Honest to Goodness!
Here Is my promise to anyone now, or in the future who might visit my Ways to Make Money Blog. I’ll be honest with you about the things I’ve learned on my internet marketing journey. I can’t promise that I’ll always be right about everything, but I think anyone who would do that, is a fool. I’ll do my best to get you to the point where YOU are making money on the internet. I’m not promising that you will make money. That is entirely up to you and your work ethic. I’m just saying that I’ll try to teach you about things that have the potential to help you out and that have worked for me. I am still learning and trying new things too, so what I’ll share the new things that I learn as well.
Where is Internet Marketing Headed?
I think the direction of internet marketing is definitely going toward what some people call “transparency”. That is basically coming clean and not trying to get anything past the people who you want to trust you. Don’t be naïve though. There are still plenty of dishonest people waiting out there to pick off anyone who will hand them their money. They have the mentality that if the people are stupid enough to believe their outrageous lies, then they deserve what they get. I have a different opinion. I know that a lot of the people who fall for get rich quick scams are just good people who are feeling desperate to make a change. I know, because I’ve been there and I bought a lot of stupid things from people peddling the latest and greatest Clickbank items back when I started a few years ago. Thank goodness Clickbank’s return policy is pretty easy to deal with. When you’re sick of your job, or creditors are hassling you, those fancy sales pages can look very good.
Honesty is the Best Policy
Just like in the movies... I found a photo of Truth Serum. How do your sites rate?
It is an old saying, but “honesty is the best policy” still holds true for me. Even a cynic would have to admit that it is much easier to keep track of things when you only tell the truth. On top of that, it just feels a lot better to not be burdened with knowing that you took advantage of someone.
To Thine Own Self Be True
We also need to be honest with ourselves. If you have websites up already, do you ever look at your them objectively? You should, or have a friend or relative give you an honest opinion. This isn’t just to help you feel better about yourself or your websites. It makes practical sense. Have you ever experienced trying to find something on Google, only to be greeted by annoying “made for Adsense” sites (MFAs) sitting at the top of page one? As a searcher, this is really annoying. Google doesn’t want searchers to find that junk. That is why they are constantly making tweaks to their algorithm. It isn’t that they have it in for people who want to make money online. Their “product” that they depend on to thrive is high quality search engine listings. The people who choose Google over the competing search engines are their customers. The big brains at Google are just trying to protect their product. When you are trying your hardest to get your sites to rank, it can feel like Google is stacking the cards against you, but that might just mean that you need to make your site better. Take an HONEST look at your site and then ask yourself if it is really the best that it can be. Is it so good that it deserves to outrank the other two million related pages that Google has in its index for your topic? Now I’m not going to be naïve here either. For the time being, Google has not entirely worked out all of the quality issues. People still build a ton of links and see good results in the SERPs. The question is, how long with that model last? What will happen when you have built nothing but thin sites and Google finally figures out a way to crawl a site and actually measure quality? If your sites are all weak, thinking about this possibility will be painful. The good news is that it hasn’t happened yet. You still have time to make every page that is getting some traffic the best that it can be.
Here is a very good video of Gary Vaynerchuk that I think is relevant to this topic. Be warned that he uses some language that some people might find offensive.
Coming Clean
I have to admit that not all of my sites are the best that they could be…yet. Some have good rankings, but that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t stand some improvement. I’ll be working on those as part of my summer clean up. I once heard someone say that you should build your sites so that you would be proud to show them to your mom. That seems like pretty good advice. If she were around, I’m sure my mother would be able to find a few improvements to make on some of my sites. How are your sites looking?
