Keep Your Dirty Little Secrets To Yourself!
I seem to be on a roll at the moment bashing the IM industry in general! Last month I criticized sleazy email lists, last week I warned people not to get sucked in by promises of big bucks, then most recently expressed my dislike of sales letters.
My topic for today? …
Secrets of the Internet Marketing Gurus
A post by Ben Cook prompted me to write this post. Its not often that I disagree with Ben completely! He says that we should learn from the California Gold Rush and SHUT UP when we find something new that could be a powerful tool in our IM arsenal.
Back in October I did my first podcast and I discussed what I intended to blog about. In that podcast I talked about IM gurus who have their little marketing secrets and how it just tires me out to listen to these people harp on about the latest secret which is yours for the sum of just $xyz per month.
My opinion on that hasn’t changed. I’ll give you a concrete example. Ed Dale & Dan Raine. Two great guys – they did the Thirty Day Challenge and they run the membership site The Immediate Edge which I was a member of for two months.
Now anybody who participated in the 30DC will remember that the course was based on getting traffic by hosting content on external sites such as Squidoo and HubPages. For the original challenge a small site called Tumblr was chosen but the challenge was so large that Tumblr could not handle the load, considered many of the blogs as spam and went on a mass deletion frenzy which was later dubbed ‘Tumblrgate’.
Some people will also remember something called the ‘Squidoo Slap’. When Squidoo first came out people discovered that building a Squidoo lens (basically a page about some topic that is hosted by Squidoo) was a great way to get traffic because the lenses ranked highly in Google.
Before long many Internet Marketers (and spammers) jumped on this and Squidoo was flooded with spam lenses and Google subsequently penalised them hence the ’slap’. This is where the whole issue of ’secrets’ comes in. The premise being that you discover a site such as this that works well, you should keep it to yourself because once it becomes public then it will be destroyed.
But you see I think people are missing the point here. One thing that Ed said over and over and over again during the challenge is that Tumblr was not the only platform to use and that there were dozens. If people would only get out there and do a little research of their own then they would be set.
The trouble is that most people won’t do that – they want things handed to them on a plate. Ed only had to mention a particular site to use and literally thousands of people would take his word as gospel and go create pages on that site which inevitably caused problems.
Ed & Dan now profit by offering the Immediate Edge which they charge a monthly fee for and they promise to reveal the latest sites to use to give you an edge over the competition. But the trouble is, that if you work in this way you will always be looking for the latest secret because it will never stay a secret for very long.
Another example – Facebook Flyers. When they first came out there were glitches in the system that allowed a select few affiliate marketers to make literally thousands per day and these guys kept quiet about it until it became more public and then Facebook changed the way things worked.
So for those few who knew how to exploit something then sure, they made a ton of money in that short period of time but it then dried up and then they had to move onto the next thing. If you do that on a consistent basis – find new things before other people, then you’re onto a winner but gosh that sounds like a lot of hard work to me!
I’d be exhausted if I had to find the latest trend or the latest hot niche every week. Last week the young actor Heath Ledger died and I know many Internet Marketers jumped on this news story in order to profit from it. Now I am not debating the morals of that activity here – just the mechanics.
Heath will only die once so those people that managed to rank in the top 10 in Google in the days following his death will certainly have seen some traffic but what next? What will they do next week or next year? My point is that if your business model relies on you finding some hot trend or secret tip then you will be in a constant battle to stay a step ahead of the competition.
In my opion there’s an easier way:
Provide Value – Receive Compensation.
Discuss!
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Allison Reynolds
January 29, 2008
Absolutely, and like gold prospecting, only a small percentage of places you look will be truly profitable.
I look at it like the stock market. Some stocks are high risk and some are blue chip. Blue chip will give a consistent return. High risk will give you a higher return (albeit over a shorter time).
Working smarter, not harder, would point to blue chip all the way.
I’ll add though, that regular monitoring of your investments is always prudent. Moving with the times is also necessary, some companies go down the tubes, and new ones arise.
Death to the crappy sale letter page!
So saying that, I love the thrill of the hunt and so still dabble in oddball ideas of my own. I prefer not to pay thousands of dollars for the privilege of being on a mailing list, that I won’t read because I am sick of the negative crap being spouted by a so called “guru”.