Internet Marketing – How To Get An Education

The Internet marketing field has become something akin to a grocery store aisle with too many options. Too often – we make a decision based on criteria that has absolutely nothing to do with the product in the box, and everything to do with an outside influence. Or there are so many choices we get fed up looking and take the one with the best packaging.

Too many choices

Educating one’s self as to what works or does not work in Internet marketing can be a costly affair, and often times the most attractive strategy is the apparently easiest one. I see many, many “Internet gurus” selling strategies that will no longer work, and they are selling them based on the fact that they were sold that idea that it works, and they have not actually tried and tested the method – they just want the commission on the product/software/ebook download/whatever.

My own thinking has always been to start with quality product or content and go from there. I also believe in working ethically – and this is self serving – because eventually the search engines discover a “black hat “ technique and when they do – it stops working. If you have approached your Internet marketing using ethical techniques – it will always work. If you paid an Internet marketing company in India to dump millions of comments on blogs – that may have worked the first few million times it was done – but you are asking to have your hosting account shut down if you try it today.

So – where to go to educate yourself? You can always use the tried and tested “suck it and see” method, but many end up sucking so many approaches that they are broke before they find the magic bullet. The fact is – there is no magic bullet. Why would Internet marketing be any different to any other field? An ethical and honest internet marketing entrepreneur will always be ion a position of strength over the long term when compared to a spammer. It also helps to have clearly defined goals – and this is where I see a lot of failures. If you do not know what you want – how can you go out and get it?

Here are a few places where you can educate yourself for free, and a couple of resources that will always be at the forefront of ethical SEO. And they are taken straight from the horses’ mouth so to speak.

Matt Cutts Blog
Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team and works on search quality at Google. It doesn’t get much better than that.
Ebay Partner Network BlogThe Ebay blog talks about best practices for driving traffic to ebay, but is applicable to any market.
Offical google blogSome of the comment sections are enlightening, if only to see what people complain about when Big Daddy G makes a change to their search algorithm.
Microsoft adcenter blog for publishersInteresting blog – with perhaps too much information at times, but worth taking a look at occasionally.

These are all advertising networks or search engines. They spell it out clearly what is going on in Internet marketing, and are a great place to get a feel for the industry and what works. And – yes – there is a feel to doing this. Combine what you learn from these blogs with well written code – and my personal favorite to build any website is to use semiologic wordpress – and you will be laying a good ground work for your success.

Further reading that may be of interest:

How to make money onlineThis is an article I wrote some time ago, and the models I describe here still work today.
How to make money blogging.
Another article I wrote some time ago, but also applicable.

Good luck out there.