Internet Marketing ladder: one step closer to the top

photo: Josh McMillan

Getting there, one step at a time. Finally got my refund today, and a friend said he wanted to take over the Internet Scam site - so I'll now be free to simply concentrate on streamlining and publishing what I know about Internet marketing.

One interesting point which has come to light just over the last 24 hours is that most of promotion is link-building. And while this is still a great majority of what you have to do in Internet Marketing, it gives us structure to what has to be done.

My take on this is going to fill about a dozen sites on the same host, with a dozen books, a dozen email courses, and a dozen CD's/DVD's filled with videos (as well as online).

If you've been following this blog intently, you may have noticed some data going up and then coming down again. I'll be able to explain this more thoroughly in these books, since now I've lived through and refined what can happen to a person when they make certain promotional steps. And more of what needs to be done to ensure these are properly effective.

This, of course, isn't the last of this - since the Internet itself is evolving and so are the lessons we learn daily as we go.

One of the more interesting mentors I've been working to catch up with recently is Charles Heflin. He's from a ThemeZoom SEO background, so is thoroughly engaged with real-world studies on what is effective site-building. As well, he is very active in the social media scene and can tell you exactly how to build an effective social network that really brings home the bacon.

While I've got a desk full of notes on this area, I'll start sorting and weeding these through tomorrow. Don't know if these will result in posts or not - since some of it is so esoteric to be nearly gobbledegook until it's all sorted through and aligned.

As well, I have to research the keywords and competition for 12 different sites in order to present them in a fashion that will be effective and useful.

One immediate spin-off is that I'll be able to do a sort of "Chicken Soup" transmorgrification, making it possible for this data to be used by all sorts of niches from small organic farmers to Fortune 500 companies, from WAHM's to Boomers - and everyone inbetween. If my heart were in it, I could spend the rest of my life just marketing this to all the various niches which need to be on the Internet to expand their own product offerings.

My work in this is to actually just perfect the marketing channel itself, so that I can move into a much tougher set of niches to crack - personal improvement.

And there are some trees beyond that section of forest as well.

I imagine that I'll be adding to this area as I find more about what happens after - particularly in building a subscription site. (Internet marketing has plenty of velvet rope areas already, so I won't bother in this one - too much inane competition. I've got bigger fish which create far more impressive changes for this planet than simply making tons of money.)

But I wanted to keep you up to date.

And if you haven't, subscribe to this blog as it will be an outlier promotion line for this new baker's dozen of products coming out. You won't want to miss this insight as I dissect the basics and show how simple it is for anyone to do this - and why most people don't...

5 ways to find a decent Internet Marketing Trainer: Community is your best indicator of stuff that works

(photocredit: ItsaFineDay)
5 Secret ways to finding Internet Marketing Training that works.

Summation: Community

This is the bottom line to all the research I've been at for all these years.

I looked over several ways people trained themselves up on making money online. There's a lot to it, but only three ways I've found so far are routinely held as working.

1. 30 Day Challenge (free) http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/
2. SiteBuildIt (monthly fees) http://www.sitebuildit.com/
3. Internet Marketing Center (much more expensive) http://www.marketingtips.com/

(Now I've got affiliate links for the last two, but they aren't included here - this is just free info for you to check out. Maybe I'm crazy, but just hear me out...)

The reason I can tell these sites work is because people are talking positively about them. Far more than run them down.

Here's a hint: Want to find out the low-down and dirty about something? Type in "(insert company name) scam" and you'll quickly find out if they are rip-offs.

But what you won't find are the many and real thank you letters and posts from people who they have helped. Go to these sites (and the more higher priced, the more you get the sales treatment) and check them out. You'll probably see some cherry-picked testimonials, but you'll also find forums and blogs where people honestly are thanking them for all their hard work and continuing effort on this line.

I mention these three because those are the only ones I've found to date with very high ratings by their own community.

That last phrase says it all - by their own community. If a company is a success, they've built a loyal following. Loyal. Like MACs, not Microsoft or IBM. Like Ubuntu and Linux distro's in general. This is the real point of marketing - building up a client base which doesn't quit, even after they've bought all you have to offer.

I've told you earlier (on a related blog if not this one so much) about setting myself up for a scam through Internet Income Solutions, BidFuel, and Bright Builders. These guys are all scammers. Not the people who work for them at lower levels - the ones I've talked to seem to be good, hardworking people. But the founders are scammers. Because they simply don't deliver.

What you won't find connected to any of these companies is a real, honest, active forum and community. Their customers don't stick with them for any reason. Because they don't deliver.

Those three companies above are based on simply overpricing Internet training to people who don't know better and then piling on monthly hosting fees and other nonsense to pull some more money from them. On top of that, they then sell their names as many times as possible to other scam-artists.

Actually, if you do get through their training, you can learn a lot. But people like me (who really should have known better - and do now) don't get anything out of it, because we've already been active for years in this industry and have a pretty good idea of how to make things happen.

What they don't tell you at the outset is that only about 3-5% of the people who sign up for their training make any decent money at it - much less recoup their investment. So the company makes their money by selling a whole lot of packages, under-delivering, and moving on. The bottom line is that they aren't set up to really help you make a decent living at this and don't really care if you do or not. They are only in it for the money. And this is why it is a rip-off.

I mentioned the underlings aren't that way. True. Nice folks. But they are limited in what they can offer and do. Bright Builders, for instance, really only gives you 4 hours of training on a line of 15 minutes once a week, every other week. They've since merged with a newcomer, Thrive Learning Institute (already noted as a scam - with more incidents being added regularly) - who now gives you two sessions of 30 minutes each week for four weeks. Adds up to the same. Pay your $6,000 and get very expensive lessons at stuff you can learn on your own for free. If you know what you're doing, you can get them to cut out the extra expenses, as you can do all of this with much cheaper hosting - but if you really know what you are doing, you don't sign up with them to begin with...

Anyway - they don't have a community for one simple reason: corporately, they don't care.

Simple.

Their corporation is there to make as much money as they can as fast as they can, and they see some suckers born on the Internet every minute. The guys they suck in don't know their way around the Internet and so click on one of these free training (for 15 days, and then they charge you $39.95 monthly thereafter - thanks, BidFuel).

Moral of the story:

1. Never give your credit card data online (or over the phone) unless you've thoroughly checked out the company and all of their fine print. Same for your phone number.
2. Always send your sign-up email address requests to a free email address you can throw away.
3. Find out if that company has a real community before you pay anything, or agree to anything. Investigate that community and read their posts and comments. Thoroughly.
   
4. Look them up on various scam boards (like RipoffReports.com) to see if they come up - and then compare these to their community comments to see if they are just sour grapes.

(Now, don't buy everything you see in a forum. Compare the data. Thrive was started up early last year, but was registered under an existing LLC which had been operating for years prior. One forum I visited was being actively shilled by some people who raved about their service with Thrive - only problem was that they said they had been getting service for years, when the company was only a few months old. I know - I've talked to people at Thrive and they each separately told me about the growth its had for only being a few months old.)

There you have it - and I hope you have incredible success in whatever you try.

PS. Why don't I link to Bright Builders, Internet Income Solutions, Thrive Learning Institute, or BidFuel? Because they aren't worth it. They don't get their traffic by using search engines or the marketing lessons they teach - because they depend on hooking up with telemarketing companies and their scammy salespeople.

PPS. Probably we should set up a support group community for Bright Builder survivors - for now, just head over to 30 Day Challenge's FriendFeed room - they'll help you out for nothing.

How telemarketer scams get traction - ripoff report - preying on the naive...

(photo credit: www.movies-photos.com)

Who Internet Scams Prey on and how... Ripoff Report

I was looking up a triage of messy telemarketer scammers I had run into:
Bidfuel.com, InternetIncomeSolutions.biz, and BrightBuilders.com

Looking these up on various SEO tools gave an interesting result. The first two weren't optimized even slightly for any niche and didn't even utilize basic SEO tactics. Yet they sold "Internet training" - specifically, "Ebay business starter" (which according to WordTracker, no one searches for).

BrightBuilders was the best of the lot in this regard.

However, when I looked for incoming links, they had between 0 and 4. I've got a single page with nothing on it, but it's linked over 768 times within a couple of months of getting the domain!

Now - it gets thicker. Looking these up on quantcast.com, the other shoe drops.

The people who go to there site are 1) Decent income, no education. 2) Are continually returning visitors - meaning they were sold a subscription.

So despite how bad they are in terms of reputation (there are ripoff reports and scam alerts in the top five for all three) - the people who buy their stuff don't know enough to look them up first. (Or, in my case, fell for the sales pitch and didn't bother to google them.)

And there you have it. Not everyone who is on the Internet even cares if someone does more than look over their site casually. That site isn't designed to sell anyone anything They aren't there to get visitors. In two of the three examples, they are simply there as a login site for other traffic.

If you do research these guys, you'll find that they are really some extremely bad-intentioned telemarketers who prey on the naive - and cover their tracks pretty well. But if they were really in business for real, they'd "eat their own dog food", meaning apply what they teach.

Caveat Emptor.

PS. Why do I link to them with these keywords? Because maybe if we all link to them with terms like "Internet Scam" and "Ripoff Report", they'll start getting that link reputation. Certainly they have no defense against it. At least its something.