In the eight or so years that I’ve been an Internet Marketer I’ve managed to involve myself in a few stupid, money and time wasting scams. I consider myself a reasonably intelligent guy, but sometimes I can’t help myself and I just get a little too caught up in a well-written sales letter. I tell myself that I learn something from every mistake I make, I hope so. At the very least, I have enough experience to write this post. So here goes, here’s my list of five things every website owner should avoid.

1) Any of the “Make a million dollars today, by doing nothing scams”: It’s common sense that these things won’t work (c’mon if you developed a system that could make you tons money without doing anything —would you really tell people about it?), but we get so caught up in the dream that our common sense sometimes goes out the window. Earning a living is hard – being an entrepreneur is oftentimes even harder, there ‘aint no shortcuts!

2) Amazing traffic deals – get 10,000 hits for $9.95, or others like them. Listen closely to me —ALL of these “deals” are JUNK! You’re getting machine generated hits, in other words, people never actually visit your website. As with many scams, common sense would dictate that the traffic is junk, why would a company sell you so much traffic for so little money —wouldn’t it make more sense to use the traffic themselves?

3) Search Engine Submission software– Make no mistake, the multi-billion dollar search engines of the world do NOT rely on people buying some $49.95 submission script to find new content to index. Search engines like to find their own content, how? by sending out spiders that surf the web much like humans do —they follow links.

4) Link brokers – Now I’m not saying there is no value in buying links to your site – if done properly this technique can provide you with targeted traffic and maybe even boost your search engine rankings. Unfortunately, you’re often buying links on sub-par websites that never get any real traffic.

Tip: Buy links on pages that are related to what you’re trying to sell – the links you buy should be visible to the people that visit that site, remember – you want traffic – if someone sees your link and clicks through, that’s a targeted visitor that wants to see what you’re selling. Buy links for people to see NOT just search engine spiders.

5) Link Exchanging – Like buying links this is only effective when done properly. Most link exchanging campaigns are simply a waste of time, links that are buried 10, 20 30 pages deep –Never see the light of day, not by search engine spiders and certainly not by surfers. Unfortunately, that’s what 95% of link exchange campaigns are. Someone either buys a script or joins a paid service and starts doing automated link exchanges – in a few days, they can have hundreds of pages of links on their site. Search engines don’t like links pages, they’ve said so! Don’t you think the search engines are smart enough to see what’s going on? The engines can tell a links page a mile away and they know exactly what their worth: $ZERO. The engines want you to build websites for human visitors; a website with 5 pages of content and 50 pages of links is NOT what they have in mind.

Exchange links properly, do it on a one on one basis. Get to know other sites in your niche, link to the ones you like. Then (and only then), contact the owner of these sites and tell them that you’re already linking to them and ask for a link back. Some may not want to reciprocate – maybe they don’t think you have a sufficient amount of content on your site yet. Don’t get angry and remove their link from your site, if you think a resource is good for your visitors then leave the link up – remember you’re building a site for your visitors NOT the search engines.

So that’s it, five stupid things that I should have avoided but didn’t. Go forth now and make your own mistakes, just stay away from these five – they’re mine!

Posted by David Olsen - Owner/Editor

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