The Following is an Excerpt from my ebook, “IM Guide for Newbies”. If you like this post and would like to see more of the 22 page guide, you can download it today by entering your name and email in the box on the upper right of this page.
Promises, promises, promises! As a beginner I heard it all and stupidly fell for most of it as well!
Remember when your parents told you if it sounds to good to be true than it probably is? Well they were right!
Look out for the terms “auto-pilot”, “internet millions”, “work from home”. All of these can alert you to something that may not be on the up and up. I’m not saying all of these are scams, but if the promise seems over the top, it probably is.
Use your common sense! You can eliminate a lot of the crap by following your gut feeling.
The biggest scam I ever fell for as a beginner was run by a lady named Liz S. I’ll leave her last name out since I’m a nice guy. Her program offered to put up niche websites for me that were keyword optimized and monetized.
All I had to do was subscribe to her monthly service and I would receive Paypal payments month in and month out.
After one month, guess what? I was paid!
Wow! This is awesome, what can be easier? However, month 2 came around and I wasn’t paid. The excuses came in from Liz that there were delays on her end and they were “ramping up” a new technique which would begin showing results in the upcoming months.
I continued with my subscription believing the promises. After all, I was paid the first month.
Well month after month went by, with me sending money out and receiving nothing in return. I was scammed by her along with numerous other naive victims. I never got my money back, but I learned a lot from the experience.
You need to put in work to make money online!
If someone tells you that they have a system that will make you money without any effort on your part, run the other way. Quickly!
Another service you are likely to see, which I wouldn’t really call a scam, is the ready made business. This is sometimes referred to as “Business in a Box”.
I belonged to a membership site that offered a monthly BIB for $27. Everything was included. The website, the ebook, the autoresponders to send to your list. All you needed to do was upload it to your hosting provider and wait for the cash to roll in.
Wrong. As you will see as you get your feet wet in Internet Marketing, the content may be one of the easiest parts of the business. The hard part is getting continuous traffic and making the sell. The “Business in a Box” was being pushed to numerous beginners. The result was hundreds of the exact same sites on the internet with different domain names and no income. Doesn’t sound like much of a business, does it?
Now, not all of these “Businesses in a Box” are scams. As I said before, follow your gut and do your research before blindly following the amazing promises you will see on the sales pages of these products.
Another offer you are likely to come across is the list of “Unknown Niches and Keywords” that will make you money. If these lists have also been sold to thousands of others are they really unknown?
The best advice I can give to you is to learn how to do your own research.
By learning how to discover your own niches and keywords you will be better off in the long run.
There are many tools out there designed to help out in the process.
Don’t waste your money on pre-compiled lists built for the masses!
It is fine to hire someone to do this research for you, but make sure it is for you. Not for you and a thousand of their “closest” friends.
Once you become comfortable with the tools and techniques you learn in Internet Marketing, you will apply them again and again to new pages on your site, new sites, and new businesses you create.
The time you spend struggling to learn how to use these tools the proper way will be well worth it in the days ahead.
If you would like to read more of the experiences I went through as a beginner in Internet Marketing along with some advice I have for those starting out and already in IM, please download the “IM Guide for Newbies” in the upper right hand corner.
