Three Big Internet Marketing Myths Examined

Like any other large market, online marketing is full of myths. Here, we’re going to examine some of the bigger ones and see whether there’s any truth in them!

1. Overnight success is possible

This depends on your definition of overnight.

If you take it at its most literal – put up something today, hit some dizzy heights tomorrow, then it’s probably as close to reality is to Harry Potter really being able to cast a spell on someone.

Sure, someone can put up a YouTube video today and be on the front page of Google tomorrow. But almost certainly not for a topic any reasonable quantity of people are searching for.

If you take overnight as meaning a few weeks or months then, yes, it’s possible but it’s not probable. Most of the stories here are flukes or one-offs that are unlikely to ever be repeated. Like the million dollar home page from a few years ago where the first person to get publicity (Alex Tew) was effectively the only person to make it pay.

Which puts overnight success as more likely than meeting the Loch Ness monster but probably about the same as winning the lottery.

Individually, near enough every part of the internet marketing equation is easy.

Starting a blog is simple – you can get WordPress installed at the click of a button and the whole thing set up fast (or you can pay someone to do it).

Writing content for the blog or for an article site like this one doesn’t need to take forever. Once you’re in the swing of things, 500 words might take 20 to 60 minutes to write depending on various factors.

The same goes for creating a YouTube video, Tweeting, putting something new on Facebook or Pinterest or LinkedIn. And so on.

So, yes, each part is easy.

It’s joining up all the components that isn’t.

Because although you can set things up so they work together well, that takes time. You need to check that everything is congruent and that all the parts are still working.

Otherwise you’ll just end up with the kind of mess that even a 3 year old would throw their arms up in horror at.

Generally speaking, the easier something appears from the outside the more complicated it actually is. And that applies a lot in internet marketing – ask Google how well their Google+ system is working against Facebook and watch them dodge the answer.

3. If you build it, they will come

This was probably true in about 1994 when the number of internet sites was minimal. Maybe even as late as 1995 or 1996.

But not much since then.

There are millions of websites available with an almost unbelievable quantity of content, a lot of which is actually reasonably good quality.

Building an internet site is the easy part of the equation.

Actually, truth be told, so is creating a new product.

Getting customers to know that it’s there is the big part of the equation.

MySpace recently spent $20 million on their relaunch and they’ve got the extra power of being owned by one of the world’s largest media organisations. But how many people noticed?

There is so much good information out there that you have to be truly stellar if you want people to beat a path to your door.

If you’d like to read more about the myths surrounding overnight success in internet marketing then I’ve written a lot more about it here.