Do You Need Any More Internet Marketing Training?

So this morning I’m reviewing another course on Adsense (highly touted by most link-pushers, serious inbox “buy now” flood), and tell ya what:

although EPIC Adsense 2012 certainly isn’t bad, the fundamental idea is pretty simple:

optimize one half of your blog for high CPC (cost per click) keywords, so you earn lots of money when people click on the ads and the other half for high traffic, low competition keywords (somehow related to the high CPC keywords).

Meaning: drive lots of traffic via high-traffic/low competition keywords, funnel visitors to your high CPC ads and make lots of money.

(oh, btw, as I’m about to launch into something some people might consider a tirade, this is NOT aimed at this particular Adsense course, it’s more a “general” rant)

So my question is: if an Internet marketing training product is based around such a simple idea, where the heck is the value? (and why should I pay $10 for it?)

Or:

Do you actually need any more Internet Marketing Training? (and should you pay for it?)

If it were a fantastic step-by-step (which it isn’t, it’s rather wordy and fails to get to the point, at least in my opinion), ok, it would be valuable for someone new to Adsense.

But as it is, this — and that’s the point of this blog-post – and 99% of all other Internet marketing training courses, fall into the same category:

Most Internet Marketing Training Is … Rehashed Information Gleaned From Other Internet Marketing Training Programmes!

Let me put it another way:

Yes, it’s official:

The wheel has already been invented!

no point re-inventing it yourself or buying yet another shiny course on how to design something that doesn’t have any edges and works really well when put under a cart (or for pushing infeasibly large blocks of stone into a giant heap to be used as a burial place for your king…)

Now, I’ve mentioned this before:

In order to make money online, you need 3 things:

1. A product (could be your own, or somebody else’s product which you sell as an affiliate)
2. Traffic
3. An Offer

and there are only so many ways of saying:

• “this is how you create or pick the right product”,
• “this is how you drive traffic” and
• “this is how you craft an irresistible offer”.

Well, the last point (the one with the offer) is a bit of a special case.

Because, and that too I’ve said many times before, the secret of (Internet) marketing and of making money online is that you need to ALWAYS TEST!

There is no such thing as the ‘perfect’ offer that works in all markets, you always have to test.

To make it work, you have to test!

Now, and in order not to get sued, I’ll simply say that *MY OPINION ONLY*, 99% of all internet marketing training courses out there are NOT based on testing, they’re based on

1. conjecture (“mhmm, this *should* work (because so many people say it “should” work, and it’s not been proven not to work)
2. plain ol’ lies: conjecture + a little bit of bending of the truth
3. one-off FLUKE successes.

Take the Adsense WSO above.

Somewhere in the PDF you’ll find an oh-so-impressive screenshot that shows you that the author made $2.03 out of 1 click (which was one of 11 clicks).

Which suggests to you that

1. you’ll make around $2 for every click
2. the conversion rate is close to 10%

and then of course your brain goes into overdrive and starts painting pleasing pictures:

“oh, I only need 100 visitors a day and this site alone will make me $20, just imagine what happens when I have 100 of these sites, boy, I’m an instant millionaire”. (thank you brain… but thank you too dear author of that training course, which left out the fact that this was probably a FLUKE, and that the real world stats are nowhere near as nice)

Anyway, here’s the deal:

Most internet marketing training courses are NOT based on solid/scientific testing of ideas, but most likely they’re rehashed crap and/or based on a one-off success, in other words a FLUKE!

And that does not help you one bit!

What does help you is learning from other people’s mistakes!

When they show you not just the $2.03 for that one click, but all the setbacks, and all the things that don’t/didn’t work and WHY they don’t/didn’t work.

Another aspect of this lack of testing is of course that you constantly get different opinions (and they’re no more than opinions) on how e.g. a WordPress site should be set up for maximum on-page SEO potential, for maximum Adsense conversions, for ….

Again, usually this is a “hey, this worked, I’m ok with the results, but I haven’t really tested it to see if I could increase the performance” type deal…

So, here’s what I think is worth paying for in any marketing training course:

It’s worth paying for an internet marketing training course if

1. it’s the “curation” you are paying for. In other words: someone has taken all the freely available information and put it into one place, so you don’t have to go hunting around for individual bits of information – in other words: they’re saving you time, and they’re up-front about it. The only pleasing pictures are those of time saved!
2. it’s the “experience” you are paying for. And I’m not talking about “ha, I’m experience, now pay me lots of money” (the word “expert” is used far too often by far too many people who have had FLUKE-successes. Show me that you can REPEAT that in different markets, that you actually have a business that feeds your family and quite possibly the families of quite a few employees, then we’re talking about “expert”). I’m thinking of “Experience” as a form of TESTING – and if you’re willing to share that history of testing (which usually contains far more failures than successes!), then I’m happy to listen to you and pay for that experience. (ah, the pleasing pictures of me getting fired as an affiliate for Jeff Walker…)

So, summary:

You only need 3 things to build a successful Internet marketing business (product, traffic, offer), and you can find all the information you’ll ever need to make this happen online, for free!

If you want to pay for information, make sure it’s because

1. they’ve done a stellar job curating the content and/or
2. because the person selling the information is adding their experience – and ideally some SOLID/scientific TESTING results – to the package, so you can learn from their mistakes.

Now, end of rant, and a look at this “most internet marketing training sucks” rant from a different perspective:

when you start creating your own products (and that could be ‘real’ products, content for free reports which you can give away, put on your squeeze page etc), ask yourself:

1. if you are curating content, is it CLEAR to the potential buyer that you’re only curating content AND do they actually want curated content?
2. are you adding your own experience to the package (and is that what they want), and if so, are you adding the the WHOLE experience to it (the good, the bad and the ugly), AND is it based on more than a FLUKE success?

Let me put it another way:

would you feel comfortable promoting whatever you’re putting out there using press-releases?

Would you be happy for Oprah’s research team to phone you up and ask you to come on the show after they’ve done their due diligence? If you’re afraid their uncomfortable questions might just be a little too uncomfortable, maybe time to go back to the drawing board.

Let me know what you think!

Veit

PS: Resources:

Product creation: I can truly *highly* recommend these two courses: The Secret Product Formula and The 4 hour Product, these 2 are all you’ll ever need to create killer products (starts from market research, looking at the different types of products people buy, all the way through marketing them (to some degree).

Traffic generation: lol, I wouldn’t even know where to start.

So, quick summary: if you’re new to Internet marketing, do yourself a HUGE favour, set aside a little money and start with PPC. (pay per click).

Paid advertising is something YOU control, as opposed to search engine optimization where you have to rely on Google to have a good day.

Yes, SEO is very nice to have in the long run, but until its effect kicks in, you’re not making money, and you’re not learning anything. (also check out my ‘anti seo rants’) I *highly* recommend you find alternatives to SEO, whether it’s craigslist, article marketing, forum marketing (without beings spammy), video marketing etc etc etc.

I’ve personally had great results with Jeff Johnson’s trainings, (although NOT as a complete newbie!) but don’t get this in the *hope* that it’ll solve all your problems.

The biggest secret with traffic is to take one method, then test and tweak until you’ve either figured out that it does or does not work for you. And if it works for you, then you scale it up, automated/outsource it and move to the next. The WORST thing you could do (and most people do exactly this) is take one method, quickly implement it one(half) time, figure out it doesn’t work ‘out of the box’, discard it and move to the next, and the next, and the next.

Offer Testing: an offer includes many, many elements, from price, through use of testimonials, all the way to the way your money-back guarantee is formulated. I can’t think of one single internet marketing training course that covers all of it, so my recommendation: grab pretty much any sales-letter, study the various elements on there and then start split-testing the different elements. I’m personally using Split Test Dynamo, which is ‘ok’, not fantastic, but definitely beats using Google Website Optimizer.

There is a new WordPress split-testing tool out which looks to be superior to split test dynamo because it allows in-page optimization of individual elements, so I’ll be checking that out soon.