Something struck me this morning as I was talking to a fellow marketer.  Something that might affect the way you think about how you market online.

I have been finding my way around this internet marketing thing for over a year now.  I subscribe to a multitude of lists and see many different offers every week, some good, some bad.

Every once in a while I see something that is really cool, in an “I got to get me one of those!” way.  Since it is such a great product and a great idea, I assume it is the newest of shiny concepts.

Often I find out that is not the case.

The fact is, if you are an ethical marketer with the best interests of your customers in mind, you will not judge your offerings purely by the length of time they have been around.  You’ll try to select products based on what’s best for them.

Though some of the newest offerings in the marketplace have truly new takes on old ideas, most do not.  Most are just a retelling of the same old story.

I am constantly amazed by how fast a new product can disappear if it is not continually marketed.  Products that were the hot ticket just a few months ago are nowhere to be seen, replaced by the newest hot ticket.

Another thing to keep in mind is that just because you are very familiar with a product or a course, that doesn’t mean everyone is.  Marketing on the internet in many respects involves a collection of interconnected circles.  The ways that you find out about what’s new will be a product of the circles you are involved in.  Those circles might not be the same circles your customers travel.

For example, if you spend a lot of time on the Warrior Forum you will be familiar with a certain set of names and products, and those names and products will seem like the biggest in the internet marketing space.  That is not the case.  A surprising number of people have never heard of the Warrior Forum, and even more have been there and don’t really go back.  So that little universe that seems like the center of all things internet marketing doesn’t impact them at all.

I don’t mean to pick on the Warrior Forum.  It’s a fine place.  But what is true for it is true for everything else.  The space you travel in is just one of many.  Don’t assume your customers travel in the same circles.

So don’t make the mistake of assuming that your experience is the same as your customer’s.  If you have a product you would like to promote because it is wonderful, but you worry that it has been around so long that everyone has already seen it, don’t.  Show it to your customers and let them decide.

We won’t even talk about open rates, or the number of times someone needs to see an offer before they buy…

The economy sucks.  And it really doesn’t look like it’s going to get better any time soon. So what does that mean for internet marketing?

Good Times.

Okay, so that’s just my opinion.  One thing I learned all those years ago when I was getting the economics degree that I never used, is that opinions on the economy are just that – opinions.

My opinion is that things are going to be slow for a while, perhaps a long while.  And that’s good news for you.

Things are tough.  How can that be good?  What does that mean?  Two things.  People are going to be looking to save money, and people are going to be looking for new careers or part time jobs to augment their income.

More and more as they look to save money, people will turn to the internet.  As the idea of shopping online becomes more familiar to people, they will see that the true value of buying online is not just in the dollars they save on what they buy.  They will come to realize that the real savings is in the time, effort and hard costs involved in driving to a brick and mortar establishment to do their shopping.  This presents many opportunities for affiliate review sites and for ecommerce businesses.

Online marketing will present a major attraction for people who are looking to expand their opportunities.  The concept of earning a living on the internet is becoming more well known and the barriers of entry are low.

This means there will be a steady supply of new customers looking for advice and training.  If you  have knowledge you can give them (and if you have reached this site, I am betting you do).  No matter what your area of specialization, or your level of accomplishment, you can write an article, record a video, set up a membership site, or start a blog and help them find their way.

There is an oft repeated phrase in internet marketing – “you know more than the next guy”.  And that’s true.   Not only is it true, but it’s an advantage.  You may not know as much as the guru down the lane, but you do know something.  The trick is not necessarily in knowing something.  It’s being able to explain it.

Just today I was installing a script on one of my accounts.  This is a url shortener, and the product looks pretty trick.  However, it’s obvious the script was created by a programmer, and on further checking, a programmer who had been using it personally for years.  The install instructions were a bit difficult, requiring some trial and error on my part, but the setup instructions are non-existent.  It looks to me like the developer had spent so much time with the program that he didn’t even realize how difficult it is to understand.

That’s the point.  The closer you are to learning something, the easier it is to remember how tough learning it can be.  That is your strength.  That’s your USP.  Decide now to share your knowledge with these customers and do it ethically, and you will build a business that will continue to profit you for years.

It seems a little sad to say, but as long as things are bad, things will continue to be good.

The concepts of Voice and Feel are two that I come back to often when thinking about the hows and whys of providing information and of consuming it.  One aspect of the importance of voice as a writer is illustrated in thinking about the idea of feel as it relates to learning.

Feel is not something you often see talked about when people are discussing the ins and outs of various Internet Marketing information products – books, reports and courses designed to teach others how to make money marketing online.  It is a concept you should keep in mind.

The first step in the journey toward success online is finding a field of marketing that resonates with you. Whether it’s affiliate marketing, adsense, article marketing or some other area, there is bound to be one that seems to make more sense to you.  It’s true that you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket, but you have to start somewhere.

Once you decide on an area of marketing that you want to pursue (and this is no easy task), you will need to light on a program to follow.  If you are like me, this means that you will begin to accumulate information and products in the area as you try to find your way.  While this can be time consuming and a bit spendy, it has one huge advantage.  You often hear that when you eventually become successful at earning an income online it will be by taking a program and making it your own.  Consuming a bunch of information about a subject is how you eventually do that.

Somewhere along the way, as you zero in on the correct system for you, you will find that one program or guide that makes sense. The one that feels right to you.

For me the area of Internet Marketing that makes sense right now is in the building of sniper sites.  These are small sites with just a few posts, that are optimized and backlinked for easy keywords.  In the past these sites have been successful with as few as two posts, but this appears to not be the best strategy these days.  Konrad did an experiment on this very subject and reported on it in this post.

I have four different courses that are examples of this type of marketing.  They all teach substantially the same thing, varying only in the details, but there is something about the fourth and last one I bought that works for me.  For some reason it feels right.  I “get “it.

I have built a site or two this way, enough to verify that the technique will rank a site.  It also lets me know I need to learn a bit about montezing a site, but that’s a different conversation.  When I get back to doing some affiliate marketing, that is the program I will largely follow.

All four of these courses are good ones.  They teach people how they can make money.  Their authors seem to be successful with the techniques themselves, and so have some of their students.  But three of them just didn’t feel right.  And that matters.

Like many of you I’m sure, I buy quite a few programs of one sort or another for learning purposes.  Video and text programs designed to teach me the ins and outs of various forms of Internet Marketing.  How important is it that the person who authored the content has been successful with the method he is teaching?  Do they need to have made a thousand dollars, or a million?  Does it matter if they have made any money at all?

I am sure that many of the training products being sold out there are not created by people who make a living with the concepts they teach.  In fact, given that many of the wildly successful entrepreneurs have almost all of their content ghostwritten, it may be that most are not.  And I don’t really care.

If your goal is to find a Guru to follow and do everything exactly as they do, great!  That is certainly a workable business model. If you can build a relationship through coaching or mentoring even better. I hope it works out for you.

If what you are doing is trying to find your way around Internet Marketing, then here are three truths:

One – most of the core concepts of internet marketing are relatively straight forward and fairly static.  Sure, the way a given strategy is best implemented might change slightly over time, but the basic processes remain.

Two – everything is available free.  It’s true.  If you take enough time and effort, virtually everything you need to know about Internet Marketing is available somewhere online.

Three – many people who are wildly successful at Internet Marketing either aren’t going to spend their time making products, or couldn’t teach their way out of a paper bag.

Is it a good thing to learn from someone who is a real, honest to goodness success story in an industry?  Sure.  If you can find one you can afford who speaks to you.  But the fact is that even if they have made a bazillion dollars doing what they do, there is no guarantee that you will, even if you mimic their every step.  I don’t know why this is so, but it is.

So let’s address the idea that the only way to learn Internet Marketing is by learning from those who have been wildly successful at what they teach.  The pool of those people is limited, by interest and by ability.  Even if there are good examples available, you need to afford them, you need to find them, and you need to understand them.

It’s fine for someone to say that you should learn from so-and-so, but if his upper end course is $2000 and the version of it that is in your reach is the “lite” version that has holes in it, what good is that to you?  He’s an expert, but he sure as heck doesn’t care about you.

The internet is HUGE, with nooks and crannies to hold virtually everything digital.  Because of this sheer volume, there are products and people out there that might have just what you are looking for, but that you will never come across.  Yesterday I watched a brief video in which the presenter (a solid six figure earner) mentioned the names of a half dozen “Gurus” in the internet marketing niche.  I had never heard of 5 of them.  And those are experts in the niche I am involved in, not dog training or anxiety cures.

I have courses on my hard drive (as I’m sure you do) that I know have enabled their followers to make thousands of dollars.  But what does that matter?  Sometimes  I just don’t get it.  And it’s not that I’m slow, or that the general technique is strange to me.  It’s just that the way things are explained, or maybe the things are chosen for explanation, just don’t work for me. I am sure I have learned valuable information from those courses, but it’s background information.  I am not able to take that method online and make money with it.

Given these constraints – that everything is available free, that you might not be able to find the right expert, or that you might not be able to learn from them, is the “expert” status more important, or is it the “learn from them” part?

List building is hot these days, and with good reason. Since I intend to build a list soon, over the last several months I have been collecting information on list building from one source or another, and guess what?  All the products I have, free and paid, say pretty much the same thing. As do all the posts I have read that I have not bothered to copy and save. The basic concepts haven’t changed much over time, so everybody is doing pretty much the same thing.  Some have more success with one type of list building and some with others, but as in the “learn from a guru” section above, that’s the way it goes.

Now, you don’t know me and I don’t have a list, so I am certainly no version of a guru.  I guarantee you, though, that I could take all the information in my head, do a bit of research to get facts and figures from free sources so as not to plagiarize, and put together a killer report on List building.  Is it rehashed information?  Sure.  Is it worthless?  Not on your life.  It would have solid, actionable content and if nothing else, many of the readers of the report will pick up something, some little way I explained a bit that suddenly makes sense to them.  And occasionally, someone will have an AHA! moment.  The time, the place, or the way I put a sentence together is going to resonate with them and they will finally get it.

Some of the best coaches in the world couldn’t play their way off the bench and some of the best teachers in the world would never make a living at their craft.

The fact is it is not mandatory that someone be able to do something well in order to be able to understand it. If they can understand it, they can probably teach it.   The real question, and the only one that matters, is can they teach it to you?

Yesterday I received an email with a link to a sales page touting a copywriting product launch.  Reading that sales page got me back up  on one of my soap boxes.

Now I have no knowledge of the content of this product, good or bad, but I do know one thing – the grammar on the sales page was so poor that I never got past the third paragraph.  I spent most of my time reading the headline with morbid fascination.  I never really did make sense of it.

The only reason I gave the sales page as much attention as I did was because I am interested in copywriting and like to get as much information on the subject as I can.  But I can tell you it would be a cold day in Hell before I would ever consider spending my money with someone who wrote as poorly as this.  The actual structuring of the argument in the copy may have been good, I don’t know. I never got engaged enough find out.

Which brings me to my point.  If you are selling stuff on the internet, physical or digital, for the forseeable future the biggest market for your products will likely be the English speaking market.  If your English skills aren’t at least adequate, you will be leaving money on the table.

That’s not to say that you need to have a degree in composition, lord knows I don’t, but that your writing needs to be at least good enough to communicate effectively.  You want to engage your readers, and that is impossible if they have to spend any amount of time trying to figure out what you are saying.  Even if they stick around, and they probably won’t, their reading will become less about what you are trying to say and more about the exercise of deciphering.

Facility with the English language is even more vital when it comes to sales copy.  Sales pages are by their very nature designed to “suck” people in and drag them down the page.  Anything that interrupts this process reduces it’s effectiveness, and stopping to figure out what a word or sentence means is guaranteed to interrupt your potential customer’s journey to the Buy button.

I could go on and on, but it comes down to this.  If you are marketing to the English language market and your skills are lacking, don’t ignore it.  Even if you are doing OK, you could be doing much better.  Trust me.  I have seen examples where I am positive that fixing this one thing could have put thousands of dollars in a marketer’s pocket.

Why take all the time and effort required to have a presence on the internet and then waste it?  Somehow, some way, find someone who can look over your stuff and make it scan. If you can afford it, pay someone.  It’ll be worth it.