Things evolved. One great opportunity for these “gurus” came. The crisis arrived and thousands of people were losing their jobs, most of them with some money in the pocket, enough to think to start a business. It was a Gold Rush. “gurus” emerged from everywhere. All of them were claiming they had the only revolutinary method that was going to make you rich. Stone soup !!! It was always the same stone enabling to people to make the same soup. What changed then, was that these old “gurus” became sponsors of the other ones. They had sold products, they had a mailing list, they could get commissions on sales. Great!!! Not to have a product anymore, not to deal with client anymore. Just get a linkl from clickbank and 70% of the price of the product. The lake was full of fish, so even little money per fish would convert in moutains of fresh bucks.

So, a third step arrived. These first gurus lost credibility. I must confess that my Hotmail (the mail I access only once a month for it not to be canceled) account is full of these “gurus” mail, all of them pretending that their old friend from school who was dying hungry suddenly had enough money to buy a laptop, an Internet connection and become a millionaire. It was so crazy that I could see 5 to 10 mails from these “gurus” coming in my inbox selling all the same product. Come on, guys! I’m reading any of them. There were so much products and so much “gurus” that mail was flooding on an incredible rate. If I was following all these advices, I could spend more than 100 USD per day.

Too much was too much. So, a fourth wave had to come. How to become more reasonable? These “gurus” started to see they had lost their credibility so they got back to their list, gave “free” stuff (most of the time, revamped old product) asking for an apology. People, I swear that I understand that I was going crazy, I made you loose a lot of bucks, so, now, I’m going to give you just the real product that you need, very few selected ones. So these “gurus” started to reduce the amount of mail, promoted by far fewer products. But, they had made their lifestyle, getting good commission and they didn’t want to loose it. So, they started to make the box nicer, with more “unannounced” free gifts, adding hundreds and hundreds of dollar, claiming that a 1,997 USD is worth it. This was the only way to catch the attention of these “gurus”. Let’s make just something like a 1,000 USd on each sale and make 100 sale a month instead of making 1 USD per sale with 100,000 sales a month.

The result: A robbery. No product can pretend to have a value of 2,000 USD, especially when they’re no miracle. The same old equation is still the same: build a site, promote it, get traffic and money will follow.

So, now, what do I do? Here are my few tips.

1. I never (NEVER) buy a product if I have to buy it before a certain time, or, otherwise I’ll loose the fantastic, great, big, amazing opportunity of my life. All these mails are filtered, go to their folders and I read them once a month. If a product was promoted for a certain period of time and this time is over, too bad for THEM. They won’t get MY money. If the product is really good, another guy will try to sell it later.

2. You must understand what Internet Marketing is all about. You must understand what Marketing is all about. As I often say, things aren’t different from the real world on the online world. Things just go faster. So, Marketing is bringing the right product (be it product, service or information) to the right people, in the right place with the right price. That’s the 4 Ps of Marketing: product, place, people, price. Never forget it. Because the same occur online. Internet Marketing is about presenting products, articles, sites to people who are searching about something on the net and be well presented to people so that they eventually consider that giving you money will help them. That’s all!

The lessons from that. Don’t scam and don’t get scammed!

Don’t get scammed

Once again, the equation is simple. Build a site, promote it, get traffic, monetize it well and money will follow. They’re different scheme for that, and I’ll take about it in another post. For now, let’s take the simplest one: we want clicks on Adsense Ads, getting traffic fromm Google Search. Just buy products that will help you fill the equation that way.

Buy a service that will give you original articles. No automated solution will ever work. If you make a crappy site, you’ll get crappy traffic and get crappy clicks (one the Adsense value at 0.01 USD). You must understand the process. Google search wants to answer as best as possible to the problems the searcher has. If your site doesn’t help, it doesn’t help. Why bother send people there? And the patterns are always the same.. easy to detect.

Promotion. You’ll find products that automate link building, writing rubbish on each and every social network, blog platform, …. Once again, so easy to detect…. Find products that really help your site be a real world site, someone people find useful when they come to it.

Believe me. I have a lot of sites and I can see the difference between the sites that were crappy made, based on “gurus” advices and the one I make now, based on my understanding of the process. The traffic I receive is not much (in “gurus” standards) but the quality is so high that both CTR and eCPM are far higher that what most people report.

So, to conclude, if you want to get in the Internet Marketing game, Welcome. This trip is fun and there’s so much to learn. You must understand that, you’ll make mistakes, because no products available there give you the miracle you expect. If you follow them, you’ll loose. So be prepared to it. Make mistakes and LEARN. By learning, you’ll start to understand the process and build your own method. You’ll build a business with providers, clients and processed that you can monitor. I’ll be here to help you. I’ll post more about that. For sure and for FREE!

This blog is also about sharing. One complaint I always had is how many people I did have an impact in my classes. Generally, not much. When you have just 10-14 people each semester, it takes a long time to reach just 100, where about 99% will have forgotten all what you teached the day after the exam. So I started to teach in more Universities. I can say I have now something around 200 students in a year. It’s by far bigger. The impact is bigger, especially with the one who continue to follow you on twitter or facebook and where you can your seeds growing. But it still isn’t enough. Conferences, speeches in different places also helps grow the audience. Still not enough. So, here comes this blog. Why not share here everything I find, read, get interest in about Technology or Internet Marketing.

I have one belief about that point. I know people who are far better in selling things online than I am. I also know people who are better than I am in computing. But, I do not think you can find easily a person which have the knowledge I have in both fields, and I think that creates me an advantage. So, we’ll see on the road what that blog gives.