Just a bit about search engine optimization.

Internet marketing is a sham. It’s a pseudo-industry created by people who want to take your money. That’s it.

And no, I’m not an internet marketer myself. I have nothing to gain by writing this, except that I’m sick of getting ripped off. Here’s my reasoning:

First, building a web site is easy. You can go to a hosting provider and have them set up WordPress for you. 10 minutes later, for $50 or so, you can have a great design installed and you’re off and running. Don’t even want to do that much? Fine. Go on Elance and hire someone for $200 to set the site up.

And you know more about your business than anyone else, so why hire a ‘professional’ internet marketing guru to write your content? Write it yourself. Or hire a contractor for $50 an article.

No one knows the secret sauce for the search engines, either (except the search engines). Are you seriously going to hire a specialist to get you search traffic when even they have no clue how to do it?

Plus, it’s a losing proposition from the start. Unless you’re the first person in your industry to build a web site, your competitors have invested a lot of time and money in building their rankings and PPC (pay per click) campaigns. You can’t beat them by going head-to-head.

Even worse, it’s pretty much impossible to tell the real experts from the ripoff artists. You don’t know a thing about internet marketing at this point, right? So how are you going to judge who to hire? 90% of internet marketing ‘specialists’ are utterly incompetent. At best you have a 10% chance of getting someone decent.

And even if you do find someone who’s legit, it’ll cost you thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands, to get their services. Let’s say they’re 3x better than you at marketing your business online. If you do it yourself, it might cost you 10x less. It just doesn’t compute.

But the real kicker was when someone told me that the rules of internet marketing change all the time. E-mail marketing? Worked for a while. Now spam filters and laws prevent you from using it. Search engines? They change their algorithms for ranking so often that an SEO expert told me they have no idea what makes you move up. Nice.

I’m telling you right now: DO NOT hire an internet marketing expert. Read a book. Learn to do it yourself. Put a little time into it. And find other ways to market everything.