is Internet or even better, it is search engine related.

The thing that you have to understand is that a press release is not an advertisement. It is a factual, narrative, newsworthy story and must be written that way. When you write a press release, you must write it in a third person fashion as if a reporter was interviewing you and the reporter is reporting your news to the world. In other words, when you write a press release, you are the reporter as well as the business owner who is being interviewed.

Writing a press release can be a daunting task because most of us are not used to writing in this way. However, once you have done a few of these it becomes much easier to do. As with anything that we do in life, the more we do it, the better we become at it.

If you have a new or existing business that you want to expose to the world there is no better way of doing it than through a well-written press release. If one of the big boys, such as Google, Yahoo, or even CNN picks it up, expect to get clobbered with more business than you can handle which is a nice problem to have.

If you feel that you are incapable of doing a press release yourself, you can always hire someone to do it for you. There are many services that will write it for a fee. Run a Google search for press release services. You will find a list of many who will perform this service for you.

Most press release sites have a free submission service as well as a paid service. While you can submit using the free version of the service, and you should for the most part, especially if you are just starting out however, you should use the paid submission service because of the extra benefits that it brings. With a paid submission, your press release will go out within a day or two and will be submitted to more news sites. I suggest that you do a paid submission quarterly and use the free service the rest of the time. Pay submissions are pretty inexpensive. Prweb is one of the largest on the web charges $40. Paying $40 every three months won’t break anyone considering the extra advantages that it can bring to your business.

You should try and write the press release yourself because hiring someone to do it for you can be quite expensive and unnecessary because with practice anyone can write a good press release him or herself. Check out Prweb and run a search for your type of business and read through the press releases there to get a better idea of how a press release should be written, and what it should look like. You can find Prweb here. http://prweb.com

One last thing that you should know about submitting press releases, most business owners will only submit a press release quarterly at most, while many others will do it just once and not do it again. If you want to get ahead and stay ahead of the competition in the business field that you are in, you should submit a new press release monthly using the free submission services and pay for it every three months.

You will be amazed how much better your business will do by using press releases because of the free publicity that it will bring to your business. Write a new press release often and watch your business grow a lot faster.