One of the topics I caught on talk radio recently was how the FDA announced that most diet pills are bad for us. The kicker was that even pills marked as all natural are bad for the people taking them. I am thinking to myself, “no crap.” Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s good for you.

Internet marketing is a lot like diet pills

Internet marketing is not easy. I won’t claim that it is. It is real work. Sometimes at the end of the day having worked 14+ hours, I question why I even bother. But when you accomplish something cool and profitable, it is completely worth it. Like dieting, there is no shortcut.

Let me repeat myself, there is NO shortcut. You can’t take some magic pill that will make you money overnight online. If that were the case, everyone would do it. It takes long hours, a lack of sleep and eating potatoes for months to save on groceries. The reason so many people out there are “pretending” to give you good advice is because they are selling you diet pills. Then when you realize those pills don’t work, they have another one lined up for you to try that “really works this time.” Quit kidding yourself.

95% of the “A-List” bloggers are selling you crap. I fell for it just like most everyone else I know. I was only smart enough to get out of the Internet marketing rat race when I saw a good thing. People like Vic and Grizz taught me how to think like a real Internet marketer and how to profit from it. They will teach you more about Internet marketing than all of the A-listers combined. They can teach you about SEO and how to make money online. If you want proof, just Google “make money online” 3 of the top 10 spots belong to these two guys.

There is a lot of money to be made online. But the pie is shrinking unless you teach yourself some valuable skills. Skills that are not of value include spending 1,000 hours building a list of subscribers who don’t buy what you are selling. That is why it takes the A-listers tens of thousands of subscribers to make money. Do you ever notice that advertisers on their sites don’t buy repeating ads? The reason is because their subscribers don’t buy anything from those advertisers. It’s a big con game. People think if they can get an ad on those bloggers’ sites, some of their money and luck will rub off on them. Nine times out of 10, the advertisers lose and the blogger wins, and you’re the sucker if you bought anything. Trust me I know.

Quit buying diet pills

It’s time to start exercising. If you want to make money online you need to learn a set of skills that will help you to do that. Pick your poison as far as what you want to do. I chose SEO because there is not a lot of competition here in Fargo and it is a lot of fun ranking websites for new keywords. I hope what you choose is something that you really love because when times get tough and you aren’t making any money, you better love it in order to stick through it. Internet marketing is a race. You don’t win races by taking pills. You have to train, sweat, eat right and have commitment.

The #1 thing any of you can do is stop kidding yourself and decide to start working hard towards your goal. It’s either that or go about doing what you’re doing and continue to watch results slip away. I made a choice to quit my job and make a living online doing something I was passionate about. I am extremely thankful I found people willing to share what they know with me freely allowing me to accomplish my dream. I would like to make the same commitment to you as well. I will gladly and willfully tell you all I know, what I’ve learned and continue to learn. All you have to do is ask.

I have to warn you that I am only a willing vessel. You can take what you want and leave the rest. I just promise not to sell you Internet marketing diet pills. I am sure I will have more to come on this subject. I dare ask if you have any Internet marketing horror stories, but if you do and would like to share them feel free to do so. Just remember, you can lose weight for free just like you can make money online for free, it just takes hard work and time. I am always available for discussion via my contact page.

Now that all of the madness is over and the election is out of our control, it is time to pick up and move on. For the last year and half we have been completely inundated with political ads and rhetoric. Campaigning for the 2012 presidential election officially starts on November 5th 2008.

One of the last papers I wrote for my political science major was about the effect of the Internet on future elections (including this one). My argument was that the Internet leveled the playing field and would continue to spread videos and political messages even though election laws forbid certain campaigning the day of election.

I think the return on investment of an online video is far greater than that of a paid ad placement on one of the major networks. I talked about a video called Keating Economics released by the Obama campaign about McCain’s ties to Mr. Keating and the S & L scandal. The video was mini-documentary style and garnered 1.7 million views on YouTube. As far as I can tell, the Obama campaign is out the production and website costs. My guess is a couple grand.

I am also sure that the page more than paid for itself by all the donations buttons scattered about. So, technically I am sure the site netted a profit for the Obama campaign as well as shaped opinions about John McCain.

Could websites and YouTube videos be the future of marketing and advertising?

I think it is pretty obvious that the Internet and all online components have a significant effect on the future of marketing and advertising. Now with social networks, emails, newsletters, SEO, internet marketing, videos, Meetup groups and on and on, you can effectively build residual traffic and income for a tiny investment.

People are looking for ideas and other people that are just like them. When they find their community or “tribe” they feel at home and are comfortable. The key is to realize that you can’t just create a community or tribe and expect people to jump on board. They want truth, passion, excitement, entertainment, gossip and whatever else they might be into. If you can attempt to create something like that out of thin air without the full conviction or passion behind it, you’ll be called out and will most likely crash and burn.

Thankfully, starting ideas online is a lot cheaper than starting them offline where overhead costs can run very high. 13 years ago Matt Drudge of Drudgereport.com started posting up-to-date news articles he found online. He runs a single page website that received just under 800,000,000 page views last month. His site is now the 6th most visited news website. He makes his money from ad placements and with 800 million views a month, I am sure he is doing pretty well.

What we online have known for a while and what those outside of the Internet are learning is how effective advertising online can be. When your message has a clear purpose and contains relevant information to your tribe, the message will spread to millions in a very short time, like drudgereport.com or a YouTube video.

It amazes me that every segment of the evening news isn’t broken up and uploaded online to easily distribute like a YouTube video. You would think they would want people to spread their content and video far and wide. Who knows, maybe they would even get views from different countries and states who simply like what they have to offer. Not to mention they could embed advertising into the videos to boost revenue.

How about newspapers allowing their readers to write and add commentary to their online web pages? A news collaborative that builds upon itself like a mini Wikipedia. Simple measures like flagging inappropriate articles and comments could allow discussion to continue without the direct influence of the company or organization. The future involves catering to your readers and subscribers needs to enable them to share and take part in the activities surrounding your community (tribe). If they like what you have to offer they will stay. If they really like it they will share. Be an enabler to your community.

Since humans picked up the very first stick and rock to help make their lives easier, we haven’t stopped. The same goes for tools online. Learning how and where to find those tools along with using them help make our lives much easier is vital for productivity. Here are my Top 10 Web Marketer Tools (in no particular order):

1. SEO Quake Toolbar

The SEO Quake toolbar is a FireFox extension that allows you to quickly and easily see quick stats about every web page you visit. As I am browsing from site to site I can simply look at my toolbar and know roughly how much traffic, authority, backlinks, age, keywords and indexed pages a site has. This is invaluable information when you are doing research on clients or competition. With a few clicks you can see much more detailed information until you are blue in the face. Here is where you can get the SEO Quake Toolbar.

2. COcomment

COcomment is another great tool to allow you to track the online conversations you have had. Every time you leave a comment on a fellow website or blog it records that and feeds it into your COcomment inbox. If anyone replies to that comment in the future you can see that to continue your conversation. I use this every day, and it helps to build your trust on other websites as a member and participator, even if you only visit to update your conversation. This is a big for time management not to mention a big time saver, an absolute must for maintaining an online presence in all different communities.

3. Google Alerts

I have touched on this before and won’t exhaust the topic, but if you are trying to become an authority on a subject there is no better way to stay up to date than with Google Alerts. You can play with the settings to receive alerts by email one a day, hour, as they happen and so on. This is a great tool for brand management and to see what others are saying about your subject, company or yourself.

4. Ping.fm

Ping.fm allows you to send messages to all of your various Twitters, Facebook, Myspace and just about every other major social networking site. I have it set up through my Gmail that allows me to send a message automatically to my Ping.fm dashboard and it simultaneously updates all of my social networking platforms. Huge, HUGE, time saver. Never again do you have to log in and out of 20 different sites to update all your friends and followers. It’s great.

5. All in One SEO Plugin

All in One SEO Plugin is for self-hosted WordPress sites. So, if you have a blog and use WordPress, you need this plugin. This plugin allows you to quickly optimize your post title, description and keywords. When you do this on a subject like Halloween Marketing Ideas, when someone searches for that keyword term it shows up in the search engine instead of your normal blog title. It looks better to the eye, meets the searcher criteria, allows search engines to categorize better and helps overall in SEO.

6. Auto Social Poster (ASP)

ASP is really a neat tool to automate the initial boost of your post in the search engines in a given term. What ASP does is allows you to automatically bookmark your newest posts to sites like Delicious, Scuttle sites, Flurl, and many, many more. You can create as many different accounts to all the sites you would like, and it will randomly select as many or few sites to post to. This gives each of your newest posts an automatic backlinks from dozens of social bookmarking sites. If you are writing on a trend type subject, this one plugin alone can help to drive hundreds of visitors.

7. G-Lock Blog Finder

G-Lock Blog Finder program allows you to search for keyword terms similar to yours in order to build good backlinks. If you have a blog about apartments and want to build that blog as an authority on apartments you can use this program to help find those apartment blogs. If you are leaving and participating on their site in a useful manner and have similar content, it should be easy to attract like audience to your own blog. This not only builds your reputation but helps to create more trickle traffic from similar sites.

8. FoxyProxy

The FoxyProxy plugin for FireFox allows you to view the web semi-anonymously by routing your web viewing through a proxy. This helps to reduce your footprint on the web and lets you stay one up on the competition. You can pick and choose how you want your settings and what sites should and shouldn’t be routed through a proxy. Once again, a very useful and free tool that can be used in many different ways.

9. Aweber Newsletter

Building a Aweber newsletter list is a very valuable tool. If you have not jumped on board I would encourage you to do so as soon as you reasonably can. Permission based marketing is becoming a huge tool for marketers to utilize. If people like what you have to offer, setting them up to receive your newsletter is a great way to keep them in contact and make genuine offers you feel will help them. This doesn’t mean you can now spam everyone on your list but it does mean you now have an opportunity to point them in the right direction hopefully with an affiliate link or commission cut. Don’t lie, cheat or steal and you can make good money from this tool just by being responsible.

10. Bookmarking Demon (BMD)

BMD is a lot like the auto social poster plugin in how it helps to automate backlinks from bookmarking sites. These sites help to increase exposure for your content and hopefully some additional traffic as well. With this program you have the ability to bookmark and share your site, useful information or even your friend’s site. This would be the equivalent of an online shotgun with the idea of getting your site out to as many places as possible. This has the potential to be used in a spam-like manner but if used correctly can again help you to increase your digital footprint online.

Before you do anything online you should make yourself familiar with all the tools and possible consequences of using those tools. If used improperly some of these can get your site deindexed or ever banned, resulting in less traffic and authority. You also never want to spend money on any tools or programs that you will not utilize fully. Look up reviews and what others have to say about any one tool over another and proceed with caution. These are a few of the tools I use on a day-to-day basis, and I personally find them useful.