How much should I listen to the advice of others?

It seems that everyone, nowadays, is a self-professed expert internet marketer and if you believe their spin and listen and implement everything they say you are soon going to be on your way to your millions online. Hang about on the internet marketing forums and you’ll soon come to realise many predators lurking in the shadows ready to pounce on a newbies post. Be vary wary of people redirecting you to links which link to a landing page for a product, when all you asked for was some friendly advice. Unfortunately, in harsher economic climates some people will resort to perhaps high pressured tactics to peddle their products/services, and in the end you might end up buying just to get rid of them. Sometimes, this can only lead to worse problems, as you can be sure once you bought one of their crappy products they’ll be wanting to upsell you to something “superior”. I don’t mean to be disparaging and tar all Internet Marketers with this brush, because there are a lot of ethical and honest ones out their who will be happy to give newbies some free advice.

I do want to set peoples’ expectations, however, on using internet marketing forums and making the assumption that just because this person has made x amount using this particular method/strategy there’s no guarantee it will work for you. It may be that person got in at a very opportune time for the particular niche, when there wasn’t much competition about and was able to get loads of free traffic to the site. Or it may be that at that time, there was a high trending and demand for the product, but now a lot of the demand has dried up. There are basically a lot of extraneous factors you need to try and account for before trying to replicate any proven income generating strategy online.

Also, there’s the matter of time management, and perhaps often the mistake many people make (both newbies and people who have been in the game for some time) is that they spend to much time scouring the forum posts or trying to help others that they lose track and sight of their own programs and mis-manage their time and let their profits as a result fall. It’s all too easy to get distracted today, by other sites, and whilst you may have had the best intentions of getting a lot done during the day, you may be wasting nearly half of it browsing information that doesn’t actual help you make $ for your own sites or blogs.

Whilst forums are useful, especially if you are new to internet marketing and just starting out, it can be a dangerous thing to rely too much on the advice on others. The best advice I can give in this article is get out there and as that well known athletic apparel manufacturer says: ‘Just Do It’ – after all there’s no point in wondering what could have been if you’ve never gave it a shot in the first place.