Get Real: How
to Stay Clear of Bogus Internet
Marketing
Schemes and Create Real Value
By
Mike Meuser
The
internet is just full of online business scams, schemes and rip-offs. Just signup on one of the many home based
business forum and you’ll see what I mean when you get friends, emails, and
replies to your posts. Many are there to take advantage of your
desperation. The majority seem to be a
bunch of amateurs who pose as professionals and try to sell you products and
services guaranteeing that you will get rich like them yet they have never sold
anything online except more online marketing schemes. Where does it end? Similar to the dotcom bomb and housing bomb,
no real value is created. Very few will profit at the expense of the great
majority. If you are lucky enough to
actually make a living with one of these schemes, is this the way you want to
do it? - At the expense of others?
That’s not the way I do business and I doubt if it is the way you really
want to do it either.
How
many people who have NO claim to internet fame except to sell internet
marketing schemes to others will there be before the bubble bursts? I could see the dotcom bomb coming. I read
reports saying that most of the top companies were only shuffling money amongst
themselves – no real money was coming in.
It was doomed to fail yet I would hear people say, “all I have to do is
work at suchandsuch.com for a few years, take my stock options, cash in and
retire.” NOT! Some I know even cashed in their kids’ college
savings to buy dotcom stock! If it were
only so easy! It wasn’t, of course, and
most lost a great deal while a few prospered.
Then
along comes the real estate boom. Just
like dotcom, everyone wanted a piece of the action before it was too late. As
the percentage of people who could actually afford to buy a home dropped from
50%+ to less than 10% in some places, few connected the dots. I saw it coming but very few realized that when
only a few can buy the inflated value homes, the bubble just has to burst –
there’s no one left to buy them. And, of
course, as we all know, the bubble did burst.
While a few got rich, the great majority suffered and will continue to
suffer for a long time.
But,
don’t get me wrong, not all internet marketers are bad. If you step away from the bunch who sell
internet marketing strategies to newbies who then in turn sell more internet
marketing strategies to newbies and on and on, you find that there are some
folks out there who sell amazing products and services. Before I elaborate on this let’s talk about
creating real value instead of furthering the get rich online marketing schemes
that very few will actually benefit from.
Here are two examples.
My
website MapCruzin.com is devoted to
helping people learn GIS mapping. I
provide free software, map shapefiles, maps and resources. I also sell a few GIS map shapefiles that I
have created. MapCruzin.com was online
from 1996 through 2008 before I even thought about making money with the
website. My passion drove me to create
unique helpful content. In 2008 I began
implementing adsense. Since then MapCruzin’s revenue has risen from a few
hundred dollars per month to several thousand.
The ads are extremely well targeted to my audience. I have both a high click through rate on the
ads and a high number of pageviews per visitor.
This tells me that both my content and the ads are of real value.
I’m now
writing an ebook about MapCruzin.com and how I earn a living from it NOT by
selling “how to make big money selling online” products, but by providing
unique content and real value to people making a living in the real world. It’s
easy to get drawn into the online-marketing-bubble, but if you do, in time your
bubble will burst.
My
other website, RecyclingSecrets.com
is devoted to helping people bootstrap (as in little or no startup cash) their
way into the home based salvage and recycling business. I began in this business in the early 1980s
doing deconstruction, metal recycling, electronic and telecommunication salvage
and reuse. I’ve done quite well at this business and I now sell an ebook that
chronicles my experience, the Home
Based Salvage and Recycling Business Manual. The manual is full of
real stories about how I bootstrapped my way into the business, provided real
value to my community, while earning a very good living. This business is not for everyone – it is not
passive income or some scheme that “guarantees” that all you have to do is work
a couple of hours a day and sit back and watch the money come in - it takes
hard work at times - but it can provide a good and growing income. You can check it out at RecyclingSecrets.com,
It
was only after years in the real business of home-based salvage and recycling
that I became qualified to write and sell an online product that adds real
value to the lives of the purchasers. Similarly,
when I do write the ebook about my success monetizing MapCruzin.com, I am
qualified to do it because I’ve spent years writing content, placing ads,
blogging, tweeting and doing related things to increase the traffic to and
revenue from the website while increasing its value to visitors. Both ebooks provide the purchaser with real
value because they are both based on the real world experience of making a
living with home-based businesses.
Earlier
I mentioned that there are some really good and helpful folks online who can
help you to create really excellent information products and market them
earning a good living. One I have found
that is particularly good is Dr.Mani
Sivasubramanian. His excellent
ebook, Think, Write and
Retire is full of helpful information about developing your niche,
writing and marketing your online informational product. More
great folk who have inspired and helped me are listed here.
You too have experiences, knowledge, interests and
passions that provide you with unique insights.
We all tend to think, “well everybody knows that” when we think about
what we know, but the truth is that most of the time, most other folks DON’T
know what we know or how to do what we can do easily.
Avoid jumping from opportunity to opportunity. You
will be better off if you stay away from things that only attract you because
of the claims about money and focus on the real tools and information out there
that will help you to capitalize on your unique skills, experience, education,
passions and interests to develop a winning strategy.
The
bottom line is to not spin your wheels and waste precious days, weeks, months
and years of your life doing things that someone tells you will “make you
rich.” Spend your valuable time creating
real value for others, creating real things that people in this world really
need. If you do this, you will succeed in business.
You are free to share
this article in any manner that you like with the following exceptions. You can
email it, use it in presentations, print
it, place it on blogs and websites, and otherwise use it only IF (1) you do not
alter it in any manner and (2) you give credit to the author by linking back to
MapCruzin.com and RecyclingSecrets.com. Thank you.