These days on the internet, it's hard to tell who's the real deal and who's just out to get your hard-earned bucks. Numerous "systems" and products that promise easy money on autopilot now populate the virtual information world. It seems that every month some "previously unknown guru" or "underground marketer" comes out of the woodwork launching new products guaranteed to fill your bank account with limitless money.
For a piece of the $6Billion Dollar Internet Marketing pie, a lot of marketers have become highly creative in having others buy their products.Their websites and emails tout "secrets" they say haven't been revealed before or untapped tools right under your noses (that everyone seems to have overlooked), going as far as stating that without their product, you're destined to fail in your marketing efforts regardless of what you do.
Not that these launched products are completely detrimental to the net. As in anything, some are legitimate, others are just full of fluff. In a way they actually contribute to the net's main purpose of disseminating information. It is supposed to be the information superhighway, after all. One must be careful in crossing this superhighway nowadays, though.
If you're a newbie, you can benefit from some of these information. You just have to be selective and practical in going about it. For beginners, it is always worthwhile keeping in mind the real basics of marketing, whether online or in the traditional world:
a. Have the right mindset - the internet wasn't perfected in a day, and your riches are not going to come to you by next tuesday so it's important to be patient and do what needs doing. The internet is always a work in progress.
b. Have the right information - get as much valid, complete information as you can before dipping into your marketing venture in order for you to maximize your time on the right marketing strategy or approach fit for you.
c. Pay Right for the information - don't get carried away by all the hype. A high price tag doesn't necessarily mean a worthy investment. There are gems of information that can be gotten at good price points (see more on this later).
c. Target the right market - the internet is just another market place following the rules of supply and demand. When you supply something in high demand, you'll profit from it. The trick is in knowing what the market wants and putting it in front of them.
d. Have your own products - eventually, this should be the culmination of your internet marketing efforts. This beats relying on commissions from other merchants when you sell their merchandise.
e. Quantify your efforts thru web statistics - what gets measured eventually gets improved, so know where your business is coming from, what search terms your web visitors used to get to your website, then use that info to improve your operations
f. Act on What You Learn - this is actually one of the most obvious secrets in succeeding not just in internet marketing, but in your life as well. You will find that the first time you do things such as marketing online, things are quite different from what you've read, quite literally. The thing is to keep moving forward, sometimes experimenting, but constantly improving yourself and your business.
Beginner internet marketers have a very special need in getting the right information covering nearly all aspects of these basics, since they require a holistic approach to understanding internet marketing. A lack of proper information usually results in an aspiring internet marketer concentrating in only one form of making money online, and once that fails, they usually give up and start regarding the net as being overrated. which is sometimes a real shame, since it's too early in the game to quit.
That need not be the case. Although it's sometimes rare to find the "missing link", or the compilation of information that'll give you nearly all of these basics to internet marketing, you can find a phenomenally complete compilation for newbies that comes close to it at this website: www.quickpath2dollars.com
Most ebooks, software, or niche products out there usually cover or specialize only in one or two aspects of internet marketing. This website (www.quickpath2dollars.com) offers something quite different, covering and offering all three types of products at the same time: internet marketing concepts, software tools and in-demand niche products, a holistic combination that shortens the learning and business curve for the greenhorn internet marketer significantly.
Aside from exercising the right basics and prudence in selecting products you can learn from online, one should also consider product price points. This means paying for the actual information value of the product, not just its perceived value.
Perceived value, as you'll learn from experience later on online, is not necessarily a result of honest product feedback or review, but could be a result of numerous product affiliates exulting praises using the same script from the product maker himself. Of course there are honest reviewers and legitimate users online who do give honest feedback, but they're few and far between, and their voices are usually drowned out by the throng of noisy affiliates long before they're even heard.
New internet marketers must be cautious in being exposured or adapting to the new internet marketing trend wherein high-profile internet marketing "gurus" are charging sky-high prices for their products. Imagine shelling out $297, $497 even $997 for electronic ebooks or dvd compilations.
And if you're not "alert" enough to buy them the first time around, they're prices are supposedly going to go up. So if you don't get it at $997, you're going to have to shell out $500 more the next time around, all because the information is presumably so valuable for you to pass up. These products are primed to be the cream of the crop and well worth their price in gold. Well, in theory at least, according to the product makers, their joint venture partners, affiliates, brokers and promoters.
That's a classic example of reverse psychology being used online, but it's a trend being used nonetheless and something one must be aware of. As a new internet marketer, it's important to see just how far some marketers have gone in pushing the envelope to make money and benefit from an online community's (sometimes) needy psyche.
It's well worth remembering just what the internet was originally designed for: a virtual environment originally designed and built for free information to the community. This trend of premium pricing (some call it paradigm shift) products is quite alarming, especially to internet marketers coming in not equipped with 3 month's worth of rent to pay for them.
Worrisome still is that a lot of aspiring internet marketers actually fall for these scheme, in a form of mass-hysteria mentality one would find quite incredible. You see web pages from these web gurus' websites splashed with testimony after testimony of successful buyers, or those who're supposedly making millions in 6 months after buying these products.
Some see this reverse-psycology tactic as ingenious, some say it's a self-perpetuating prophesy, others think it's hype. As a beginner, be aware that no internet marketing secret is worth losing your shirt over, or worth securing a mortgage for...
In my last installment I promised that this time around I would discuss the importance of links in your search optimization efforts as well as how to get them. Unfortunately this article got long in a hurry, so we'll just tackle the importance of getting external links now. I think you might be surprised at how vitally important they are, and mildly depressed at how hard it is to get high-value links. But stay tuned: Part 4 of this series will improve your mood.
In my opinion, the entire field of search engine optimization has become a lot simpler in the last year. In a nutshell, keyword optimization is nice, but getting external links is basically the whole enchilada. If you need to focus your time and energy, focus on acquiring unreciprocated external links.
Proving the Point
If you want to see how important links are, open your web browser, go to Google.com, and do a search on ?Click Here?. The first result is Adobe.com's Acrobat Reader download page. Interesting, no?
Even more interesting is the fact that the words ?Click Here? are nowhere on the page. It would be silly to use ?Click Here? as keywords because it is not a normal search term, and Adobe did not even include them anywhere on the page text, title, description, or in any metatags at all. So why does Google rank Adobe's download page number one on that term?
The answer is external links. As a convenience to customers and site visitors, just about every web site that has a PDF file available also has a link to Adobe.com for the Acrobat download. And almost invariably, the link text is something like, ?If you need Acrobat Reader, click here.?
Anchors Aweigh!
The Adobe example illustrates a key point about links: The search engines use anchor text as a huge hint as to what the target web page is really about. Anchor text, for those who need to know, is the visible link text that you click on in the browser when the page is rendered. The URL the link takes you to can be something like, ?http://midnightmarketer.com?, whereas the anchor text can be, ?Free web marketing community site??or virtually anything the page author wants to say.
In some ways that makes our lives more difficult because we cannot control how others link to us, much less whether they link to us. There are some ways around this that I'll touch cover in the next installment. But first a word about Page Rank.
A Salute to Those of High Rank
As mentioned in a prior installment, Page Rank is a term Google coined for how valuable or important it believes your web site to be relative to other pages on the web. Page Rank values range from 0 to 10 (which is an eleven point scale, oddly enough). The actual components of Google's Page Rank calculation are yet another closely guarded secret, but it doesn't take a genius to see that the number of external links to your page is a huge part of it.
The importance of Page Rank is sometimes overblown since search engines must by definition care more about a page's relevance to search queries. However, Page Rank is definitely one of the factors that will push your page higher in the crowd of equally relevant pages returned as query results. If you have virtually no competitors for your primary keywords, don't worry about Page Rank. The rest of us need to have it on our radar.
There are precious few PR 10 web pages and at the time I'm writing this, Adobe's Acrobat download page does indeed have that coveted PR 10 ranking. It certainly got the bulk of its rank because so many sites provide unreciprocated links to it. Another factor in Page Rank appears to be age: All things being equal, sites that have been around longer tend to have higher Page Rank values.
A hint to those still awake: The age factor as well as the Google sandbox described in part 1 of this series are both powerful arguments for getting web sites up and spidered as soon as possible, even if only as prototypes or proof-of-concepts.
If you were to survey tens of thousands of web sites, I believe you'd find that the most successful private, non-corporate web sites have a PR of 6. There are very, very few PR 7 sites, and if you've managed to achieve a PR 4 or 5 without professional SEO help, you've done pretty well.
Now we come to the slightly depressing part: One of the best ways to improve your page rank (and therefore improving the tendency to show up higher in search results) is to get an unreciprocated link to your page from a page with a higher page rank. If the Acrobat download page linked to my site, I'd be sitting pretty.
But alas, such links are very difficult to come by. Even worse, as we said in part 2, the one thing we can easily offer is a return link, but such reciprocal links have dubious value. I have anecdotal evidence that their value is rapidly declining and they are worth far less now than they were just one month ago when I wrote those words.
Here's another tip: Reciprocal links to sites that have nothing to do with your web site in terms of content are a total waste of time. If you have a site about wedding gowns and you exchange links with a gambling site, in my opinion you've achieved nothing.
I'm connecting some faint dots, I admit, but I know Google in particular is investing a lot of effort in what is called ?semantic analysis?. In short, they have a pretty good idea of what your web site is about, and they are highly motivated to provide the best possible search results. If a wedding site and a gambling site link to each other, the search engines are not all that interested in your contention that marriage is a gamble. That link is worth nothing.
In fact, I predict that if Google finds many reciprocal links with unrelated sites on your web page, you will actually be punished in terms of your page's ranking. I can't prove it yet, but as I said in part 1, if you learn to think like the spider, you'll be able to predict what they're going to do.
The spider likes it when you link to things that provide value to your visitors. And the spider gets angry when you trade worthless links solely for the purpose of fooling it into thinking your site is wildly popular. I predict spidey will bite you, if not today then tomorrow.
So what's a new web site owner to do? There is no free lunch, but we'll evaluate the items on the menu in part 4.
Both Winston Yam & Ross Lambert are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Winston Yam has sinced written about articles on various topics from Site Promotion. Winston D Yam is webmaster and owner of, a website offering one of the most holistic, virtually complete internet marketing guide an. Winston Yam's top article generates over 720 views. to your Favourites.
Ross Lambert has sinced written about articles on various topics from Wine and Spirits, Site Promotion and SEO Search Engine Optimization. To learn more about SEO, please visit . Ross Lambert founded Midnight Marketer, a newbie-friendly community of web marketers. He is also the author o. Ross Lambert's top article generates over 4400 views. to your Favourites.