For those of you who have been subscribers to this blog for quite a while you will no that I write a good bit about Internet Marketing. The main reason I started writing about this subject is because at the time I started this blog I was spending a lot of time on the Warrior Forum. There are some posts in that forum that offer some great ideas for marketing on the Internet, but  there are also a lot of people on the forum who are just trying to rip people off.

You can go there just about any day and find a post talking about some Internet Marketing Guru and how they made millions of dollars on their last eBook. Most of these Gurus are selling some ebook or software that promises to make you millions if you will just follow the directions and take action. I’ll admit I’ve purchased a few of these products, but I did not make millions. I guess I’m just no smart enough or I did not follow the directions properly. Or it may have been that my morals would not allow me to take advantage of someone else, which is what a lot of these books teach. I’m not saying they all do, but there are some practices which I would deem as unethical. I’m not saying they all are pushing crap, but it does happen a lot more than you would think.

Of course I’ve always wondered a couple of things. If these Gurus are so great at building web communities and they have been building these since the web was an infant, then you would think you could find their name associated with one of the huge online ventures that have made millions or been sold for millions or billions. But outside of John Reese, you can’t really find any of these names associated with any really big popular sites. At least I have not been able to find any association. If I’m incorrect, will someone please correct me.

Now while I don’t doubt that there are probably thousands of websites these people own and operate, I don’t know of any really big popular sites. This tells me that most of these people own small sites that bring in a few visitors per day and they make their money in the form of a few pennies each day multiplied by the thousands of sites. In fact the few sites I have found show this to be the norm. Now while this may be a valid business model for some it seems like a lot of work when you could just build one large authority site, promote it like crazy and come out better in the long run. Of course this  is not the main promoted business model promoted. The main idea of most Internet Marketers seems to be build a site with 10 or so rewashed PLR articles, promote it to a few directories to fool the Search engines into indexing it, spam your link through out the web to get a few people visiting the site and then do this 5 to 10 times every day. So you build small site after site registering a domain name for each one. Or you take a domain name, utilize some sort of site generating software or RSS feed and have the software create the site for you. You slap some adsense or Affiliate programs on these sites and hope for a few clicks and maybe a purchase. You can build thousands of these and earn some money from them. These seems really expensive to me. If you register a domain name with Godaddy you can spend $9 dollars per top level domain per year. Now you can get an unlimited domain hosting account fairly cheap, but the domain name registrations are going to cut into your profits.

Now once you have these sites built, you throw together an eBooks and build a sales page promoting the book. Put your book on Clickbank and wait for the sales to come in. Sometimes if the copy is good enough on the sales page, then the sales will come in. Of course then you talk others into promoting your eBook as affiliates then you can sell more. Now you don’t really care if anyone actually learns how to make money, you really don’t want them to become self sufficient. for everyone who actually learns how to make enough money to become self sufficient, the Guru loses a potential customer.

The one main rule of any selling business is to make the customer come back and buy again and again. The trick to be successful is to make the product quality just good enough to impose a level of satisfaction with the customer, but of the quality that the customer never needs to buy another copy or version in the case of eBooks.

All this may be acceptable for some but for me, I’m not sure if my ethics allow me to be associated with this type of business.

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There is an interesting post over at Small Fish Big Money that provides methods to continue to earn money with enduring the Google wrath. Unless you have been on another planet I’m sure you have heard of Google’s latest attack against solicited reviews on blogs or links. Fabien discusses some other options for blogger to continue to monetize their blogs in an effective manner without a penalty.

The stronger that Google becomes, the more items like this will be important to the smaller bloggers who are just trying to make their way and earn a little money at the same time. Google has shown an increasing trend towards these sort of actions that hurt webmasters. Of course its always under the pretense of protecting the validity of their search results. While this may be a valid argument, it seems that more and more the penalties comes to websites which are promoting a similar business model to Google. Many people consider Google a search engine company and at one time when the company was young it was true. They still have a search engine, but Google is in the business of selling links. No matter how you look at it that is where most of their money comes from, so they are a link selling company.

I was in a meeting several years ago where a Microsoft Executive was speaking and he made a comment about how he did not want to help Microsoft’s competitor Google. At the time I did not understand how Google could be considered a competitor to MS. After all Microsoft is in the Operating System and Application market. Of course Google is moving head strong into Applications now and there are rumors abound that Google is secretly building a OS. I would not be surprised if it was not true. Of course if they do build a Google Operating System, then it will just be a modification of some flavor of Linux and I doubt it will add much more value to a Linux OS other than to make it bloated. But I’m sure there will be some Adword ads built into it somewhere.

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I’ve been watching Google Trends lately and I noticed something interesting. It seems people are constantly searching for information on what comes on TV. I noticed TNT is showing A Christmas Story( which by the way is one of my favorite movies. You’ll shoot your eye kid) today. I think this may be the first showing of this movie this year. Well I noticed the search terms are now number 4 on the hot trends list with a peak of a couple of hours ago.

I’ve been watching Google Trends a lot lately and I notice this happens all the time. If you watch the cable channels directory then you will notice a lot of times the top search phrases are titles of Television Movies. Now how could you take advantage of this. Well one thing you could do is to watch the guides days in advance and try to create pages on the topics that rank well in the SE’s. Its pretty much a crap shoot as its hard to tell exactly what people are going to be searching for and then you will have to get into the top of the search results. But if you could manage that task then you may get some decent traffic. This would really be chasing a phantom’s tale, but it may be something worth looking at. Well off to watch the rest of A Christmas Story.

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