You probably know that the question in the title is more of a rhetorical one than anything else. And the answer is different for each individual. For some of you, the answer may be 0. For other persons, it may be thousands of dollars or even more. Let’s get something straight: we are talking about money spend, not time or anything else, and yes, I know that time costs money.

So why do I insist on only taking money into this equation? Well, to be frank, because this is how Internet Marketers who supposedly sell recipes of success put it. And you might argue that I have something against them, which is simply not true. I couldn’t care less for the majority of them.

But why do they insist, in their sales letters, to say things like:
“This product will bring you tens of thousands of dollars each month, what is this worth to you?”

If you have seen some of the sales letters, I know you will recognize the speech. The overwhelming majority of their hyped up sales pitches have this line in order to justify their often absurd prices. In order for you to understand how stupid this type of line is, let’s think about an example that could easily be – and probably has been for many people – a real life example.

John buys a van, and starts transporting people between two different towns. He starts a small business, and due to the fact that he had a somewhat lower price compared to other companies and started developing a good reputation, business was good to him. He bought another van and so on and so forth. John now has an incredibly developed business, with many coaches and lots of routes, between many towns. Let’s say that the first van he bought cost $15,000. His current business has an annual money flow of 3 million dollars. So, was the first van he bought worth $3,000,000?

Of course it wasn’t. The time, dedication and commitment he put into development of his business is worth that much. However, many ebook and other digital products gurus try to lead you into believing their products are worth the metaphorical $3,000,000. But their products are not. It’s your own commitment and work that is worth the output you manage to get out of your business. You shouldn’t judge a product based on how much money it can theoretically bring to a person, because in theory you can make millions starting with a pencil. Now I wouldn’t mind the gurus saying: “Hey, this kind of advice is scarce and there are not too many experts on the matter, so that’s why it’s priced at $197”. In other words, to base their prices on the supply and demand balance of the market. But wait, now I remembered: they’re not real Marketers, they’re just salesmen.

Of course, in the end, this is just another one of their strategies that try to play with one’s mind and induce them the buying attitude. For me, it is just not fair. It doesn’t seem fair that an ebook from a quasi expert who barely knows how to write costs $97, while a real Marketing book, from a real expert, Philip Kotler, can be found on Amazon for as low as $68.

“Forgive me but the day I start trusting him is the day I would have sold my soul”. This quote is from Sayid, a very cool character from an even better show called “Lost”. A show which is definitely my all time favorite. What does that have to do with Internet Marketing? Well, the quote tells exactly how I feel about the majority of gurus - I will not call them Marketers, because I don’t consider them to be.

Being a “guru” is very fashionable in today’s online environment. They project an image of success and everyone who tries his/her luck online wants to be exactly like the gurus and fit into the guru mentality. I am telling you to think again. Let’s talk about some of the reasons why you should not listen or follow these self-proclaimed gurus.

1. THE GURUS FEED FROM YOUR LACK OF SUCCESS
It sounds pretty cruel, but it’s still the blatant truth. As I was saying before, many people who get disappointed by the lack of their online success tend to buy more and more of the gurus’ ebooks. When they don’t really find the answer in a product that sounded too good to be true, they move on and buy another. The conclusion is simple: the gurus only sell their products because you don’t achieve online success. Because if you would, you would not be needing their products, would you?

2. MOST OF THE PRODUCTS ARE OF POOR QUALITY
Not ALL of the products are of poor quality, but most of them are. For one thing, they never tell you the whole story. They tell you some basic things, without touching the essence. And they don’t really want you to succeed online. If you are successful online, it means that:
- they have more competition to worry about;
- they lose one of their potential buyers (you).

Then, not every person can be a writer. Many of these ebooks have basic Grammar errors that would make a 12-year old feel embarrassed. Amateurish and sloppy writing is the best way to define these products. In order to overcome this and capture the reader’s attention, they resort to extreme measures like offensive language, constant bragging, etc.

3. YOU DON’T NEED THE GURUS
That’s exactly right, you don’t need them; it is exactly the other way around. They need you and other people like you who dream of online success in order to sell their products. I am not saying that you shouldn’t buy any of their products at all. As I stated before, there are some good products. But you certainly don’t need to buy each and every new product that comes out. As a matter of fact, you can believe me when I tell you that it only takes the best product from each field and you’ve read them all.

4. SOME OF THEIR PRODUCTS ARE RIDICULOUSLY OVERPRICED
$800/month for a membership site?! $1000 - $1500 for a single product?! Some of these gurus’ greed is indeed endless. However, you must remember that not the people who demand such outrageous sums of money are being foolish; it is the people that give the money. Never pay such large amounts on Internet Marketing products; you would be disappointed of what you get in return.

5. LACK OF REAL QUALITY CONTROL
However, there’s one area in which these gurus excel indeed: vanity. OK, that too. But I’m referring to something else: copywriting. Yes, they are indeed very good at writing hyped up sales letters that touch a sensitive string in people. The fact that they don’t deliver is not that important (to them, anyway). Some of these sales copies are so good though, they should be made illegal.

Usually, the longer a sales page is for a product, the worse the product is. There’s no wonder that there’s a rumor that says that Google is going to filter these pages out of the search results. However, the lack of REAL quality control is an issue. For instance, what would you say if you saw a driving school’s advertisement that said: “Come to our school, and you will be able to compete in Formula 1”. Unfortunately, this is not a far fetched comparison, not by a longshot. While you would know that the driving school’s advertisement is fake, you would not really be able to tell that you can’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars overnight by reading a certain ebook. This is exactly why I said that the gurus feed on people’s hopes and dreams, and take advantage of them.

Now, as a final note, you might argue that one has to sell his/her products. I am not against that. What I am against is throwing out poor products with no sense of ethics whatsoever. In one of my future posts I will make a comparison between your average guru and his / her inherent way of thinking and real Internet Marketers who know what they are talking about and actually bring something useful to the community.

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past few years, you probably know the great popularity that the blog platform enjoys nowadays. The term “blog” actually comes from the term web log, and the conceptual backbone is similar to that of a diary, except for the fact that it’s exposed for everyone to see and it is online.

People share their expertise and experiences through blogs and it didn’t take too long for people to realize blogs are a great way to make money online also. So what are the most important advantages of a blog? Quick installation and the ability to receive instant feedback and to communicate with the visitors are some of the most important ones, but there are many more. However, this is not the subject of this post.

What I am going to talk about is the title tags of your blog posts. The great majority of people owning blogs use the WordPress platform, with its 5 minutes quick installation and its versatility. However, what the WordPress CMS fails to provide is good title tags for the blog posts. However, there is a solution and it’s called the SEO Title Tag plugin and you can find it here.

With this handy little plugin, you have the possibility to create a custom title tag for each of your blog posts. As you might have noticed, Wordpress title tag usually defaults to the headline of your post, which is not a very good thing. I’ve had a few websites filtered out of the search results for doing this mistake back in the times when I was a rookie.

The installation is simple. You simply upload the plugin onto your server, in the wp-content folder, and in the sub folder called plugins. After that, you log into your administrator area of your blog, go to plugins main menu and plugins sub-menu. You will get a list of your available plugins, where you will see the one called Seo Title Tag. Hit activate. Now, before you actually start customizing your title tags, there is one more thing you need to do. You need to replace the title tag php command line in your header file. If you don’t know absolutely anything about programming, don’t fret. This is far easier than it sounds. You just need to delete a line and copy-paste another one. Here is how you do it.

In your blog admin area, you go to Presentation main menu and Theme Editor sub-menu. At the right of the page, you will have a list of editable files. Click on the one called “Header”. Look for your title tag, it is to the top of the page. It is the statement between the beginning title tag (<title>) and the ending title tag (</title>). All you need to do is replace that line with:

<title><?php if (function_exists(’seo_title_tag’)) { seo_title_tag(); } else { bloginfo(’name’); wp_title();} ?></title>

Hit update file, and start customizing your blog posts’ title tags. This is a must do, so make sure you don’t skip this. Have fun.

No, this post is not about how gurus make their often enough immense amounts of money by selling false dreams to naïve people. Nope, this is about something else entirely. This post is about me and my performance.

And boy, do I have a lot of things to feel frustrated about. First of all, I feel very uncomfortable for setting up this blog and utterly and completely forgetting about it. If you have any experience whatsoever in the field of Internet Marketing, you will know how I feel and what I am talking about.

It is very easy to get carried away, make big and bold plans, and then not carrying on with them. Especially in Internet Marketing. The mirage of hitting it big time is often a curse also. We can say that not every person is prepared to embrace success. Internet Marketing is like flirting with a beautiful woman. You can either become the happiest man in the world or heart broken.

But before throwing other metaphors at you, I will also tell you exactly what I mean. It is easy to get carried away at the allure of a free life, with you being your own boss. It is very easy to think about waking up each morning, taking a shower and going at the corner café for a delicious breakfast taken while checking your overnight income. What most people often forget – your truly, guilty as charged sometimes - is the fact that you need to work really hard if you want those dreams to become reality. As much as working on a normal full time job? Nope, not as much, way more!

So as of today I am going to make a promise to myself. Although I can’t say that I’m a lazy person, I can safely say that I can do more. This blog is a proof of that. So what would you like to mend in your Internet Marketing method of working?

I recently came across a pretty good free report, called “Teaching Sells”, which you can find here. It was written by Brian Clark, but I found the report via Aaron Wall’s SeoBook site. You can download the report and read it, it is pretty good. But that’s not the point.

The most important messages of the report (from my perspective), are the following:

• the fact that you shouldn’t rely on Google for traffic;
• the fact that you should SELL your content, and not give it for free;
• the fact that you should always have the big picture and mind and think about the future.

While I don’t necessarily completely disagree with neither one of those key points (as a matter of fact I strongly support the 3rd one), I want to raise another issue here: when having the average Online Marketer in mind, whom is he/she supposed to listen to? Now I’ve tried and tested several systems, I know some of them work and some don’t. However, this is because of years of trial and error. But then again, the average Joe hears from a big shot SEO expert that he could and should try building some Adsense websites. Some of them say “Hey, Google is your best friend. Catch some long tails, and success will surely come”. Then, there are people like in the above-mentioned case, who state that Google is a dictator – which I don’t necessarily disapprove of, I was just giving an example.

I think this is a pretty big problem. People who look for online success are usually very susceptible to believing almost everything they hear. That’s because being successful online is still perceived as a dream, and the Internet is the land of dreams consequently. But when they buy an ebook and they learn something, only to buy the next one and learn something else, that’s a problem. Because even though some people do make money from Adsense and rely on Google for traffic and some people make do money through selling content, they all suggest theirs is the only way. However, from all the ebooks I’ve read and all the pieces of software I’ve used, there’s only one that had a big impact on me at the time of its reading. That’s the only high quality Internet Marketing product that could ever compete with standard Marketing books written by classics the likes of Philip Kotler - you know, the ones that get printed :). But more on that sometime in the future.