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There are definitely many scams out there especially on the Internet. Because everyone is hidden behind a computer monitor and the fact that ones identity can be easily hidden makes the Internet a perfect place to scam people. The disturbing thing about it is that many of the people who are involved in scams on the Internet are considered honest people in the real world and would never think of getting involved in this type of thing if their identity were known. Just goes to show you that many people will lie, cheat, and steal if they know that they can get away with it.

The definition that I found on the word scam is ‘to defraud; swindle or to deprive by deceit’. Because there are a lot of gray areas when it comes to scams I will give you my perception of what I think a scam is. It’s pretty easy to scam someone and come off like you delivered on your promise of what a product does.

I’ve seen and I’m sure that you have too, so many products out there especially digital, and member sites, that make outrageous claims that kind of deliver on what they say but doing it is nothing like they claim. I’m sure that you have seen and probably have tried some where the sales page implies that all you have to do is buy their product and do practically nothing and the money will roll in by the truckload only to find that it will require some real knowledge and serious work on your part. I’m not impartial to hard work but I do have a problem with someone telling me that I don’t have to do much only to find that its a complete lie. The marketer figures if they tell you that a lot of work is required you won’t buy their product. While some may not call something like this a scam because it gives you a workable strategy to get there. Deceiving people to believe that there will be little work to do when in fact, there will be, makes it a scam.

My perception of a scam is when you are made to believe that a product will do something that it does not do. A great example of this is the ‘Get Google Adwords Free’ e-book. The sales page leads you to believe that there is some kind of loophole in the Google adwords system that will allow you to advertise for free. The e-book tells you to sell ad space on your landing page to offset the advertising costs through adwords which is the same as getting your adwords advertising for free. The deception of the sales page and the reality of the strategy makes this a scam. While the sales page never says that there is a loophole in the adwords system, you are lead to believe that there is.

While there is no foolproof way to identify whether what is being advertised is a scam or not there are some things that you can look for that will help you determine whether it is a scam or not.

Be very leery of websites that display their earnings. This is done to give you a picture that you will attain the same results if you buy their product. You will almost always see some kind of earnings disclaimer somewhere on their website to protect them from being sued when their product doesn’t deliver on its claims, however, the implication of attaining the same results is there.

Watch out for marketers who do reviews by slamming one product and then proceed to try to sell you another one. This is the oldest ploy in the book and has worked very well for years, and still does. The problem with these types of reviews are that they are very biased and are written to sell you another product. In most cases, the marketer has never used any of the products being reviewed. This is not always the case but it is something to be suspicious of.

Another thing to look out for are the marketers who claim that they have been scammed over and over again until they finally found a product that works. These marketers are the worst because they feed on the fear of being scammed and they use this technique to let you know if you don’t buy their product that you probably will get scammed buying someone else’s product. This type of thing is almost always a scam.

Stay away from online job sites, survey, and data entry programs that require you to pay a fee because these are scams. No legitimate company will require you to pay a fee to do a service for them. It works the other way. Legitimate sites will always pay you to do the service. The rest are scams.

I know that almost every sales page on the Internet uses a lot of hype to sell their products. It’s just part of selling on the Internet. The ones that you want to be suspicious of are the ones that are over hyped and make outrageous claims. Always keep in the forefront of your mind that if it sounds too good to be true, it most certainly is.

As I said before, there are a lot of gray areas when it comes to Internet scams and most Internet marketers will do just enough to keep themselves out of trouble but many of them step over the line in order to make a sale and it is up to you to use common sense when considering to buy something online. Before you buy any product run a Google search on the product to see what others are saying about the product in question.

Some webmasters use black hat strategies to give their website a boost on the search engines index. Using black hat methods is a bad idea because it can get you banned by the search engines. If you know about black hat strategies you can bet that the search engines do too.

In case you don’t know what black hat is, here is a very short and basic description. Black hat is methods that are used to optimize a website in a way that violates the search engines guidelines.

Here are the most commonly used Black Hat SEO practices.

1.) Keyword stuffing is probably the most used black hat method. Keyword stuffing is overusing keywords throughout the web page. What black hat SEO’s do is repetitively use their target keyword phrase throughout the web page. For example, instead of using a keyword phrase once in the title, a black hat method may use that keyword phrase 4 or 5 times. Basically, keyword stuffing is the use of keywords more often than needed and because of this overuse the content on the web page often doesn’t make a lot of sense.

2.) Another black hat method is inserting hidden text on the web page. This is accomplished by making the text color the same as the background color of the web page allowing the black hat SEO to place the keywords on the web page hundreds of times but the visitor will never see them. The insertion of the hidden text is for the benefit of search engines only.

3.) Redirecting visitors from one web page to another. This is done with a META REFRESH tag or with a javascript. The idea behind this method is to optimize one page for the search engines and the other is a readable version for human visitors.

4.) Web page cloaking is another commonly used black hat method. Cloaking is used to trick the search engine spiders by pointing one page to the search engines and the other is another version of the web page and is pointed to the website visitors. The search engine version is optimized for the search engine spiders and the visitor version is human readable.

The four above strategies are not all of the black hat methods that are used but they are the most widely used.

Using black hat methods may get your website an initial boost on the major search engines but somewhere down the line they will detect these methods and will surely ban any website that is optimized using black hat methods.

Stick with the methods that are allowed by the search engines otherwise you will find yourself with a website that you can’t do anything with because it has been banned by the search engines.

After the news of the sale of ‘the Rich Jerk’ empire last week the Rich Jerk responds to the claims that he is selling his online business to avoid bankruptcy. He says on his blog that his business is not up for sale.

If what ‘the Rich Jerk’ says is true then why was it advertised for sale last week on BizQuest? The ad has since been removed. Sounds to me, like, ‘the Rich Jerk’ has something to hide.

He goes on with his usual trash talk saying how he is better than everyone else and that the rumors were spread by website owners to get traffic to their website. That’s not the case. The fact remains that his business was advertised for sale a week ago and today it is not there.

He went on to say that he was going to sue the big name marketers for putting the news of the sale on their websites. I don’t know what grounds he figures to sue on since his business was clearly advertised for sale.

I know that ‘the Rich Jerk’ is really out there but his response is really off the wall, even for him. You can find his response here.http://www.therichjerk.com/blog/2007/05/24/ha_ha_im_going_brokeagain.html

It’s really important to track the traffic to your website so that you know what pages your visitors are landing on the most often so that you can monetize the most popular pages to better provide your visitors with the information they are most interested in.

You may be very surprised at what web pages are the most popular. By tracking this website I have found that one of the most popular places is the search page. If I hadn’t been tracking this website I would have never known that nor would I have thought that the search page was one of the most popular here.

There are several ways that you can track your website but I will give you the two that I use for The Truth About Internet Marketing (this website).

The first is StatCounter. In my opinion StatCounter is the best tracking system on the Internet because of all the things on your website that you can track with it. This is an excellent tracker. There are so many things that you can track with StatCounter that it would be impossible to list everything here. I’m only going to tell you about the two tracking features that will help you evaluate where your traffic is coming from and what pages are being viewed the most often.

There are two features in StatCounter called ‘Recent Visitor Activity’ and ‘Returning Visitors’. These two features are just as they sound. The ‘Recent Visitor Activity’ feature gives you where the visitor came from such as a search engine or wherever the person came from and will also display what web page on your website the searcher was sent to. The ‘Returning Visitor’ feature tells you whether or not the visitor is a returning visitor which is really nice because it will tell you if there is a real interest in the topic of your website or not. If you are not yet using StatCounter you really should get it because you are missing out on important information about your website. You can get StatCounter here for free.

The second is ‘Crazy Egg’ which is another great tracking system. Crazy Egg is a little different than StatCounter in that it tracks your visitors after they have arrived on your website. In other words Crazy Egg picks up where StatCounter leaves off. When people come to your site you want to know exactly what pages they are looking at the most so that you know what your visitors are interested in the most so that you can provide them with this info on a regular basis and also make sure that these popular web pages are monetized to its full potential. Most important is to provide these visitors with the information that they came for on a regular basis so that they will come back often. ‘Crazy Egg’ will provide you with this crucial information. You can get Crazy Egg here for free.

If you are not tracking the visitors to your website you are missing out on a lot. The information that it will provide you will help you determine what your visitors want the most from your website and will provide your visitors with a better experience and will keep them coming back for more and at the same time will put more money in your pocket.

Kelly Felix “the Rick Jerk” is selling his entire online business lock, stock and barrel. The Shoemoney Blog reports that he is selling his online empire to avoid bankruptcy.

I knew something was up with the ‘Rich Jerk’ because I always got an email from him without fail at least once a week and haven’t gotten one from him since February when he was peddling his RJ X-Ray software.

Included in the sale is his 2 offices one in Carlsbad, CA. and the other in Thousand Oaks, CA. and the ‘Rich Jerk’ name along with his three websites at:

http://www.TheRichJerk.com
http://www.RichJerk.com
http://www.RichJerkRealEstate.com

You can find the announcement of the sale on BizQuest.com here: http://california.bizquest.com/836910.html

I was surprised by the news since the ‘Rich Jerk’ has been doing late night informmercials and seemed to be doing well. I guess everything isn’t always as it seems.

Pay Per Click can be a great way to convert some sales especially in the early going of your online business. There is something that you should never do and I have seen it quite a bit in pay per click ads that will cost you more than it will ever make you.

It seems to me that everyone is so fixated on the amount of traffic that they get instead of how much money that they are making. All the traffic in the world is useless if you are not converting that traffic to sales.

What you should never do is use the word ‘FREE’ in a pay per click ad. The reason that you never want to do this is because it will cost you valuable advertising dollars. If you are on a strict pay per click budget wasting advertising dollars is the last thing that you want to do.

The reason that you don’t want to put the word ‘FREE’ in your pay per click ad is you will attract a lot of freebie seekers at your expense. Even if you are using a freebie to entice people to purchase what you are selling, you still don’t want to put it in your pay per click ad because the freebie seeker will have to click the ad before he or she will realize that they will have to buy something in order to get the freebie. I can tell you that freebie seekers will never buy anything from you because they are looking for free stuff.

Save your free incentive offer for your pitch page where it won’t cost you anything. Keep it out of your pay per click ad. You will get a higher click through rate but a much lower conversion rate using the word free and you will increase your chances of having a losing advertising campaign to go along with that higher click through rate.

The name of the pay per click game is converting sales not getting as much traffic to your site as possible. I guess you have to ask yourself do I want more sales or more traffic. If your answer is the latter there are better ways to get traffic that won’t cost you money in advertising. Save your pay per click campaigns for making sales.

Your pay per click campaign should generate quality traffic that will convert that traffic to buying customers. Let the freebie seekers get their freebies somewhere else. Don’t let them do it on your dime.

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.

I’m sure that many of you have heard about the 10 Adsense Decoded Videos selling for $117. Before today, I never heard of them. The only reason I know about it now is because I received an email from Google Alerts. (Something everyone should use with a content based website)

Since I just heard about the Adsense Decoded Videos and know very little about them I really can’t say much about Adsense Decoded Videos one way or the other however, the standard red flags did go up when I read about Adsense Decoded Videos.

I’m not going to go into too much detail about Adsense Decoded Videos because you can get more info on their website. I will tell you what bothers me about Adsense Decoded Videos.

What raised some flags for me to begin with is that the thing sounds too good to be true along with the standard, results are not guaranteed. I always have a problem with disclaimers of this sort because if what they claim is true a disclaimer wouldn’t be needed.

Another thing that bothers me about Adsense Decoded Videos is the shortness of each video. Each video is about 15 minutes long. Seems to me that you can’t give too much detail in 15 minutes to explain how something works. On the other hand if these videos are straight to the point maybe it can be explained in 15 minutes. Still, I question how detailed the information is.

I did run a search on Adsense Decoded Videos and did not come up with anything negative about the videos. Who knows maybe they are worth the $117 price tag. I just question whether or not that this is the same old crap that seems too be a plague on the Internet.

If anyone has purchased these videos I would be interested in as I’m sure some of the readers of this website, some input of your results and impressions of the videos, good or bad. I’m looking for unbiased opinions. Any affiliate links to the Adsense Decoded Videos website will be deleted.

Here’s the link to adsense decoded videos home page.

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.