What is an Internet Marketing Godfather?

Someone who I *perceive* to know more about Internet Marketing Stuff than me. Usually, my thinking tells me that if they are making more money than me, I should listen to them.

But consider this. How come some Internet Marketing Gurus do not even tell you what script they use to manage their affiliate program?

Obviously this is an important ingredient in the Internet Marketing recipe. Of course it is, but they want to tell you how to get rich marketing their products. They will even sell you tools to help you with this.

Consider this too. Internet Marketers first mail their joint-venture partners with their *new* product. After the joint venture partners have mailed their huge lists, they then offer the item to the rest of their lowly affiliates.

What is Internet Marketing Sin?

In it's simplest form, it is perpetrating an untruth. Once upon a time it may or may not have been true, but things have changed.

The Internet is in a constant process of change and growth (like the Universe), and certain statements that once were valid and correct, no longer have meaning or value, or have less meaning or value to Internet Marketers today than they did a few years, or even a few months ago.

Example of an Internet Marketing Sin

Start a link exchange program in order to increase your search engine rankings.

This is not as effective today as it once was. The reason? The search engines are filtering out certain pages as irrelevant. A real life example of a page getting filtered out is one that is named "links.html", and maybe even directories called "links" could be targeted in the future.

This is just *one* example. I wander how many things we are doing which is at best is only a waste of time, and worse, is getting us banned and costing us money?

How does Internet Marketing information become a Sin?

The same way it does in any area of thinking.

Example: For decades, our parents, grandparents and great grandparents have watched ads on TV which claim milk is good us. Also, the parents *teach* their children that milk is good for them without ever doing any of their own research on the matter. They accept what they see on TV as truth and never question the validity of these "milk is good for you" statements. It must be true, there was a doctor

And so a sin is born. A belief based on an assumption without any investigation whatsoever. This sin gets passed down from generation to generation as absolute truth.

Another example: Industrial-age thinking. Parents who were brought up in the industrial age believe in getting a nice safe secure job and working hard for 48 weeks a year for someone else so that they can retire in comfort.

This sin is is still being passed down from parent to child. It is also being taught in schools as part of an education program. It must be the way to go, everybody mocks me if I think something else which opposes this.

In the same way, someone who got into Internet Marketing years ago could be perpetrating information which is simply not relevant today or maybe never was relevant. The information only served to waste our precious time, vacuum clean our wallets and line the pockets of the perpetrator.

These people might have published a book or started some kind of service on the Internet. The book or service is being plugged by thousands of affiliates who recruit even more affiliates.

This is how sins, errors in thinking, false beliefs or whatever else you want to call them get passed along the the Internet Marketing Community.

Differentiate between the true and the false

On the Internet, seven generations is not like seven human generations. Information passed on seven times, seven levels deep is seven generations.

Just because someone permission markets you with some new tool which will explode your Income, search engine rankings or traffic, does not mean that it will work for you today.

Hell, join their affiliate program and spread the sin one more generation. Recruit others who will recruit others and help you spread the sin.

Conclusion

Reading up-to-date search engine books is a step in the right direction, as is lurking around good webmaster and SEO forums. There you can ask questions about particular products and get feedback from those who have walked the path before you.

Copyright 2004 Ed Zivkovic

The author, Ed Zivkovic owns his own website which contains articles with all sorts of tips for work at home webmasters. Here is the site: http://www.ezau.com.