Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

A couple of days ago I sat down to list to a mainstream podcast presented by a guy who has quite a following among mainstream webmasters who are trying to make money online.

He offers lots of advice for people who want to grow their email lists, increase the number of people who are reading their blogs and generally make enough money online to be able to give up their day jobs. His advice is interesting, there's nothing all that radical in what he says, he is quite adept at dropping names that are sure to impress many people and he is not afraid to publish his income statements.

So people listen to what he has to say and I am sure that many of those people try to follow his advice because what is there not to like about someone like him? Great, free advice from someone who obviously knows what he is talking about and is clearly making money online is hard to ignore. But what if his advice is wrong?

What if he doesn't really know, or hasn't fully researched what he is talking about? What happens to all the people who follow his advice because he couldn't possibly be wrong? They have spent a lot of time, and probably a lot of money, on something that is never going to work for them because the guy who couldn't possibly be wrong was wrong.

And in this case he was wrong ... very, very wrong ... and I know he was wrong because I've been working in the same area, doing the same things that he said he was doing and getting the exact opposite result to what he said he was getting.

Now I know that something we should never forget here online is that what works for one person may not work for another but that wasn't what was happening in this case. This time the podcasting guy was never going to get good results because he had missed one very important feature of the marketing tools we were using.

My marketing was working for me ... and my clients ... because I was applying a number of filters to my ads to ensure that the people who saw my ads were those who were interested in what I was selling. On the other hand the podcasting guy wasn't filtering his ads at all and claimed that there was no way they could be filtered by age or interests or location.

His advice was to skip the marketing tool that I was using and move straight to a second type of marketing where the ads were much more expensive and less likely to be seen by anyone. While I could reach my target market for as little as $7.00 he was advising his listeners to spend much more for what was likely to be less results that what I was getting.

So the reminder is this: don't blindly follow anyone's advice! Always doubt and question everything you hear online because the Net allows anyone to have a voice regardless of whether they have experience and qualifications or not.

For all you know, the person who is giving you great sounding advice on how to spend your marketing dollar for the best result could be a 10 year old kid sitting in his bedroom pretending to be some sort of Internet marketing guru.

Even if you know that he is not some 10 year old kid what guarantee do you have that he really knows what he is talking about? There are so many people out there who think that they can make a name for themselves by taking information they have found on the Net and publishing it as their own.

They really have no experience of their own but, by copying other people's work, they can sound very plausible and how would you know that what they are telling you to do is just a load of rubbish that they copied from someone else who may have copied it from some other person?

Can you really afford to follow anyone blindly? Even when you're reaching desperation point you need to be cautious about what advice you follow. If you're down to your last shot you don't want to waste it on information that is just plain wrong.

So what can you do? Never trust any advice you get until you have seen it work for you. Test everything and never commit to any course of action until you know that it is going to work for you ... and even then do some more testing before you fully commit fully.