If you're just getting started in Internet Marketing, you may be awed by amount of "Internet Gurus" out there, all making millions of dollars (or so they claim) and for some reason seem more than willing, for a fee, to teach you their biggest, most intimate secrets.

I believe in one thing - If it sounds too good to be true, it most probably is!

While I have no doubt on specialized skills and techniques used by these gurus, it can get way too frustrating simply getting into all their hype, and find almost no value at end of day. Hype - that's one thing I agree these guru's are really good at. For some of them, unfortunately, hype is only thing they're good at.

So question, for those who are trying to master Internet Marketing, might be:

1) Can I learn anything from these gurus without paying money?

2) Who is real and who is not?

3) Whose methods should I follow?

Can You Learn Something for Free?

Most guru's have opt-in newsletters on specialized subjects like website marketing, Pay-Per-Click, search engine optimization or whatever specialized skill they have "mastered". Almost all of them ask you to subscribe to their newsltetter in return for some kind of "breakthrough" report, and promise to deliver "valuable information" weekly or monthly to your email address. Sound great.

Here's what happens 2 weeks later - You realize that "breakthrough report" is same old regurgitated information which you can find almost anywhere. You might also relize that "valuable information" never comes in full, without any hidden agenda. The "valuable information" is actually a soft-selling (sometimes even blatant advertisements) ad for guru's products, or even worse, some other Internet marketer's products.

I'm not trying to shoot down any marketer here, but irony is in their teaching. Almost all internet gurus would advice you to offer valuable, free information that benefits other people. Profits, as they say, is secondary to actually helping people and making a difference in their lives. What a load of BS. How come they don't practise what they preach? Of is that how Internet Marketing Game is played?

Fortunately, not all guru's are same. There are still some jewels to be found, and they offer some great information in their newsletters, such as:

Your site does no good if nobody visits. Put your website address on everything you produce that goes in hands and in front of eyes of your customers, distributors, and other audiences: in your email messages; on your brochures; on your letterhead; on handouts at presentations; on company vehicles; etc. Mention address when you are speaking with potential customers and in audio communications. Search engine marketing

Optimize your website for indexing by search engines, and above all, get other sites to link to yours. Most of popular search engines, including Google, base their rankings on key word and phrase relatedness to search and popularity of your site as measured by number and popularity of sites that link to it. You'll usually need to be in top 20-30 results for most important related search terms to really benefit.

The other major determinant in search engine ranking is amount of content on site that matches or approximates search terms...so, a site with more content is likely to be ranked higher.

Make sure search engine "spiders" or "robots" can crawl through your pages (follow links to all pages on your site). If your site is built entirely in Flash or another multimedia plug-in (offfer a plain HTML version!), uses frames, or generates most pages dynamically, you will need to take special steps to ensure that your site can be indexed.

Get your site listed and linked in portal websites covering tourism sectors, destinations, and lifestyles related to your offerings—generally, for free. Trade links with related sites. These activities not only help with search engine rankings, but will be a source of visitors by themselves.

There are many factors that affect rankings, and they are weighted differently by each engine. Despite these differences, you will be on right path if your site has plenty of content that contains search words or phrases your customers will use, if you include key search words and phrases in page text and in TITLE tags in your HTML pages, and if you can get a few dozen pages on related sites to link to your site. It can help to bold or italicize some of main key phrases in text of your web page and to put them in heading tags (