Internet Archives - Page 8 of 13 by Mark Murnahan

Imitation Marketing Means Imitating Marketing Failure

Trend, fad, popular, meme, hot, new, fashionable … word it however you like. Everybody wants that piece of whatever it is that works in marketing today. Companies and individuals frantically try to be on the leading edge of a wave that promises to be the “next big thing” that will bring them success. They hear how well it worked for this company or that company, and then make carefully calculated efforts to imitate that success. Perhaps they always heard it is best to imitate success, but on the flip-side of that coin is the far more likely outcome of imitating failure. I call it “imitation marketing” when people strive to imitate success, and it comes with a good side and a bad side.

Anybody who has used popular social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and the rest, has surely watched the imitation that happens every day. Somebody tweets, facebooks, or blogs about something “hot” and all of the sudden every other blogger scurries to their keyboard to blog about the same thing. If you catch on with things that are “hot” in a market, you have a greater chance of catching your 15 minutes of fame that was promised. Let’s face it, a lot of what we see each day on the internet is just the same thing, regurgitated with an alternate slant, and worded slightly different. If you look at any industry, you can see all the competitors mocking each other while only a few really stand out. Is that imitation really going to produce the results they are seeking? The odds are against it. There is a near infinitely greater chance of wasting time, energy, and money!

The Imitation Marketing Monster Eats Its Young

In this Internet age of vast information and lightening fast social media reach, we have collectively created a monster of sorts. What many people do not understand is that it is a monster that eats its young and as the cycle goes on, it eats itself.

Along with economic insecurity over the past couple years, it has become easy for people to believe they can save money by handling their own marketing. The Internet is the obvious place for this to happen, because it is easy. Anybody can put their name out there on the Internet and cross their fingers. The craze for do-it-yourself marketing on the Internet has created “marketers” out of about every living being that has a pulse, and a mouse to click with. Standing out from the crowd will take something unique, and not just “imitation marketing”. If you are up to the task, I am here to try and help you with my experience.

Whether you like this or not, you are right there in the thick of it. There is no other reason for you to read my blog than to try and know a better way to market what you offer and to become more profitable. Face it, you are here because you want more money, and you think you may pick up a tip to make that happen faster and cheaper than your competition. It is either that, or you have it in the back of your mind that you may pick up the phone and hire me to produce and implement a plan for your marketing … but that is only a tiny fraction of the people reading this. I am here to try and help you in either case, because it is what I do. I want to see you be successful.

Pay attention as I give you a surfing analogy: The waves of popular methods of Internet marketing exposure come a lot faster than ever before. By the time you see the wave, your window of opportunity to surf it to the beach has already closed. The riders of that wave were on it way out at sea, and it is moving far too fast to jump on now. If you want to surf in today’s marketing ocean, you are better off making some waves of your own.

I do not want to discourage you, and if I do, I will make it up to you with some encouragement. I am going to tell you what you are up against in your marketing, in order that you can prepare for the challenge.

Meeting the Creative Marketing Challenge

I just have to share a piece of reality in order to emphasize my point. Most of my readers are still swimming along in the vast open water and trying to stay afloat by imitating success. What they seldom realize is that by doing so they carry a higher risk of failure than hiring it out to experienced people like myself who do this all day long … for decades. They will soak up every bit of useful knowledge the vast Internet has to offer, and then try to create something more inspired and genius than all of the trained marketers who have facts, figures, creativity, and experience on their side.

Just as a simple example, consider how creative you are feeling today. Do you have it in you to write three, four, or five blog articles and marketing copy to promote your brand … or even one article? Do you have it in you to be sure what you produce is in front of hundreds of thousands of people … or even a thousand people? The right people? Can you write three books in three months (and actually have them sell) … or even one book? Can you write something and be assured that it will be listed within the top five results for the keywords you targeted less than ten minutes after you publish it … top 2,000 results? Do you have these things on your side? Well, I do, and there are others out there like me. That is what you are up against. When you get busy with your marketing, be aware that a lot of us make it a full time job, and some of us are damn good at what we do. To get ahead, you will have to be damn better.

The rampant drive for do-it-yourself marketing is one of those crazes that, like all other fads, has seen its time and is a wave that already crashed on the beach. It was a great idea, but when you are one of millions of people attempting to be the loudest, smartest, and overall best at what you do, your voice is squelched by the static. So, is there a fix? Yes! This is where I make it up to you if I discouraged you.

Stop Seeking Marketing Waves and Start Making your Own

Stop doing what they are doing. Stop trying to play follow the leader. Do something genius. If you spend your time making more waves and less time trying to catch one that is over your head, you have a lot better chance of surfing all the way to the beach. It may be easy to look at successful marketing and say “I can do that, too” but the odds are overwhelmingly against you. We trained and experienced marketers stacked the cards a long time ago as we earned our battle scars. We have been there, and we have done that. There are a lot of guys like me who spent 100 hours per week for years of our lives studying, practicing, learning, and tapping into every resource available to crush the competition of our clients. There is simply no way to beat us at our own game, so instead, you must create your own rules. Make your own waves. If you want to do it yourself, do not even try to do what everybody else is doing. You do not have the same resources as the competition, so don’t try to market as if you do. Take a serious inventory of your strategy and what resources you have at your disposal to implement that strategy. Stop trying to figure out how to do what the others are doing and get serious about what makes you different and better.

Tips for Overcoming Imitation Marketing

Try sitting in a quiet and dark room for an hour and think about what makes you different. Bring a voice recorder to take notes. Repeat this as often as you can. Read more books, blogs, and do everything you can to exercise your brain. The more you use it the more creative you will become. Read my blog. It really has a lot of great brain food to boost up your creativity. Start blogging! Read these really good reasons to blog and also read about how blogging improves intelligence. Seriously … go do it and stop trying to make excuses. This is for your benefit, after all. This is intended to help you increase your marketing talent.

Get really serious about what you are doing and stop letting yourself become comfortable. If you are going up against professional marketers, you are going to have to get serious with your marketing creativity, and it just doesn’t come naturally … it takes a lot of hard work. I get paid to make my clients successful, and if you want a piece of any market I am in, you had better brew another pot of coffee and plan to stay up all night.

Go sit in that quiet place and think really hard about how you are going to do something that nobody else is doing, and start figuring out how to make some waves. If you are not up to it, you should start getting settled with the lackluster results of “imitation marketing”, and be ready to take some heavy risks of failure. My hope for you is that you will try harder than ever, and take some of my tips. Otherwise, hire me to do the work for you and go get some rest … this marketing stuff is exhausting!

Good SEO vs. Bad SEO: How to Tell the Difference

There are good SEO (search engine optimizers) and there are bad SEO, and if you cannot tell the difference, your money and time will be wasted. I am going to give you some third party objective tools to tell the difference between good and bad SEO. These can help you to determine whether yours is working, whether you have hired it out, you are seeking to hire it out, or you are venturing into the ever-popular DIY SEO. The information I will provide in this article also includes some great SEO tools just to satisfy your curiosity. This can help, in case you wondered why there are not more people coming to your website, or to estimate how well your competition is doing. First, I want to be sure that you understand what SEO is and why good SEO is important, so I will start with that.

Why Good SEO is Important

We should first establish that it is important to be listed when somebody searches the Internet looking for what you offer. Searching the Internet is the most common way for people to find a business. If people do not find you, they will find somebody else. Obviously, they will find your competition. Count on it!

I will be really basic for a moment, in case you are totally unfamiliar with SEO. In this article, I will use the term SEO as both the field of search engine optimization (the art and science) as well as search engine optimizer (the person). In basic terms, SEO involves placing your website at the top of a list when somebody performs a search on the Internet. SEO also has a lot to do with making sure that when your link is found in a search, people will click on it, read what you have to say, and take an action such as buy what you have to sell, tell their friends, fill out a form, call you on the phone, and etcetera. These are the things that will produce more business for your company. It really involves a lot of different areas of art and science, so I want to give you some ways to measure both of these things.

Now, let us assume for a moment that good SEO actually exists. It is not a unicorn chase, and it is not some VooDoo witchcraft. Somebody actually is at the top of those searches, they are making sales, and there are reasons for it. So, let’s look at this from a standpoint that there actually is such a thing as good SEO for a moment, please? After all, we can be pretty sure that there is a reason the company at the top of a search for, let’s say, “travel” is not just a brand new company with a $400 budget and 13 incoming links to their site. No, it does not happen that way … ever.

Tools of the SEO Trade

Good SEO is not just made up of a couple of big factors. Yes, there are some big things we look at, but there really are a lot of little things that make up the big picture. Some of the factors are specifics about the website itself, such as the programming code, the servers, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, text content, link structure, keyword usage, and much more. There are a whole lot of pieces to the puzzle of the website itself that add up to make a difference. You have to get those things just right, and have every piece in place to achieve high search engine ranking for competitive search terms. That is to say, the things people actually search for when they need you. Then, there are the things that exist in the world outside of your website. These are things that a lot of website owners often feel are a bit out of their control, or really hard to improve. It is not so hard, but it does take some work. When there is work to be done, there are tools for that work. My father was a craftsman, and he always expressed the importance of using the right tool for the job. If you use the right tools, the job will always go much smoother. My father was really on to something.

Understanding SEO is Not Like Understanding “Rocket Surgery”

SEO does not require a degree in “rocket surgery” (rocket science and brain surgery). A lot of people will try to do some, if not all, of their SEO on their own, and it really can help. I respect anybody who wants to try to build their search engine optimization. Having people understand that SEO is important and that it actually works when done properly is one of the biggest hurdles in my job. In fact, I do everything in my power to be sure my clients and prospective clients understand SEO enough to help themselves. I tell them to read the “Google SEO Starter Guide“. I teach them the good reasons to blog, and I want them to have a better understanding of SEO. Most good SEO will generally try their best to be helpful, because they equate their success with the client’s success. They realize that it is a joint effort. Good SEO know that when they make clients massively successful, they have a lot easier career path. It is why people who Google the term SEO lessons find me at or very near the top. I want people to understand how and why it works. That makes my job much easier.

One of the biggest factors of SEO is backlinks, or links that point to your site from other websites. As you surely understand by now, this is not a silver bullet, but it is a huge factor. So let’s look at link building for a moment, and how to see if you or your SEO are doing a good job.

How to Check for Backlinks (incoming links)

Since a primary factor of good SEO is backlinks, we need to know how to check for them and monitor them. When I say backlinks, I mean links coming to your website from other websites. This is the biggest factor of Google’s PageRank algorithm, and it is what will make the difference between two otherwise equal websites. One with a lot of high-quality incoming links will be ranked, while the other may be totally invisible to search engines, or somewhere between. This is so important that if you could just see me right now, I am jumping up and down and screaming.

Most SEO fail at link building. They get it totally wrong, and their link strategy fails miserably. If you want to know why, I strongly suggest reading this article: “SEO Backlinks: Why Most SEO Fail at Link Building“.

I will give you some tools to check for backlinks. Each of these are useful, but for the most comprehensive look at incoming links, any SEO knows to use Yahoo Site Explorer. By default, it will show you the links for the particular page, so if you enter your website, be sure that you click the “inlinks” button and then select links to the entire site rather than just looking at the home page. After all, people link to the pages they like, and not just link to the homepage and tell people to look for it. Only television stations do that, and perhaps you have heard what kind of trouble they are in these days.

Your search for backlinks should look something like this search that shows tens of thousands of “inlinks” to my blog or like this search excluding internal links.

Another useful tool for determining incoming links and whether they are doing any good is to look at SEOmoz Linkscape. Linkscape will also show your mozRank, which is similar to Google’s PageRank but, in many people’s opinion, more useful.

It seems that most people are confused about backlinks. High-quality backlinks do not just mean any link from any website, and they do not mean just any type of link. The quality of the linking website makes a big difference in the quality of the link. Also, a link coming from a picture is not all that great, but a link from text is fantastic. Wait, but not just any text. A link that points to you with the words “pink ponies for sale” is not so great if you do not have any pink ponies to sell. You want links that are relevant to what you offer, and links that benefit your site. This is where Open Site Explorer can be handy. Open Site Explorer (another SEOmoz tool) will show you which links are valuable to you. It will tell you the actual text within the links pointing to your site (e.g. pink ponies for sale), whether they are “nofollow” links or “dofollow” links (which is another blog post), it will tell you the domains that link to you (e.g. facebook.com), and even how many domains link to them (which is also important). There is a lot more functionality to Open Site Explorer than I will go into here, so be sure to check it out. If it starts to feel like you are just tinkering with useless information, then you are getting the picture about why there are people who actually do this for a living.

Now that you know a little about checking for links, you may also like to know how to discover new ones as they arrive. For this, you can keep checking back, which I suggest anyway, but you can also set up a Google Alert to email you or monitor the RSS feed for new links coming in. That is another blog post, but what we want here are ways to decipher good SEO from bad SEO. So, let’s look at some tools that examine good or bad on-site SEO. This is to say, the things about the website itself that are working correctly, or need some tuning.

SEO Website Readiness Tools

Is the website ready for the incoming links? Let’s find out. I know that I probably spent too much of your time with that drawn out portion about incoming links. Backlinks really are very important … extremely important … but there is more. If you are still with me, I want to share some good SEO tools that will help you to uncover on-site issues that may be stumping your search engine optimization efforts. Running your website through these free SEO tools will help you find things that you can often fix quickly and relatively easily. If you test your website with these tools, and fix it as directed, your SEO will get better. If you are trying to determine a good SEO from a bad SEO, their website should be standing tall in these tests.

Note, that a good SEO also knows which “rules” to break. Nobody will have this all just perfect, because sometimes you just have to break the rules to get the results you want. For example, my site will not validate as XHTML Strict, because I use Disqus commenting system, TweetMeme for people to easily share my articles on Twitter, Apture for cool content display, and I use an anchor target in some of my links so that pages open in a new window. This is OK, because I know which trade-offs are worthwhile. However, the SEO’s own website should provide a good indication of their SEO knowledge. I understand the whole excuse of “the plumber with leaky pipes” (I have been guilty, too), but this is not a good excuse! Any good SEO should be able to show some pretty impressive results with their own website. I find a lot of people trying to sell SEO services who have very few incoming links, and really rotten rankings for their targeted keywords. Try these tests to compare SEO:

HubSpot Website Grader
SEOmoz Toolbox (an assortment of good SEO tools)
W3C Markup Validation Service

Website Traffic Estimates and SEO Website Age

If you are comparing SEO, you should know a couple of key things about them. Does anybody know they exist? You can find a really quick answer to this question by checking their Alexa.com rankings and see their estimated website traffic. This only gives a reasonable estimate based on sample data, but it can definitely tell you a lot about the SEO. If they are unknown there is a reason, and there are no good excuses for it. There is also the often more definitive Quantcast, but a lot of SEO do not wish to share that much data.

I see a lot of SEO with new domain names. This is not always a red flag, but it can be a sign that they are either new, or their previous domain was banned by search engines for abuse. It happens more than you may imagine. This is not the kind of SEO you want to do business with. If they have been banned, you can bet some of their clients have been penalized as well. I said that a new domain is not always a red flag, because there are a few newer SEO who have talent, or may just be beginning their freelance career. However, if their company website is new or unranked, they better have a really good sales pitch. You can look up domain ownership with a WHOIS tool such as YourNew.com WHOIS Lookup or DomainTools.com

Content Creation is Important to Good SEO

Content creation is where many of these SEO factors come into play. A great looking website that is easily indexed by search engines is a good start. Now let us consider content production. If the website does not have good content that includes topics and keywords people search for, it will not matter. You must have something fantastic to offer once the website visitors get there. This is where a lot of the art of SEO comes into play. This is where marketing talent and creative content really make a huge difference between success or failure. How important is creativity in marketing? The easy answer is that it is absolutely critical. Great website content is what creates a desire to buy what you sell, and is also the biggest factor in that important SEO goal I wrote about above. It builds links! If people like what you have to share, and if they find your website content to be useful to them or somebody they know, they will share it. They may tweet it, digg it, stumble it, facebook it, or blog about it, and that creates links.

I explained that incoming links are the most important off-site factor in good SEO. This is an undisputed fact in my industry. Now I want to explain that you do not get those backlinks by taking a pink pony ride with one of the SEO offering to add your website to a squillion search engines and directories. No, that is not how this works. That is how the bad SEO will often try to get your money. You will get the best links with great content, and being useful to others. Even then, good SEO results only happen if you make all the other pieces fit just right.

By the way, good SEO also means they read it all the way to the bottom of the page.

The Lazy Internet Culture: A Culture of Internet Marketing

Do You Understand Global? — Do You Understand Globalization?

The Internet has created a lot of change in culture around the world. It is not true for everybody, but on a large scale, globalization and greater awareness of the world is a reality. People learned more about the other side of this planet in the past decade than in all those thousands of years prior to the Internet. We have embraced other cultures that we were not previously aware of, and we have blended into a larger culture … the Internet culture. The Internet truly has been instrumental in creating the more global society we know today.

I am an American. I live within about an hour drive from the geographical center of the continental United States. I am about as far away from another country as you can be while within the USA boundaries. At the same time, I would estimate that I have more experience in dealings outside of the USA than 99.9 percent of United States citizens. Much of that is due to the Internet, but not entirely. I have traveled extensively, and I have spent time in many other countries. I have done business in countries all around the world, and learned a lot of interesting things about many cultures. I guess you may call me “worldly” based on my experiences, but I have learned more about people and cultures by using the Internet than in my travels. I should perhaps also add that it has provided me with a unique view on Americans and American Work Ethic vs. Globalization.

The Lazy Internet Culture and Internet Marketing

It seems that the Internet has a downside. Actually, the Internet has a few downsides, but I want to address a particular one. I want to address the culture of laziness that the Internet has made widely available. It is a lazy culture of believing that the Internet will fix everything, and that it is a simple place to earn a living. After all, who wouldn’t love to sit back and watch money flow in all night and day for doing nothing, and risking nothing? That is how the Internet is viewed by a frighteningly large number of people.

This really is a problem, and it really does have an affect on your business future! It has an affect on how people view their jobs, and it creates a laziness with a backlash that we cannot even quantify as of yet.

A Story of Our Internet Culture

I received a call a couple days ago that sincerely troubled me. I actually get a lot of calls like this, but I will share this particular one with you. The woman on the other end of the line asked me “how much does a website cost?” I have been answering this question for over a decade, but the absurdity is getting worse. The woman wanted to know what it would cost her to get what she wants. I needed more information, because after all, websites are not created equally … not even close. An ecommerce website with seven digits of monthly traffic will not cost the same as a novice site invisible to Google by the kid who just took his first high school computing class. If you really want to know how much a successful website will cost, without any clue about how it will succeed, my easy answer is “fifty-two squillion dollars and thirty four cents” (plus a fresh pot of coffee and a carton of cigarettes). Read “How Much does a Website Cost?” if you want a more defined look at the variables involved.

I asked her what kind of website she needs, what she will be offering, and what her goals are. She told me that she wanted to sell travel, and she wanted to earn between $1,000-$2,000 per month. Please note that I don’t market for hobbies … I market for businesses. This was clearly not a client that I would accept, but I wanted to help her with some guidance anyway. She seemed really earnest in wanting to do something, but she was extremely confused. So, we talked for a bit. I did not charge her a penny.

I came to discover that she did not yet have a service to offer. She was looking into an opportunity to sell a travel service. The company she had been considering offered a package for $399 with a website and everything she would require to make the money she needed and wanted. She was actually coming to me for comparison shopping. She thought maybe I could offer something for less than $399 that would earn her $1,000-$2000 per month. (Note: I do not deal in hundreds.) She really felt interested in the opportunity the company offered. I did not want to hurt her hopes, but I was just dying to know how she thought she would stand out beyond 672 million other results in a Google search for travel, with a budget under $400. I wanted to know her angle. I also really had to know whether she had heard of Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline, Hotels.com, or the others. I wanted to hear how she planned to get her piece of that market without any sense of a marketing budget, and without any travel industry experience. Don’t judge me just yet. I was nice about each of my questions … I was sincerely nice.

All of the sudden, the topic changed. When I asked about how she would target her audience for selling travel, she was at a loss. I guess she got a bit scared when she realized it would be kind of hard to earn a living selling travel to her friends and family. Then she wanted to know about marketing her line of perfume. No, not just perfume, but wedding perfume. Wow, this was a big shift from travel. She wants to market a very targeted perfume, specifically for a Christian woman on her wedding day. Really, she had a good case for it, too. The story was complete with things a nun had taught her as a young lady. She is ready for targeted marketing. Well, except for the fact that the target is like shooting a pea with a spitball at 100 kilometers.

Please see my point here. I hear a lot of stories about the next fantastic idea every day. Sometimes it is a new idea, and sometimes it is a person who just wants a piece of an existing market. Many times, it is just somebody looking for a way to get out of a job or to increase their lot in life, without any focus whatsoever. In nearly every instance, it is a person or corporation who thinks they have what it takes to be a success. They think this right up to the point of going broke trying to prove it. Sometimes they get lucky and find somebody who will tell them the truth before they waste a bunch of time and money. It is the lucky ones who find somebody to be honest and let them know it will not be as easy as the advertisement they just read about the Internet being their new savior.

I am usually pretty abrupt about things like this by giving an Internet marketing reality check. I felt really kind toward this woman. I guess I just needed to know more about her hopes, and I wanted to try my best to understand the mentality of people and what they respond to. I wanted to have a feel for people again … real people … like the ones struggling with hopes that they secretly believe are foolish but really want to hold onto. I wanted to feel somebody’s hopes, without just immediately crushing them with the truth. I wanted to let her down softly and not just be the everyday brutally honest Murnahan.

Three Lazy Internet Marketing Categories

I want to offer my views of three very sad categories of people I find in my career in Internet marketing. These three lazy categories of people that the Internet culture has created are as follows:

Type One: They heard the Internet is a great place to earn more money. This is a common message delivered by people trying to rip somebody off. It is so common that I would categorize it as the most destructive factor of the Internet. The majority of Internet users falling into this trap do not understand business, marketing, or even conceptualize earning a lot of money. They just know that they hear a whole lot of talk about making a ton of money, and websites … and there was something else. All they really heard was “money” and “website”. The rest was just filed off as something they did not need to know. They deeply believe that there actually is a quick and easy road to riches, and they just have to keep looking under every rock until they find it. There is a big belief that “somebody is getting rich the easy way, and it may as well be me.” What these sad folks will never grasp is that if anybody is getting rich easy, it is the one who sold you that delusion. The truth is that they are usually not worth the paper they are printed on.
Type Two: They already tried to use the Internet for a business, and it failed. This usually happens when somebody fails to implement due diligence. They did everything they heard would work, and they still failed miserably. Their business did not grow, and they lost every penny they spent. This is a sad category to me, because it is the kind I may have actually been able to help if they came to me earlier. There really is a huge marketplace on the Internet. Success is attainable if you have a business with a really good Internet marketing plan. If you are in this category, I wish you the best. If you ever want to try to do it better than before, I will be delighted to visit with you about a solid marketing plan with real numbers.
Type Three: They keep hearing about the Internet and are curious, but they are paralyzed by fears. They do not want to make the wrong decisions, so they make no decisions at all. They do what is comfortable, and they are afraid to push the marketing go button.

How Can I Call Internet Marketing Culture Lazy?

People who have followed my blog or my career for a while realize that I have been very successful in my line of work. Many also realize that I took it on the chin for the small guys about two years ago. I took some big losses in 2009 by standing up for people like this. It caused a loss to my annual income of more than an average twenty Americans earn per year, and postponed a planned 2012 retirement. That happened when huge corporate suppliers and clients alike started laying people off and ceasing services that I sold to my clients. I was a stand-up guy when they needed a stand-up guy. I feel mostly good about my decisions, and never regret holding integrity above profits.

I have always had a bit larger view of the Internet than average, because I provide the services that a lot of Internet service providers sell to their customers. I was not a bastard when I perhaps should have been a bastard the most. When I talked to the woman in the conversation above, I wanted to get back to understanding these people who have hopes without common sense getting in the way. After all, I created a massively successful Internet business back in 2000 with that same positive spirit. Fortunately, I also owned a 13 year old marketing company at the time.

There has been a lot of change in the world since I started my wholesale Internet services company. It was not easy then, and it is even harder to get a good foothold now. The opportunity is greater than ever, but it is incredibly irresponsible to start a new business with no budget, no marketing plan, and nothing but a huge set of blinders on to keep you from seeing anything but a carrot of hope in the distance. Success does not work that way.

What will make you different? I have an idea! Try some marketing talent. If you don’t have marketing talent, you better have money to hire it out.

A Positive Note About Internet Marketing Laziness

I want to leave you with a positive thought about the laziness and easy-money attitudes about Internet marketing. I have been in this industry long enough to see a lot, and I have had a lot of success at it. I have also worked very hard for it. If it helps you to feel any better at all, I will show you three little kids who will never in my lifetime be allowed to think the Internet is an easy place to earn money. These are my children, and I love them too much to destroy them with such nonsense.

11 Important Internet Marketing Laws

There are many legalities in doing business online. It shocks me just how many people are unaware of the laws they break online. I have spent well over a decade learning laws relating to the Internet. There are laws dealing with credit card handling; laws to address copyright; industry-specific laws for things like medical records, legal records, and etcetera; and of course, laws to deal with SPAM.

I believe it is time to consider a list of important Internet marketing laws. They may seem elementary, but I think these are still laws worth addressing. So here is the short list, but of course there are many more. I just want to start you off with eleven Internet marketing laws, and you can add your own comments.

Internet Marketing Law One: Typographical

If you think it has not already been done, you probably just made a typographical error. Google it again. Somebody else already does that.

Internet Marketing Law Two: Urgency

If you think it can be done better, hurry! There are many people who agree with you, and they are already working on it.

Internet Marketing Law Three: Correctness

If you think you have done everything flawlessly and nobody can fault it, blog it, Facebook it, and tweet it. You were probably not as correct as you expected.

Internet Marketing Law Four: Persecution

People will persecute you, but if you do not receive an occasional death threat or flame-letter, it just means you are not reaching enough people. You probably suck at Internet marketing. Give up now, before you anger me. You will not like me when I am angry.

Internet Marketing Law Five: Client Errors

Client errors only happen to new or inexperienced Internet marketing people. Fire them and start over with new ones (but give them my number).

Internet Marketing Law Six: Delegation

If you think somebody else can do it better than you, delegate it. Pay somebody else so you can get back to working on the things that delight your customers. This will save you a lot of headache and lost opportunities.

Internet Marketing Law Seven: Perfection

You are not perfect. Somebody can always do it better than you. This is the Internet for Pete’s sake. See Internet Marketing Law Six. You know what to do.

Internet Marketing Law Eight: Expenditures

Internet fame and fortune will not be yours for the taking with just a couple hours per day when you pay only $299 for the magical out-of-the-box online business. That dude is lying! If he was extremely convincing, it is because he is still really wanting to recoup the $299 that he spent on his magical box. Don’t you think that if it was true, corporations like Google, Microsoft, McDonald’s, WalMart, and Pepsi would have already purchased all of those magical boxes? Well, they didn’t, and that means the one holding the box is a sucker with a few hundred less buck to waste on their next blue sky failure.

Internet Marketing Law Nine: Success

There is no magical pink pony ride to success. Just ask somebody who has done it. Live with it. Success will not be as easy as the job you left. If it was easy, nobody would call it success. They would call it … hmmm … oh yes, they would call it average.

Internet Marketing Law Ten: Public Exposure

If you get really great at Internet marketing, the traditional sense of “public” can be a frightening place. Those people talk, think, look, and act different than you remembered. All that time basking in monitor-glow has made sunshine a creepy notion, and you forgot that offline cash registers actually still make sounds (so old-fashioned).

Internet Marketing Law Eleven: Time

If you are going to make it with Internet marketing, you had better stop wasting time on silly junk like this and get back to work. Just don’t forget to pass it along to all your friends so they don’t get too far ahead of you.

Write Page Titles That Get Attention

Page titles that get attention are smart, short, and compelling. Without a good page title, the rest loses importance. If you want to write a page title that works, stop using so many words. Write like you want it to be read.

I am a conversational writer, and I use too many words. I write books and long blog articles. You use too many words, too. Most of us use too many words. We make sentences too long. If we word-it-up, we (think we) seem smarter.

Page Titles Get Clicked

Page titles are a top priority for SEO. Titles are indexed, and page titles are what people click to read the rest. Practice writing page titles. Write it in fewer words if you can. Make it easy to understand.

Try using Twitter if you need practice.

Stop using too many words.