It’s an interesting question and the terms ‘unethical’ and ’scammer’ are tossed around way too liberally. First I’m going to tell what an unethical marketer or scammer is NOT.

The guy who sends emails promoting a new product to you every day regardless of whether he knows if it works or not … he’s not being unethical or scamming you. He’s desperate and has no business plan. He most likely maxed his credit cards out buying every get rich quick scheme that he could get his hands on and now he’s desperately trying to make some money back so he can pay the next electricity bill. Rather than getting angry and calling this guy names … learn from him. Realise that this isn’t something you want to do because it’s just going to end up with a lot of unsubscribes from your mailing list.

The guy who sells you a product with some fairly specific outcomes such as ‘You WILL make $500/mth with this’ is not a scammer or unethical if YOU DIDN’T TAKE ACTION AND FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS. This is probably one of the single biggest causes of disappointment  amongst buyers and the biggest frustration for sellers. You will see many many blog posts, forum posts etc saying ‘product X is worthless .. it didn’t make me any money…’ but in many of those cases the buyers were lazy. There’s really no other way to put it. They simply didn’t get off their behind(s) and use the product in the way that the seller intended or suggested.

Granted, the laws are changing and still need some changing but if every online marketer who was accused of being a scammer really was – then the majority of online marketers would have an office at Sing Sing or some other prison .

So, before you go labelling someone a scammer or unethical .. think … REALLY think about whether you gave a product your best shot or whether you expected that it would somehow, magically put money in your hands. Making money online isn’t as easy as many sales pages suggest -  but sales pages are about making sales rather than deterring people with terms like ‘hard work’ and ‘takes time’ so it’s not surprising that they are all very ‘glass is half full’.

The REAL scammers and unethical marketers are people who sell ponzi schemes, don’t honor guarantees, don’t deliver the advertised product, don’t deliver the product at all … you get the picture I’m sure. Basically they are people who break the law. Somewhere, someone decided that online marketers were some different sort of breed to offline marketers but the reality is that online marketers have to adhere to pretty much the same trading laws as offline marketers. The biggest difference is that it’s much easier to have a global market with your online business than with an offline business AND it’s much easier to call someone a scammer on a forum or blog than it is in person.

There is no doubt that you will come in contact with or buy products from someone who you may think has questionable marketing techniques or products. Learn from that and don’t let it distract you from building your own online business. I know that I spent 2 or 3 years being ‘angry’ about online marketers in general until I realised how destructive that anger was to my own ambitions. Nowadays I just take a chill pill and get on with building my business!

In my opinion it is essential. I created TheMarketersGeek with a rough kind of plan but I don’t really think that was adequate.  I’ll tell you why. Just after I created this blog/site I also created a site at thewebmastercourse.com. The plan was that this site would be mainly about the technical side of online marketing and thewebmastercourse.com would be mostly tutorial videos.

There’s the first problem. If this is a technical site, then shouldn’t it have videos? I don’t want to duplicate everything I do so straight away I had to change my plan. That’s fine and it’s not unusual to have to tweak and change things as you go but if I’d written my plan down to start with and done some brainstorming then I probably wouldn’t have had to make changes so early.

So I figure that this site will be changing focus a little. I’ll still talk about technical topics but I’ll also throw in some of my own experiences and things I’ve learned on the marketing side of things. All of the tutorials will be over at thewebmastercourse.com and then at some point I’ll make a premium membership available that will include some coaching and a lot more video material for you.

Ideally I’d like to present a plan starting right from  ‘I have no web site so what do I do’ and progressing through the task of creating a Wordpress blog initially (because it is by far the easiest way of creating your first online presence) and then looking at web sites and how you go about building them.