5 Overused, Ineffective Internet Marketing Techniques

October 13th, 2008 | 40 comments

ineffective internet marketing techniques Sometimes a technique is effective at one point in time, but becomes ineffective later on. Sometimes a technique just sounds so right that “it’s gotta be true” although it’s not. Sometimes the effectiveness of a technique is exaggerated to sell products!

Whether the following are ineffective due to one or more of the above, or for some other reason, they are indeed overused and ineffective techniques that Internet Marketers commonly use:

1. Using quotation marks around a phrase to judge it’s competition – If you want your page/site to rank #130 for your targeted phrase then this technique is effective. But if you’re like me you want a top 10 ranking, so there are only 10 pages you care about; the top 10 competing search results!

2. Article Submission for links – If you’re submitting articles strictly for links and not doing your keyword research, you’re not getting the most out of your articles. Article marketing is very effective and the links are nice, but it’s the article directory’s ability to get our articles to rank in the top 10 of the search results for our well-researched keyword phrases that makes article marketing so effective, not the link building aspect!

3. Assuming that because “guru’s” send too many emails to their lists, that you should do the same thing! Many well-known marketers send too many promotions to their lists… it’s a fact. However, that doesn’t mean it’s the optimal strategy! Many times promo’s are sent out to “pay back” a buddy who promoted that persons product etc. Just because someone you consider to be a guru sends loads of promos to their list, doesn’t mean it’s the most effective strategy! Help people… that’s the best strategy!

4. Targeting “Make Money Online” with an Internet Marketing blog/site. They’re two totally different niches with 2 totally different target markets. More on that in my report: “The Make Money Online Niche Exposed”

5. Concentrating only on Search Engines – I don’t know how many people told me this when I first started online, but I just ignored them and worked on SEO. I obtained some very impressive results, but it took me 2 years of concentrating almost entirely on SEO to be able to support my family. It was about the 2 year mark when I realized, “there has to be an easier way to make a living online” so I started getting into blogging, email marketing etc.

In other words, I diversified my business and my income has been steadily increasing ever since! You should never rely on one individual business model especially if that model is SEO because algorithms change, markets change etc. Diversify, diversify, diversify!

image credit: e453753

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40 comments

Alex Newell (11 comments.)
13th October, 2008 at 5:37 pm

Hi Josh, I love your old fashioned ” Help people… that’s the best strategy!”.

I like the independent tone of your blog.

All The Best

Alex
Matt James (2 comments.)
13th October, 2008 at 5:46 pm

“Targeting “Make Money Online” with an Internet Marketing blog/site”

…isn’t that what you’re doing Josh?
Josh Spaulding
13th October, 2008 at 5:49 pm

“…isn’t that what you’re doing Josh?”

No, the title of this blog reads “Internet Marketing with Josh Spaulding” so obviously I’m targeting, you guessed it, Internet marketing

The root (ez-onlinemoney.com) targets “Make money online” but the root is for a totally different audience than the blog.
Stephannie (2 comments.)
13th October, 2008 at 5:59 pm

Opps…looks like I may have been making a mistake

I appreciate the statement RE gurus and multiple e-mails. Many of the lists I am on do this and I find myself either simply deleting them without first even reading it or I unsubscribe from their lists. I don’t have time to wade through several e-mails saying the same thing.

Enjoyed the info,
Stephanie
Chris Brown (2 comments.)
13th October, 2008 at 6:24 pm

I totally agree with the comments of “gurus send to many emails to their lists” I have ended up on several of the “big hitter’s” lists, and they send 3 or 4 “hot offers” a week. (Someone in the UK calls them the “Brady Bunch”; each promoting the other’s product in the hope of a quick buck.

For me, it’s proving counter-productive. Once I see an email from them, I might visit the site to do a quick scan out of curiosity, but ultimately my response is “Can’t be bothered to order as they’ll be another product along tomorrow!”
Eklavya (2 comments.)
13th October, 2008 at 6:25 pm

Hello Josh, thanks for writing about these techniques. I really liked your insight into these techniques. However, I think that it is not proper to call all the above techniques ineffective. The first and the fifth techniques (using quotation marks to judge a competition and focusing only on search engines , are not ineffective. They are actually incomplete techniques and we need to supplement them with other research/strategies. Using quotations around a phrase gives us a rough idea of how many pages are optimized for the exact term. It may not help us to rank in the top 10, but it gives us a fair estimation of our competition. I think it is always a good idea to research the in-demands keywords in all possible ways.

Coming to search engine, if you set aside the concept of email marketing, almost a major portion of all website’s traffic comes from search engine. Therefore, concentrating on search engine can be a very useful strategy provided we diversify our efforts in other directions also.

Just my two cents.

Regards
Chris Lockwood (5 comments.)
13th October, 2008 at 6:34 pm

I’m not clear what you mean in #1- are you talking about people putting quotation marks in their content somewhere?
Peter Tremayne (8 comments.)
13th October, 2008 at 6:36 pm

Hi Josh,

Thanks for another good little post. Always a pleasure to receive your emails.

Diversity is the name of the game and it works especially well if you do it on a regular basis.

Little and often has been the key for me! Just 1 method each day.

Perhaps your next post could be your “5 Most Effective Marketing Strategies”.

Cheers!

~ Peter Tremayne
Paul (8 comments.)
13th October, 2008 at 6:44 pm

I need to slap myself silly right now….Ouch. Ok I am guilty of doing some what you’ve just wrote. Thanks for the wake up call.

Paul
AndyT (2 comments.)
13th October, 2008 at 6:56 pm

I must admit I have never quite “got” the technique of putting your keywords in quotes. I understand that it shows your competition against pages optimised for that keyword but there have been many occasions when I have successfully got my “quoted” keyword to Page1, expected at least decent amounts of traffic only to find myself down at page 4 or Page 5 for the key phrase without quotes. Most people search without quotes and short of people changing the way they search I cannot see anyway round it other than getting keyword specific anchor text backlinks
Mike Collins (15 comments.)
13th October, 2008 at 7:20 pm

I completely agree with number 2. When I right articles its for traffic. Any links that they bring in are just a bonus.
Matt James (2 comments.)
13th October, 2008 at 7:35 pm

The root (ez-onlinemoney.com) targets “Make money online” but the root is for a totally different audience than the blog.”

Yeah, I was talking about your “root”. So you mean the homepage is more for the newbies?
Evan
13th October, 2008 at 8:15 pm

Thank you so much for all of this solid information Josh.
I especially like what you said about the “so called gurus” sending out way to many emails to their list. Some of them send email to me every day and I have begun to unsubscribe. It certainly is not helpful to be inundating people with thousands of offers.
I certainly appreciate the information with substance that you give and how you email sparingly.
Your emails are a welcome relief from a constant barrage of internet advertising.
Vince (4 comments.)
13th October, 2008 at 8:27 pm

Josh, as a relative newbie I’m not sure I understand the reasoning for not using quotes around keyword phrases when assessing competition. as you say a lot of people recommend doing that. I thought using quotes gave the count for sites using the exact key phrase, I thought that’s what we needed.

I notice the broad match without quotes can be huge numbers compared to with quotes. I trust your advice but I just want get this right as it completely changes the way I have been doing things.

Best

Vince
Josh Spaulding
13th October, 2008 at 8:54 pm

@ Eklavya – If you’re interested in that kind of stuff go for it Personally, I’ll spend my time looking at the top 10, which I’ll actually be competing with. In regards to SEO… if the majority of your traffic comes from search engines you’re doing something wrong! You need to be retaining your traffic! But at the same time, I never said to ignore search engines… I’m just saying SEO shouldn’t be your only business model! If you rely on search engines, you’re in for a rude awakening very soon!

@ Chris – I mean wrapping quotes around a phrase when doing a search for it. Many people do it to see how many pages that are indexed in that SE with that particular phrase in the title… who cares… I care abot the top10, not the top 100000000.

@ Peter – Good idea… that may very well be the title of my next blog post

@ Matt – yep

@ Vince – Please see my response to Eklavya and also realize that you can do whatever you like I’ll do what I’ve done for the past 5 years to gain top 10 rankings for keyworkds like

- make money online
- article marketing
- article directory
- germany tourism
etc.
etc.
etc.
etc.
etc.
etc.
etc.
etc.
etc.
You can keep doing what you’re doing if that’s what makes sense to you. But personally I do what works, not what people tell me to do.
Dave Nevard
13th October, 2008 at 10:11 pm

I think Im pretty much over trying to make money of the net, lets be honest, you coud have the best group of informative article in the known universe but if you haven’t done the grunt work of gaining links, you ain’t never going to get noticed. It’s nothing to to with quality. Look at all the spam sites out there, cleaning up. Im one of them so I cant complain, just jealous I suppose. All the best Josh.
Vince (4 comments.)
13th October, 2008 at 11:39 pm

Josh, Ithink I now get it! I re-read the $5 formula and I think I’ve just had an ah, ah, moment.

You are not really that concerned about the number of matching searches but more concerned about the other criteria you use to get the front page i.e. the strength of the competitors on page 1 for the search term. Am I on thr right path?
Gary (1 comments.)
14th October, 2008 at 1:35 am

Hi Josh, Great post! Thanks for the tips.

I have created my first adsense website using the strategies in your 5 dollar report.

I’m very proud of myself, this is the first website I have ever created and I owe a big thanks to you.

I checked my adsense account today and I have made over 2 bucks and close to 10 buck since I launched the site two weeks ago.

I have only submitted a hand full of articles to two article directories and I placed a post on the warrior forum and that is all the advertising I have done so far.

I can’t wait to see what happens when I finish writing and submitting all the articles for this website.

Please have a look at it and tell me what you think.

Thanks again
Alan (2 comments.)
14th October, 2008 at 2:08 am

Quotes—NO Quotes

I would like to share my perspective on searching with quotes when attempting to determine the competition level for a particular keyword.

I often see videos where folks will want to get an idea of competition by going to Google and typing in the word that they would like to optimize a page for in quotes. Naturally, they type the query into the engine and produce a result.

So here’s a quick example of what you might see.

Let’s try this keyword:

coolest dude in the universe

no quotes–35,900 as of this writing and my part of the county. Doing it this way is know as broad match.

So for me NO Quotes on the coolest dude in the universe term 35,900

Now with quotes “coolest dude in the universe” the number drops all the way to 343 results. Know as exact match.

So what does this mean?

It tells us is that on the pages that Google has indexed in its primary database, there are 343 pages that have the exact term “coolest dude in the universe” somewhere on the page.

I personally don’t consider that as realistic competition because my page could be about Duke Nukem, which you will find if you search for “coolest dude in the universe” in Google with quotes.

But it’s only because someone choose to use that term in a comment on a forum post, hardly competition, and clearly not relevant, if I were just looking to optimize for the term coolest dude in the universe.

So what is the best way to determine who’s actually optimizing a particular page on their website for a term?

I have found that using the search operators provided by Google work the best when deciding on the level of pages that are optimize for a particular term.

There are several of them and for the sake of saving time you can look them up on Google, but the ones I like the best are the:

intitle:
allintitle:
inanchor:

Using these do a much better job of extracting the pages that are optimized for a particular keyword.

So to bring things full circle………

When we go back to the coolest dude in the universe term using the allintitle search operator you see that there are really only 9 pages that are optimized for that term.

That tells me that if I want to compete for that term those are the pages that I must focus on. This does tie with what Josh eluded to in his original comments, usually the top ten results are going to be using the keyword that they want to optimize for in the title tag.

That may not always be true, but most of the time that’s what you’ll find at least from my experience.

To me however, the bottom line is that using just quotes around a term is not a very effective strategy as Josh pointed out, and really gives you no assessment on your competition with any kind of accuracy.

Just my thoughts.
Mike Collins (15 comments.)
14th October, 2008 at 2:40 am

Regarding using quotes when researching competition, I’ve always bought into that because it does make sense. But now I realize Josh is right. Who cares if a site is using the exact keyword phrase in their title or elsewhere? If they’ve got a top ranking for it they’re obviously doing something right.
Kang (1 comments.)
14th October, 2008 at 4:21 am

I haven’t bought something recommended by a guru in a long long time.

Not using their affiliate links anyway

I’d have to disagree with #1.

There IS a difference in the difficulty beating 1000 exact results to get into the top 10, and beating 100,000,000, is there not?

I liked #4.

SO many newcomers to the game do that, it’s saddening
Neels Theron - Non-Guru Road To Making Money Online (9 comments.)
14th October, 2008 at 6:31 am

Good, solid information as always, Josh. You are so right about not bothering to use quotation marks around a search phrase.

As for keyword research for articles – I have always found it interesting that Tim Gorman (one of the well-known names when it comes to article marketing) always says that he doesn’t really get into keyword research, yet he does very well with his articles. I have never been able to understand how one can succeed with article marketing without good keyword research.
AndyT (2 comments.)
14th October, 2008 at 8:11 am

I agree with Neels comments. Keyword research has actually been holding me back from actually writing and submitting articles. I think in future I am going to spend much less time on keyword research and concentrate on getting good quality articles out there… there may be hits and misses but I will have good articles published and the search engines are not the be all and end all. It is also surprising sometimes the keywords which you do get ranked for – often they are not what you expect!
Dave
14th October, 2008 at 7:37 pm

Thank you again for another great post. If you concentrating on all the SEO stuff and not what had got other sites into the top 10, then like you say “who cares”

Quick question – we are going to launch a blog for our ecommerce site where we sell golf clubs and I like the layout of your blog.

Can you reccomend a source for blog templates similar to yours?

Thanks
Dave
Online Business Review (1 comments.)
14th October, 2008 at 10:32 pm

This is very true and I am just starting into the SEO. It is a lot of fun but I can see myself getting exhuasted doing this. Thank you for the good advice and building a profitable blog and email marketing is the way to go. Putting together “email marketing”, “Blogging”, and “networking” a person can make a good living.

OOBR
Vince (4 comments.)
15th October, 2008 at 3:31 am

Alan
That was an interesting comment…

How do I carry out a search using the three examples you give.

intitle:
allintitle:
inanchor

Thanks
Vince:
sophielc (1 comments.)
15th October, 2008 at 10:15 am

I confess that I don’t bother doing my keyword research before submitting articles; I really need to read your $5 mini-site formula again and stop being so lazy!
Damn it, I have the best advice stored in my computer but do I use it?
Dennis Edell (40 comments.)
15th October, 2008 at 5:55 pm

Excellent list my man, oh so true.

LOL some may disagree, but since about month 2 being online I’ve looked at almost all “guru’s” as an excellent source of what NOT TO DO.
Amanda
16th October, 2008 at 9:07 pm

Hey Josh–If you need another blog post idea I’d love to know how you evaluate the “strength” of your competition. I know it involves looking at number of backllinks, SEO, etc. but would like to get your take on it.
Chuck (70 comments.)
16th October, 2008 at 9:35 pm

I’m still fixated on the search engines. But I’m interested in learning more about the other psychologies behind article marketing. I guess I’d better get my tail back over to the Coaching with Josh forum one of these days, eh?
Hayden Dell (1 comments.)
18th October, 2008 at 2:36 am

Many people think that all they need to do is get those rankings. There is much more to succeeding online and you have done a good job of outlining it here. It makes an SEO’s job easy when all they want is rankings but in the end you will have a dissapointed client on your hands if it makes no difference to the bottom line.
Progressive Circle » Blog Archive » 5 Marketing Tips From Josh Spaulding - The Progressive Circle of Success
20th October, 2008 at 3:51 am

[...] bought a lot of his stuff and have been really satisfied with it. I just read on his blog about five common mistakes made in web marketing. They are short tips but well worth [...]
Josh Spaulding
22nd October, 2008 at 1:52 pm

@ Dave – All you need is a couple visitors a day, which can easily be done with a single article, to develop a following overtime.

It’s not about the amount of traffic you get, it’s about RETAINING the traffic you do yet! If you can’t retain them via RSS or Email subscription and you’re not truly helping them, they aren’t going to stick around.

But, it sounds like you’ve made up your mind, so I wish you the best of luck with whatever it is you do for a living.

Those with a passion to succeed will succeed, those with excuses why success hasn’t been handed to them won’t!

“Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls aren’t there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show us how badly we want things…the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough!”

– Randy Pausch

@ Vince – To a point, yes. But, I am of course interested in the search volume as well though… if there’s no search volume for the phrase there’s no use in targeting it.

@ Gary – Hey, that’s great to hear… it feels great doesn’t it?

@ Kang – I’ve explained why it doesn’t matter several times already in the comments feild of this post and within the post. If you disagree that’s fine. You do what you do, I’ll do what I do How does that sound?

@ Neels – Tim outsources his keyword research…

@ Andy – Well, it is a good idea to spend as little time as possible doing research and as much time as possible actually writing and submitting, but it’s very important to do things correctly at the same time or it was all done for nothing. Take a look at my “Keyword Research Simplified” post, it should help.

@ Dave – Sure, Just let them know I sent you http://www.graphicsquick.com/

@ Sophielc – You REALLY need to start doing keyword research… REALLY btw, I did the same thing when I first started, no keyword research, big mistake.

@ Dennis – “LOL some may disagree, but since about month 2 being online I’ve looked at almost all “guru’s” as an excellent source of what NOT TO DO.”

You’re on your way to becoming one yourself then

@ Amanda – Please see “Keyword Research Simplified”

@ Chuck – Yep, we miss you over there…
Dennis Edell (40 comments.)
23rd October, 2008 at 1:10 am

AACCKKK Noooooooooo!
Top 5 Most Profitable Internet Marketing Business Models
29th October, 2008 at 3:06 pm

[...] couple weeks ago I shared 5 Overused, Ineffective Internet Marketing Techniques. In the comment field of that post Peter Tremayne suggested my next post be on the top 5 [...]
Chelle (5 comments.)
14th November, 2008 at 5:30 pm

Different things work for different people I suppose. I really like that I never get email from you…in fact, it was because of that I decided to stop by today after getting an email from you and started catching up on the things i have missed!
isabellenewton
21st November, 2008 at 10:20 am

Some really good advice here – from the post AND the comments. There are loads of sites out there at the moment that promise to teach you how to make money from home quit your job and live the high life, what they don’t always tell you is the amount of work and effort that working from home takes. It’s not a holiday – it’s like being constantly AT work. But it’s worth it if you put the effort in at the start.
Dave@Internet Marketing Techniques (1 comments.)
22nd November, 2008 at 2:43 am

While I agree you should not search for your competition using quotation marks, it is still a good way to get a quick overview of the niche competition as a whole.
Rick Imby (10 comments.)
3rd January, 2009 at 9:45 pm

I really like your blog but I don’t agree on your search with Quotations point.

I like to look at several things when picking a keyword to go after. The sites that show up in the top ten are important but the sites that show up in quotes is definitely something I take into account. It is not the only factor but I never go after a keyword without checking it.

Rick
Molly tracfone deals (7 comments.)
25th January, 2009 at 10:46 pm

So Josh what I think you are saying is you do not care how many pages have your target keyword in it you only care to see if you can compete with and maybe displace pages in the top 10 of the search results?

Molly