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How Internet Marketing Gurus are Screwing The Public and Making it Increasingly Harder for Newbies to Gain Guidance

March 2nd, 2008 by Vishen Lakhiani Read more about Articles

I came across a rant today by Mr X, the Inter­net Mar­keter behind the Adwords Black­Book. It’s well worth a read.

This got me thinking.

In the last few years, Inter­net mar­ket­ing has gone from a legit­i­mate busi­ness build­ing skill with a few solid qual­ity prod­ucts to a indus­try of oppor­tu­nity seek­ers blow­ing money on every dumb idea being tossed out.

As one anony­mous copy­writer I know put it: “Inter­net mar­ket­ing has become one giant inces­tu­ous cir­cle of mar­keter sell­ing hype to mar­keter sell­ing hype to marketer.”

He has a point. It started in the late 90s with the late Corey Rudl. Rudl was the first guru I fol­lowed. And his stuff helped. His sales force was relent­less, I remem­ber get­ting a call once in 2003 and being pitched a $5000 con­sul­ta­tion with Corey. But his stuff worked. I still save a space on my shelf for his early courses. Corey helped me take my first site to over a mil­lion in sales.

Flash for­ward to 2005.

Many of Corey’s cus­tomers go online to make big bucks. But instead of pur­su­ing niche fields (like sell­ing con­struc­tion equip­ment, gar­den­ing advice, leather goods etc), they decide to emu­late their Guru and start pitch­ing Inter­net Mar­ket­ing advice.

Some of Corey’s stu­dents pro­duce excel­lent work. Even Frank Kern admits to being a stu­dent. But most pro­duce mediocre work. Want an exam­ple? Just down­load Mike Filsaime’s monthly Mar­ket­ing­Pro­duc­tRe­view Newslet­ter and check out the new prod­ucts being put out each week. Based on what I know of this mar­ket, I’d say more the half the prod­ucts on this list are crap.

Sim­ple ideas are being tossed out at over-inflated prices. And many of these ideas are utter wastes of time and energy. (I’m look­ing at you Gurus who are cur­rently pitch­ing Web 2.0 mar­ket­ing strate­gies to newbies.)

And the Victims?

The vic­tims are the 70% of peo­ple in this mar­ket who clas­sify them­selves as new­bies. They are forced to grav­i­tate from flash-in-the-pan idea to over-hyped trend to the “get rich quick scheme” of the day.

So how do you get guid­ance. Here’s my advice.

Focus on prod­ucts that teach the CORE. The core is never-changing and will set you up for suc­cess with­out cost­ing you to waste time on the slew of new prod­ucts being pushed to you every month.

This is the Core

1. Under­stand Human Behavior

The best book on this sub­ject is “Influ­ence” by Robert Cial­dini. And it’s only going to cost you $15 on Ama­zon. This is the bible of mar­ket­ing. Period. No other book comes close. Every guru I know raves about this book.

2. Under­stand Busi­ness Building

Read blogs and reports that help you boost your business-building skills. I rec­om­mend Rich Schefren’s Reports such as the “Inter­net Busi­ness Man­i­festo” (it’s free) and books like “E-Myth” by Michael Ger­ber which will cost you just $10 bucks.

3. Under­stand Your Range of Options Online

If you’re just get­ting started online — get Yanik Silver’s Moon­light­ing on the Inter­net book. It’s $15. Yanik is a great guy. (Case in point: sent me a free copy of a $2000 prod­uct just because I asked nicely. I’m still stunned. Guys like this are rare.)

4. Under­stand How to Launch a Busi­ness with Speed

At the sem­i­nar I just attended in Orlando, Rich Schefren got on stage and said the Jeff Walker’s Prod­uct Launch For­mula is the most impor­tant inter­net mar­ket­ing strat­egy he has ever encoun­tered. Rich said that is you had to erase his brain of all his knowl­edge and allow him to retain only one idea — it would be the Prod­uct Launch For­mula. Jeff Walker’s course was released in 2005 and you can get a used copy on EBay. Ver 2.0 is being released in 2 weeks but it will cost you $2000. I’m not going to insult you by giv­ing you an affil­i­ate link. But I do rec­om­mend get­ting it if you can afford it. If not, try­ing search­ing the net for older inter­views and videos on Jeff Walker’s for­mula. I met some guys in Florida who did very prof­itable launches just by watch­ing Jeff’s free videos.

Focus on the prod­ucts that give you these time­less core skills.

When you get pitched on the next “get-rich-quick” fad — pause and ask your­self if this new prod­uct fits in the core. If not — for­get it.

Finally an apol­ogy. I fell into the trap of pitch­ing my list and blog read­ers on a few prod­ucts last year that I did not 100% believe in. For a brief while I turned into an oppor­tu­nity seeker and paid more atten­tion to my affil­i­ate fees than to the qual­ity of infor­ma­tion I was shar­ing with my list. I’m sorry. And I thank those of you who sent me emails that put me back on the right track.

Although I am friends with many Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Gurus, I will only rec­om­mend prod­ucts I know are good. And I’ll always pro­vide cheap alter­na­tives. I’m putting my list and blog audi­ence before my affil­i­ate checks.

PS — I’m writ­ing this rant from an air­port on a 8 hour tran­sit stop. I’m not going to bother with proof-reading or gram­mar. So for­give any errors. And please com­ment on this post to keep this con­ver­sa­tion alive. I think this is an impor­tant con­ver­sa­tion to have.

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About the Author

Vishen Lakhiani Vishen is a co-founder of MindValley. Before MindValley, he was an exec in Silicon Valley and New York for several internet and technology firms. He turned bedroom entrepreneur at 27 and by the time he was 31 had founded 6 web businesses and never had to work a conventional job again.

Check out other posts by Vishen Lakhiani

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19 Responses to “How Internet Marketing Gurus are Screwing The Public and Making it Increasingly Harder for Newbies to Gain Guidance”

  1. March 2nd, 2008 at 8:53 pm Meike

    Wow — sel­dom came across that kind of rad­i­cal hon­esty! ;-)

    It is true: all these exag­ger­a­tions and superla­tives work once, twice, maybe three times. But after a while peo­ple get used to it and these words loose their power.

    A friend recently rec­om­mended me an arti­cle on rad­i­cal hon­esty… and the guy who pas­sion­ately does research on it (Brad Blan­ton) claims “it was the only way to smash through modernity’s soul-deadening alienation”.

    Hey — why not test­ing THIS out once??? It would be some­thing new. Some­thing rad­i­cal. Some­thing that might actu­ally irri­tate peo­ple… and there­for catch their attention.

  2. March 3rd, 2008 at 11:06 am Gary Smith

    I appre­ci­ate this hon­esty also.

    I so agree with you about focus­ing on the fun­da­men­tals. When I first started mar­ket­ing I, too, was get­ting “fleeced” buy­ing expen­sive courses from ‘gurus’.

    Luck­ily I began focus­ing on copy­writ­ing. Which then intro­duced me to the core ideas of direct response mar­ket­ing and per­sua­sion. And one thing mar­keters need is copywriters…so the oppor­tu­ni­ties are endless.

    Recently I was able to do some writ­ing for both Rich Schefren and Jay Abra­ham. I don’t have a huge busi­ness yet…but doors are open­ing and open­ing quickly.

    Here is what helped my writing…

    1. The Gary Hal­bert Let­ter. You must read every issue. Prac­tice the exer­cises. And copy out the style of his writ­ing. Most mar­keters and writ­ers lack “punch” in their writing…this will give you some “punch”.

    2. Read Sci­en­tific Adver­tis­ing and My Life in Adver­tis­ing by Claude Hop­kins. Pretty much every­thing you need to know about mar­ket­ing in these two books.

    3. Influ­ence by Cial­dini. For the rea­sons stated above.

    4. Begin learn­ing Google Adwords. Still the best way to get tar­geted traf­fic. I agree with Penny Marshall…really Google Adwords and copy­writ­ing are two skills that, once mas­tered, will enable you to build a busi­ness quickly any­where, and in any field.

    5. Study­ing Prod­uct Launches in action. Once you learn the key concepts…then begin observ­ing and tak­ing notes on big prod­uct launches like Walk­ers upcom­ing launch, Kern’s Mass Con­trol launch, and Eban Pagan’s launches.

    Learn­ing all this takes time and effort. But you can do it.

    And let’s see…all this would cost about $50.

    Good luck,
    Gary
    http://www.rightbraincopy.com

  3. March 3rd, 2008 at 8:30 pm chris

    I am an email mar­keter, and have fol­lowed your blog as your PPC insights hold true for email sub­ject lines as well. It has been great stuff. I really appre­ci­ate your will­ing­ness to hon­estly share were you are com­ing from and the change of heart you had after hear­ing your read­ers opin­ions about your prod­uct recommendations.

    Keep your list grow­ing with authen­tic­ity in your com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and the money will follow.

  4. March 3rd, 2008 at 9:08 pm Kuan Yew

    I con­fess, I tried to be one of those new­bies before and was even in the process of writ­ing the next big inter­net mar­ket­ing book that would help any­one cre­ate a mil­lion dol­lar busi­ness in just 2 months or so…

    And I haven’t even made a hun­dred bucks online!

    Thank god, I came to my senses and didn’t fin­ish writ­ing that scam book.

    Your con­fes­sions have been great, the resources you high­lighted are great mate­ri­als for any­one who would like to under­stand how things work online.

    Great job Vishen!

  5. March 5th, 2008 at 2:08 am Juan - Lidernova - juanmartitegui.com.ar

    I am one of the new­bies! Really I’ve felt cheated some­times with this kind of “Guru’s”.

    Now I make a very hard and deep research before buy­ing an Inter­net Mar­ket­ing prod­uct. Thanks Vishen for shar­ing this.

    What I’ve been doing also before buy­ing it is to ask for more infor­ma­tion (the index of the prod­uct, some free chap­ters, etc.) and this helped me to avoid buy­ing the same con­tent more than one time.

    Hugs!

  6. March 7th, 2008 at 12:38 am Gab Goldenberg

    Why did Schefren’s peo­ple spam Sphinn?

  7. March 7th, 2008 at 4:06 am rishil

    I agree whole­heart­edly on one par­tic­u­lar point in your arti­cle — … “pitch­ing Web 2.0 mar­ket­ing strate­gies to newbies”

    When I started learn­ing about SEO/M I found it increas­ingly hard to get good data or infor­ma­tion, and when I found “hot” news, it was hard for me to under­stand and utilise. Look­ing back, if I got the whole 2.0 is great pitch, I would have wasted large amounts of time on mess­ing about with social net­works etc.

    Online mar­ket­ing in my opin­ion, is an exten­sion of tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing, and until you under­stand the basics, there arent any get rich quick schemes.

    What most newbs get dis­tracted by are the lat­est fads, and are always try­ing to jump on the band­wagon… I would say learn what the band­wagon is first, and then decide whether you want to jump on it, tow along with it, or entirely ignore it.

  8. March 9th, 2008 at 3:07 pm Sexy Sunday Stuff | The BookmarkMoney Blog

    […] Affil­i­ate X posts his thoughts: The Death of Crap. This rant inspired Vishen at Mind Val­ley Labs to post his own thoughts: How Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Gurus are Screw­ing The Pub­lic and Mak­ing it Increas­ingly Harder for New­bies to Gain Guidance. […]

  9. March 10th, 2008 at 12:23 pm Sarah

    I couldn’t agree more. We have a mem­ber­ship site and we spend on an aver­age 6 hours a day (each) work­ing with our mem­bers one on one to help them sort through the crap that is out there.
    Mar­ket­ing is very basic, but you have to work at it. There is no magic but­ton you can put on a web­site that will make you mil­lions as promised by the guru’s. I too have noticed most every pro­gram com­ing out is just “recy­cled crap”.
    We have recently added a fea­ture to our web­site that reviews prod­ucts out there.
    When did it become about fleec­ing your fel­low mar­keter, and get­ting every dime you can squeeze out of them instead of pro­vid­ing great infor­ma­tion? I have bought sev­eral pro­grams in the last cou­ple of years that peo­ple I trusted pitched and ended up so dis­ap­pointed that it was just a step to an up sell. I kept wait­ing for the real nitty gritty only to just be told I had to spend another few thou­sand for the soft­ware or mem­ber­ship to get the real information.

    I think the time is here to make a stand.
    Kudos to you.

  10. March 11th, 2008 at 9:39 pm MG Page

    Vishen,
    I really think more and more of us who have been drawn into inter­net mar­ket­ing have come to this real­i­sa­tion. Until “oppor­tunists” wake up and smell the rose they will con­tinue be vic­tims of inter­net mar­keters look­ing to make a quick buck. Of course we would all like to be able to come up with a prod­uct that solves a prob­lem and make a squil­lion! Inter­net Mar­keters are cater­ing to a niche… other inter­net mar­keters. In time the “new­bies” will wake up and realise that what you are say­ing here is true.

  11. March 17th, 2008 at 11:16 am Chris Stigson

    Inter­est­ing post… I’ve been mar­ket­ing online for about 14 months now and I’m learn­ing more and more so this post really made me real­ize some of the things I though I knew, which obvi­ously I didn’t.Thanks,- Chris

  12. March 20th, 2008 at 5:46 pm Jeff

    While we’re being bru­tally hon­est lets face these facts.

    “New­bies” aren’t an audi­ence. They are a parade. A con­stant stream of peo­ple enter this mar­ket every day, which is the main rea­son it is so lucrative.

    It is also the rea­son recy­cled prod­ucts work — because they are brand new to the guy who just started googling “make money online” yesterday.

    That guy doesn’t know who the rep­utable peo­ple are and who are the peo­ple who made their first $100 yes­ter­day and are writ­ing about it today. Or who are the peo­ple still sell­ing infor­ma­tion on how to get to the top of the AltaVista search engine because new­bies don’t know any better.

    This makes it harder for the rep­utable peo­ple to stand out, espe­cially since so many new­bies end up get­ting dis­cour­aged because the first few things they bought weren’t good.

    Also — the peo­ple putting out cruddy prod­ucts can do so for years — as long as their traf­fic stream comes from brand new peo­ple enter­ing the market.

    Let’s also face the fact that most peo­ple don’t do any­thing with the infor­ma­tion they buy. And that’s true of $1,000 courses as much as for $29 eBooks. A friend of mine had peo­ple in his $15,000 coach­ing pro­gram who never par­tic­i­pated. So whose fault is that?

    There are uneth­i­cal peo­ple in every busi­ness. It’s just eas­ier to reach a lot more vic­tims on the net.

    Prob­a­bly the best defense against this is to research forums and get feed­back from cus­tomers before you buy anything.

    Inter­net mar­ket­ing is still the best way I ever found to make money. But it is work. You don’t suc­ceed by buy­ing an eBook if you never act on what you learn.

    Jeff

  13. April 5th, 2008 at 7:41 am Susan

    Finally some­thing that I have long sus­pected and am reminded of every time I open my wal­let and buy one of the junk courses.

    As a financier strug­gling to also be a mar­keter, I appre­ci­ate your straight­for­ward approach.

  14. April 8th, 2008 at 8:36 pm Jay

    Bravo,

    I am sick to death of these flash in the pan so called inter­net mar­ket­ing ‘gurus’ pros­ti­tut­ing their info-crap that I shud­der every­time I open my inbox these days.

    Give me results not just over­hyped ‘hope products’.

    Thanks Vishen your post has given me a new idea for a domain name to sort the ‘wheat from the chaff’.. just reg­is­ter­ing it now.

    If you are buy­ing a car whats the final thing you do (after research & finances etc) before purchase..

    A ROAD TEST!

    So I have just reg­is­tered this minute affil­i­ateroad­test

    A place where the ‘aver­age joe’ can request, test, and report on what pro­grams actu­ally deliver.. because like every­one else I am sick of wast­ing time, resources and money on the NEXT sure thing.

    Thanks again Vishen, keep the posts coming.

  15. May 26th, 2008 at 4:19 pm Christian

    I agree that the inter­net mar­ket­ing niche is flooded with bad advice and bad prod­ucts. Although this tends to be the case across the board, I think many would agree that it has got­ten a lit­tle out of hand in Inter­net mar­ket­ing. With the num­ber of prod­ucts being launched weekly along with the num­ber of so called experts claim­ing guru sta­tus, new­bies can very eas­ily fall vic­tim to the “shiny new thing” syndrome…I know I did.

  16. November 24th, 2008 at 4:26 pm Ellie and Seas

    Oh wow — this so hits home with me. I am so tired of all the mar­ket­ing hype sales pitches these days.

    I thought they were really inter­est­ing in the begin­ning, but come to find out they sell “sell­ing” using under­handed tricks sometimes.

    These days, lots of folks are strug­gling and can ill afford spend­ing on guru tac­tics they will never use.

    It’s alot of work to get high in the search engines. Tons. Many of these ads promise glitzy liv­ing if you buy these pro­grams and attend these sem­i­nars and only work an hour a week from com­fort of home. So many peo­ple are taken in. NOT nice!!

    I am so over it. It hurts my heart to see so many peo­ple buy into these pro­grams and then become dis­heart­ened and dis­il­lu­sioned when they don’t succeed.

    The gurus rake it mil­lions — good for them — but I can see that most all of them are super tal­ented, write incred­i­bly well, work day and night on pro­mot­ing, talk­ing, cre­at­ing con­tent. They are super folks.

    But every­day peo­ple like me, are NOT. We can’t do what they do. They love sell­ing. They can’t stop.

    We reg­u­lar folk don’t like sell­ing. It’s not us.

    I just started a new web­site and maybe I won’t make a dime because of my igno­rance — we will see. I wish I could afford Mind­Val­ley­Labs and do what they rec­om­mend. But I can’t, and I’m not that smart.

    I just wanted to share my teeny ire about these great mar­ket­ing gurus who sell truly great things that nobody can use.

    Thank you for lis­ten­ing, and actu­ally I do appre­ci­ate all this advice from Vishen, a bril­liant genius.

    But i felt like say­ing my hon­est peace — if this gets me in trou­ble, oh well. My heart is in the right place. I care and I want EVERYBODY to suc­ceed in life. Not just great ones.

  17. November 24th, 2008 at 7:37 pm Amir Ahmad

    Ellie and Seas,

    “So many peo­ple are taken in. NOT nice!!”

    True, and that’s the result of too many peo­ple sell­ing hype and tem­po­rary trends.

    “We reg­u­lar folk don’t like sell­ing. It’s not us.”

    And that’s what can be changed.

    “I care and I want EVERYBODY to suc­ceed in life. Not just great ones.”

    Which is an admirable sen­ti­ment, and herein comes the need to learn how to sell, because in my opin­ion, that’s a big part of success.

    Sell­ing your prod­uct, ideas, or even your­self dur­ing an interview.

    Sell­ing is an impor­tant skill to develop. Vishen already high­lighted excel­lent sources that teach the PROVEN fun­da­men­tals, and the best part is that the afore­men­tioned books are all very affordable.

    Just focus on them, take it all one step at a time, and you will get there.

    Cheers,
    Amir ;)

  18. October 6th, 2009 at 1:37 pm Kerry in Ohio

    Until five days ago, I didn’t know the mean­ing of “affil­li­ate pro­gram” or “adword”. And as many other mil­lions, my hus­band and I are strug­gling due to down­siz­ing and a seri­ous work injury that between the two claimed half of our income within two years. We need to take a risk. Go down a new path. Dur­ing research, it seems that the “big” money mak­ers are using scams and under­handed tech­niques in the inter­net mar­ket­ing field to get rich off the backs of the des­per­ate like us. Is that what I’m get­ting? Every review page or blog page I went to had com­ments from all types but had one thing in common.….a link to their site where they were hop­ing to guide me to make a buck off me. Is that cor­rect? But after lit­er­ally hours upon hours of research, this looks like a place on the up and up where I can come to get real info about start­ing an inter­net busi­ness with the under­stand­ing (and real­ity) that it takes time, perserver­ance and good old fash­ioned hard work to become a suc­cess. Please tell me, do I have a clue or do I need to start over because I have it all wrong…
    signed,
    the prodi­gal newbie

  19. December 16th, 2009 at 9:33 am A.B

    While I have no doubt about the spe­cial­ized skills and tech­niques used by these gurus, it can get a lit­tle too frus­trat­ing sim­ply get­ting tan­gled and lost in all their hype, and find almost no value at the end of the day.
    Hype — that’s one thing I agree these guru’s are really good at.

    For some of them, unfor­tu­nately, hype is the only thing they’re good at.
    So the ques­tion, for those who are try­ing to mas­ter Inter­net Mar­ket­ing, might be:
    1) Can I learn any­thing from these gurus with­out pay­ing money?
    2) Who’s real and who’s not?
    3) Whose Inter­net mar­ket­ing meth­ods should I follow?

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