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Avoid Being Scammed

First of all, you need take all Internet marketing advertisements and hype with a grain of salt. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater because of some ridiculous pitches made by some overzealous Internet marketers.

If you think about it, the way common products are pitched on TV is just as ridiculous nowadays--we’ve just become inured to it. For example, how seriously do we take shoe commercials where athletes leap 20 feet in the air, or automobile ads where cars do ridiculous things like avoid 30 ton rolling balls or dodge artillery fire.

We know such advertising is over-the-top and would never expect our shoes or cars to actually perform that spectacularly in the real world, yet we still recognize that the actual products being pitched do have value that is useful to us, and end up buying them.

Similarly, despite the over-the-top ways some Internet marketers advertise their products or services sometimes, there is in fact great value in the industry, and it has been proven that you can make great money online if you apply proper and legitimate principles that truly work.

The way to identify these principles and avoid the scammers is by: 1) always keeping a skeptical mindset, 2) never falling for a “get rich quick” pitch, and 3) choosing to heed only the most reputable Internet marketers who can demonstrate a proven track record.

Fear of New Technology

Or on a slightly different tack, perhaps you feel you are hopelessly behind due to your lack of Internet knowledge, and are simply intimidated by all the technological concepts and jargon. It’s perfectly acceptable and understandable to have such fears; after all, facing the unknown is always a scary prospect.

However, it’s not acceptable to let such fears hold you back from moving forward and grabbing hold of success in life. You have to realize that it’s 2008 now, and that the Internet has become a daily necessity for hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

The Internet is indisputably an essential part of modern society, and no serious business operation would dare to launch today without an online presence. Even children are familiar with the Internet now, oftentimes much more so than adults. The Internet will soon replace TV as the preferred way to market to customers and generate new business. In fact, the convergence of TV and the Internet has already begun.

And yet, surveys show that only about 10 percent of households around the world currently have Internet access. That’s about a billion people online already, but with 90% of the world yet to get online, just imagine the massive impending growth.

To put it bluntly, you had better start getting comfortable with doing business on the Internet now, or get left behind in the digital dust.

The “Model-T” of the Internet

The main issue with the Internet has been that establishing an online business has traditionally been associated with huge startup costs. As an example, the aforementioned YouTube.com needed 3.5 million dollars from a venture capital firm to establish its website. Even building a small business site for a sole proprietorship cost at least a few thousand dollars a few years ago.

But now there's a whole new vehicle that lets the "little guy" compete with the "big boys" on equal footing in many online arenas. I liken Internet marketing to the Ford Model-T automobile when it was first introduced. At the time, most people believed only in traditional means of transportation such as riding horses and horse-driven carriages, and the Model-T received plenty of ridicule early on. But within decades, the automobile had completely dominated and transformed the American landscape.

Although Internet marketing is somewhat of an “underground” industry now--often misunderstood and even ridiculed at times--it will soon become a staple part of mainstream business, and may even change the way the term “job” is traditionally viewed by society. And at the rate technology moves, it won’t take decades for Internet marketing to transform the online business world.

All of today’s biggest Internet players--Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, and countless others--are involved in empowering individual e-business entrepreneurs to carve themselves their own little niches online. In fact, Amazon.com is the originator of the affiliate marketing concept that drives the whole Internet marketing industry today.

If you want to be a player in this brave new world, you can’t afford to be frightened by new technology and concepts. Instead, you must take on the challenge to learn how to apply them to your advantage in order to remain competitive.