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I swear with every new product that launches that is guaranteed to make you a millionaire over night I receive 20 or 30 emails about the product. They all say the same thing, “Give Joe Blow your money so I can get some of it!”

The worse part is that all the emails say the exact same thing with a different name on it. I mean literally this time not metaphorically, they all use the sample email sent out by the creator of the product.

I don’t know about you but the way I see it is if the person sending me the email doesn’t have the time or willingness to write an email that tells me how they feel about the latest and greatest money grabber then how did they find the time to look at the product?

If they haven’t looked at the product how can they recommend it to me?

People actually believe the hype sent out in the email and purchase the new money grabber that will make them rich. The fact that they buy it isn’t the bad part, the bad part is a vast majority of the money givers never use the product they just look at it quickly and put it in the shelf help section of their lives and then complain about it not working.

When you purchase a product USE IT, if it doesn’t deliver on all the hype either contact the creator and ask them what is wrong or request a refund. I am amazed at how many people I have seen buy a $1,000 product and complain, complain, complain but never request a refund. Worse yet, quite often, they are complaining about their own lack of action with the product and their complaint would be solved if they read page 37 or did step 12.

Yes, I am an Internet Marketer.

Yes, I want you to give me your money but I want to earn it.

Do I promote everything that I am asked to promote? No!

Do I promote products that I haven’t tried yet? No!

Am I a minority among Internet Marketers? I think I am but I wish I wasn’t.

I am in the position where I get the joint venture invite most of the time but I don’t always get the product. This means they want me to email my list about something I don’t know anything about. If their sales page convinces me to buy they might get lucky and I might send out an email for them after I have tried their product but definitely not before I try it.

But this is getting off the track, we were talking about giving away your money.

It all boils down to the consumer. As long as there are people that buy the, “Make $5,000 In The Next 24 Hours” products there are going to be these types of products that don’t work.

As long as there are people that purchase a product because of the hype on the sales page there will be hyped up products.

As long as there are people that don’t request refunds for a product that doesn’t live up to the hype of the sales page there will be products that don’t live up to the hype.

Now comes a key for everybody that is starting out.

QUIT BUYING AND START PRODUCING!

This was told to me by Sterling Valentine when I got into his coaching program and is probably the best advice I ever received from a coaching program.

What he meant by this was that I was at a point where I needed to stop spending money and apply what I had already learned.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t buy anything but you should focus on what your goals are and your path to getting there. In other words if your plan is related to adsense you can purchase programs on adsense and apply what you learn (remember if the product doesn’t live up to the hype of the sales letter ask for a refund) and you keep on working with adsense until you start making some money. Then once you have figured out how to make money with adsense on a consistent basis then you can think about getting into something else.

Don’t read this wrong and think you have to start with adsense before you go to something else. You can start in any area you like. The key thing is to keep learning until you figure it out.

This means learning from your mistakes. Everybody fails, all the top marketers have had products and sites that didn’t work. But they didn’t give up, they learned from their failures and moved on.

There is enough good information on the internet right now for free to get you started in almost any niche. Unfortunately there is three or four times as much bad information. The only way to tell the difference is to try it. Sorry, but that is the only way I know, until you try you won’t know what works and what doesn’t

To summarize this wordy post:

Don’t buy any product unless it is moving you toward your goals.

If you buy a product and it doesn’t live up to the hype request a refund.

If you buy a product USE IT. How can you tell if it works or not if you don’t use it.

Never buy a product you don’t plan on using right away. If you say you will get to it next week or next month you will probably end up with two more products you never open.

The following are a couple of excerpts from the book, Getting Started remember you can get the entire report free. Just click the link at the top of the page.

Believe it or not, your mindset is more important than any of the knowledge you have. Henry Ford only had very limited formal education, but he had a desire and a mindset that actually forced him to achieve his goals.

He is also the one that said, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t your right!”

His drive and determination took him from a non-educated worker to a leader in industry.

This is the same type of mindset you need to have to succeed. This is a mindset that doesn’t say, can’t!

The word can’t is a word that is sure to bring you failure if you use it all the time. I like to define can’t as conveniently accepting negative thoughts.

C= Conveniently.

A= Accepting.

N= Negative.

T= Thoughts

Whenever you say you can’t do something, you are conveniently accepting negative thoughts. There is always a way to achieve your goals.

If you don’t know how to do something that doesn’t mean you can’t do it.

If it hasn’t been done before, that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

All you have to do is to create a mindset with a burning desire to achieve. This means anything that you think you can’t do, can be done. You just have to figure out how to do it.

NEWBIES

The most common excuse that I have heard used for Internet marketing purposes, is “I am a newbie!”

I know this doesn’t sound like an excuse, but it is. Gary Ambrose pointed this out to me a couple of years ago. When you say you are newbie, you are using that as an excuse. The reason for this is that you never say I am a newbie unless you need an excuse.

Example: what is your website?
Answer: I don’t have one I am a newbie.

Question: what niche are you working in?
Answer: I don’t have one I am a newbie.

Question: have you started building your list yet?
Answer: No, I am a newbie.

As you can see all the answers were used as an excuse for not having something done. I know I used this as an excuse, when I started out, and you probably have too.

But just being a newbie doesn’t mean that you can’t take action.

Getting started doesn’t take a lot but you have to take action in order to start.

There are a lot of elements to “On Page Search Engine Optimization” and there are people that will tell you that you don’t need on page optimization as long as you have back links.

Guess what that is bull!

Before you even think about getting back links you should be doing on page optimization. On page optimization includes things like:

1. Keyword density
2. Meta Tag keywords
3. Meta Tag Description
4. Title Tag
5. Keyword Prominence
6. Font Characteristics (H tags, bold, etc.)
7. Domain Name (this one is overlooked a lot)

All of these elements (except one) will help with your search engine rankings but one had more ranking power in the major search engines and one doesn’t even come into play with the major search engines. Do you know which is which?

Let’s start with the one that doesn’t really matter anymore.

Meta Tag Keywords – This is a tag that you put in the head section of your web page that lists all the keywords that you want to be indexed for. Sounds like it would be something that you would want on your website, doesn’t it? But the truth in the matter is because of abuse of this tag all the major search engines have stopped reading this tag. They now just read the content on your page. I haven’t used this tag in about 3 years and I can still get #1 ranking in Google.

Meta Tag Description – This is, again, a tag you put in the head section of your web page that describes the page itself. You would think this is a good spot for your keywords and it is but the search engines don’t put too much weight on this anymore either. But in a lot of the search engines this is what the searcher will see when you turn up in the SERP’s (Search Engine Response Pages) and if it has the keywords they searched in the text they are more likely to click on your link, which is a good thing, but it doesn’t help much with your actual ranking.

Font Characteristics – This is your font settings such as a H1 tag or a bold. This does help a little with your on page search engine optimization but not a lot. What it boils down to is that if you have a page that ends up with the same score as another page in the search engines. If you have your keywords in H1 tags and they have theirs in H2 tags with everything else being equal you will rank higher then them. All characteristics have some value rating to them but the heading tags (H tags) have the most effect.

Keyword Prominence – Prominence is how visible something is. Keyword prominence is how visible your keywords are. Remember search engines don’t see a page the same way you and I do. They only see the text of the code. The higher up in this code your keywords are the more prominent they are to the search engines. The more prominent your keyword is to the search engines the more relevant it seems to the algorithm.

Keyword Density – You constantly hear about this. Keyword density is how many times your keywords show up in the text on the page compared to how many words are on the page. For example if you are using a one word keyword phrase and you have it on your page 5 times and you only have 20 words your keyword density would be 25%. Let me tell you right now that there is no specific density that you should shoot for. All the search engines compare the keyword density of all the pages that turn up for that keyword and average it out. If you are too high you get penalized, if you are too low you might not rank. But your back links can help you if you are too low but they won’t help you if you are too high. The key here is to just write what comes naturally and you should end up with a decent density.

Title Tag – This is the most important place to have your keywords. At least for now, as more and more people start to spam this tag the search engines will do like they have done with all the other tags and make it not that important anymore. But at the time of this writing this was the most important place to have your keywords. You should put the main keyword for your page at the very beginning of the title tag.

The Domain Name - This is something that is overlooked by a lot of people. But the way the search engines see it is that if you are going to pay for a domain that has the keywords in the name you must plan the site to be about that keyword. For the search engines it doesn’t matter if your keywords are run together in the domain name (it does make a difference in the page and folder names) or if you have hyphens between the words but you have to watch out for the possibility of creating different words. I registered a domain marketerstool.com and this can be taken either as Marketers Tool or Marketer Stool. If it would have had hyphens it could only be interpreted one way.

To give you an idea about what this can do I have a domain Marketing Beginners that I didn’t do any real optimization for, I didn’t create a back link campaign for it, I didn’t create a sitemap for it, I just put it up and put Marketing Beginners in the title tag and it became #1 in Google, MSN, Yahoo! and Ask for the keyword marketing beginners on its own in a very short period of time. The site is now over a year old and it has naturally grown some back links but since the beginning I have been getting visitors from the search engines.

Back links are a great way to prove your site as an authority site and to boost your search engine rankings. But there are some things you shouldn’t do when it comes to back links

1. Babies Walk Before They Run – Most search engines aren’t dumb, at least the ones that count aren’t. If you have a site that is only a week old and it has 1,000 back links to it, the search engines are going to wave a red flag and say, “Just a minute, this shouldn’t be happening.” Your back links should grow naturally. This means that you won’t get 1,000 back links in just a couple of days. The main place this can really hurt you is if you are using article marketing. A lot of people are using submitters that will blast your article to 1,000 plus article directories overnight. Which on the face of it seems like a good thing but if you actually get published on all those directories in 24 hours you will be facing a possible worsening of your search engine ranking. If you are going to use a submitter try to find one that does the submission over a period of time so that you don’t get penalized for growing too fast. This really only applies to newer sites but even the older sites can be looked at if they have a 1000 time increase in their back links in a short period of time.

2. One Way is Better Then Round Trip – The main job of the search engine spiders is to find new pages, they do this by following the outbound links on your site. They don’t like it if the bounce back and forth and make no progress. This is what happens if you have too many reciprocal links on your site. Every time the spider leaves your site they are bounced back to your site by your partner’s link to you. This is something that is very easy for a spider to track and if it happens too much then you will be penalized for it. If you are working with reciprocal links limit them to one reciprocal link for every 3 outgoing links you have and boost the one way links to your site with submissions to directories and article submission.

3. Being Part of The Crowd Doesn’t Pay – There are a lot of link sites out there, some times called “link farms” that you can list you site on to get back link. Be part of this crowd too many times can actually hurt your ranking. There are a couple of reasons for this and part is that there are too many outbound links on the page and the second part is that there are too many different topics on the page. Having too many outbound links means that all the links will share any page rank the site might have this means you won’t get much. The best links come from the textual content of a page with your keywords as the anchor text (the words that create the link) and the page content being about or similar to your keywords. When you are on a link farm there is almost always a large number of topics on the page and you usually don’t get anchor text links.

4. Page Rank is Everything. NOT! – Everybody wants back links from sites with high page rank. This is actually good but if all your back links come from sites with the same type of page rank you will again get the search engines raising the red flag and looking at your site. The reason for this is there are places out there where you can buy one way links to your site. The search engines don’t like these services and if your site grows naturally you will never have all your back links coming from sites with a page rank of 5 or higher. Back links with a page rank of 1 will help your site, especially if you can get your keywords in the anchor text for the link. If you are running a back link campaign go after them all not just the high ranking sites. If you are purchasing back links make sure that they provide you with an assortment of sites with different page ranks and not just high ranking sites.

5. Variety is The Spice of Links – You have heard me say that you should you’re your keyword in the anchor text of your back link. This is very true but you shouldn’t have the same text in every back link or the same keyword in every back link. You should have a list of keywords for your site. Create a number of different links that use different text and different keywords in the anchor text. This will make your site rank higher on more keywords and it looks better to the search engines because people don’t phrase things the same way. If all the back links to your site are exactly the same then the search engines start grouping your links the same way they group duplicate content.

Remember back links are good but they can always be better. Remember the above to optimize your back link campaign.