Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
You’ve read all about it. You’ve heard it all before…
That Internet Marketers just lay around in their pajamas all day barely working. That they spend all their time on the beach doing whatever the heck they want, travelling the world and driving expensive cars.
Or that the Internet Marketing lifestyle is working 2 hours/week making an easy 6 figures a year on “autopilot”. The reality is most of what you read online about online marketing is total hyped up B.S. designed to get you to buy some info product.
Today I wanted to dismiss a bunch of deadly Internet Marketing myths and divulge some real information that you need to hear about the Internet Marketing niche.
1. Most Internet Marketers Are Full Of Shit
This piece of information is valuable beyond belief if you’re just getting started in the online marketing world or wanting to become another Frank Kern or Ryan Deiss.
The problem with the majority of Internet Marketers is that they all make their money in the Internet Marketing niche. The Internet Marketing niche basically consists of Make Money Online nonsense and traffic/lead/customer generation bullshit.
It’s Internet Marketers teaching other Internet Marketers Internet Marketing, how retarded is that (LOL)?
Internet Marketers have serious skills. They know how to market on Facebook, get top rankings and how to dominate social media. But what do they moronically do with their knowledge?
They sell it in the form of cheap info products to OTHER Internet Marketers for $7-$10 on the low end up to $50-$200 on the high end. They giveaway all their secrets to other Internet Marketers because every Internet Marketer wants to be another guru. The truth is you’d make 100 times more money using Internet Marketing outside of the Internet Marketing niche.
Don’t get dragged into the Internet Marketing community. It’s essentially this incestuous pit of money grabbers who all sell, buy and promote each other’s products.
99% of Internet Marketers in the Internet Marketing niche don’t have real businesses. They simply sell stuff to other Internet Marketers which is an awful business model since there’s 1000 times more money outside of IM.
Most IM products are based on theory since they don’t have real businesses to test the theory on.
2. Internet Marketing Is Easy
Internet Marketing is by no means easy. If you’re building an IM business from scratch on a very limited budget it can take years to succeed – the opposite of easy. Starting an online business isn’t so different from starting an offline business.
Internet Marketing requires hard work, dedication and strategic thinking just like anything else. There are no push-button software that makes millions; not yet anyway.
3. Internet Marketing Is Free
Internet Marketing is free? That’s just ridiculous. Internet Marketing could possibly cost nothing. I mean if you really wanted to build an online business from nothing, and I mean $0.00 – you could but it’d take you several years.
Whether you want to do that to prove a point or something, I don’t know – but it’s a terrible idea. If you have no money, get a job, borrow it or dig into your savings – don’t start from scratch.
There are costs associated with every business and while Internet Marketing may not be free; you certainly can start it on a shoe string budget. For around $1000, you can start an online business quite easily – but still not $0.00.
4. You Barely Have To Work
I would say that Internet Marketers spend more time working than most 9-5′ers. Not because they have to, because they want to.
You can quite easily work 2-4 hours a week and make a small living on the Internet. However, Internet Marketing is fun, enjoyable and addictive. That’s why Internet Marketers work for so many hours and late nights.
They either haven’t figured it out yet or are seriously enjoying themselves. In the beginning; expect to work hard and long hours. Once you’re properly set up, you can work as much as you want to.
5. You Can Just Take Off, Travel The World And Keep Getting Paid
This is what drags a lot of folks into the online world of marketing. The hype says Internet Marketing will just pay you automatically without you ever working. While that may be true only once you’ve built a system, the maximum you can really “take off” for is 2-3 months. After that, your business will probably collapse.
Internet Marketing is constantly evolving, if you don’t predict what’s to come, listen to the signals and adapt prior to a major shift – you can lose everything.
6. Internet Marketing Is A Scam
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Yes, there are hundreds of scam artists on the Internet. Yes, there are too many people selling sketchy black hat tricks, methods and software…
…and yes – there are countless Nigerians out there waiting to steal your hard earned money (kidding). The fact is the offline world is crawling with far more scams than the Internet. Fortunately online scams are easy to point out.
With enough research, you can find high quality products that give real value…
…and yes – Internet Marketers do make money from completely legal, safe products that help real people.
7. $100,000 In 30 Days
Unless you’re a genius or have hundreds of thousands behind you, there’s no such thing as Instant Internet Riches. Anyone who guarantees your success is not to be trusted. Normal people are making fortunes online, but none of them overnight – despite what Clickbank sales pages might say.
8. Internet Marketing Is For Computer Geeks
This one is quite annoying. Just because I make a living online does not mean I know anything about computers. I probably know slightly more than most people only because of the sheer number of hours I spend online each week.
I know the very basics and that’s all that is required.
Windows Explorer, Google Chrome, Gmail, Downloading, Saving, Zipping/Unzipping, Attaching Files and Microsoft Word are all you really need to understand. The complex stuff like web design and programming should always be outsourced.
9. It’s All About Traffic
More traffic means more money, right? Traffic is all that matters, right?
No and definitely not. Traffic is for scaling up your online business. More traffic doesn’t directly translate into more revenue.
Online marketing is all about conversions. Converting traffic into leads and leads into customers. Conversions are 100 times more important than traffic generation. Any idiot can generate visitors, but only the masters are able to persuade A LOT of them to buy.
Websites that get 100 visitors/day can generate far more revenue than sites getting 1000 visitors/day or more. It’s all in the conversions. Traffic is only useful when you have the system in place to convert it.
Not all traffic will convert with your offer. You can shape your offer for a particular group of people, but ultimately you need to shape your marketing to capture right people and not the other way around.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below. Also opt-in to the email list on the right for more Internet Marketing tips, tricks and secrets.
Comments
Curtman40, August 27 2012, 14:30
Identify a problem, provide a solution, charge for said solution, that is internet marketing in a nut shell.
erlindashen, August 27 2012, 15:00
The Internet marketing truth hurts.
John Doe, August 27 2012, 16:15
Great post! Many of these myths are so true.
Jane Smith, August 27 2012, 17:30
Thank you for sharing this. Internet marketing isn’t as easy as people think.
Mike Johnson, August 27 2012, 18:45
I wish more people understood these myths. Thanks for clearing things up!
Susan Lee, August 27 2012, 19:00
This article is spot on. Internet marketing requires real effort and strategy.
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
Get paid 100%, on-chain, the second the sale clears
Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Myth 7 is the only one that’s actually honest. Every other ‘myth’ quietly argues the honest path is just as lucrative, dressed up as busting hype. Fine. But myth 1 says most IM products are theory because their creators don’t have real businesses outside the niche. So what is this post, if not exactly that?
Marla’s right about the pattern, but I’d add: myth 4 assumes you have hours free to notice you’re being sold the same idea twice. When you’re doing this in forty five minutes between bedtime and collapse, you don’t have time to fact check the funnel, you just do the next thing on the list.
Cass, that’s the part nobody selling this ever prices in properly. When I was building my team, the ‘few hours a week’ phase existed, but only once the structure underneath it had already absorbed years of unpaid, invisible hours from someone earlier in the chain — usually me, in the beginning. The post is right that it’s not free and not effortless, but it undersells how much of the ‘light workload’ later on is actually subsidized by the heavy workload nobody else sees, including the people who joined after you and only ever saw the finished version. That gap between what the model shows and what building it required is why I don’t do it anymore, not because it doesn’t work but because someone always pays the difference in hours.
The traffic-vs-conversion point in myth 9 is the one worth sitting with. I ask clients to do this before touching acquisition: pull the last 100 visitors to your site and map exactly where they left. Usually it’s the same one or two steps. Fixing that step is cheaper than any traffic strategy. Where does your funnel actually lose people?
Map the last 100 visitors is fine, but is 100 even a big enough sample to trust the drop-off point? I’d want a few hundred sessions minimum.