Is Internet marketing dead or dying?

For the last ten years doom and gloom merchants have been forecasting the end of Internet marketing. Every few months someone else pops up and says that this or that method of making money online is dead or dying.

The funny thing is that for the many people who spend their time actually earning a living online rather than reading or writing about it, Internet marketing is a great business to be in!

In some ways though, the 'death of' predictors are right. Business online is an ever-changing landscape and what works brilliantly one day may not work at all the next. Take made for AdSense websites for example.

Back in 2002 or 2003, they were everywhere and people were making a killing by taking one article on a niche subject, placing it on thousands of pages on their site along with a few scraped search engine listings for a keyword, and surrounded the whole thing with AdSense ads.

For a good few years, Google had no real way to tell if those sites were trash or not and so sent them traffic anyway. Quite a few rich people made a killing from the clicks on the ads that the free traffic generated.

Then Google cottoned on to the scam and found a way to block such sites. Suddenly many of those folks saw their incomes plummet by 95% or more. And articles started to appear saying that Internet marketing was dead. Of course it wasn't. One, less than kosher, method had bit the dust, but not the whole concept of making money online.

People who made content-rich websites, built using common sense, white-hat principles back when everyone else were making those scraped, automated sites are still earning from them many years after the trash garbage has been forgotten.

A few years later, article marketing became all the rage and people quickly discovered that Google didn't much care if an article was 200 words or 2000 words so long as it was keyword rich.

So guess which kind of articles became the norm? The awful, thin, information-poor ones.

Now that Google are starting to fight back and are changing their algorithm to weed out such scanty nonsense, we are starting to see the wails that 'article marketing is dead'.

No, it isn't. Bad article marketing is dead. Good riddance.

Every now and again there is a shift. Being online, where things move much faster than anywhere else, the shifts happen rather frequently. That's really due to the fact that as soon as someone comes up with an idea, thousands of sheep-like online marketers rush to copy it and so the Internet becomes saturated with badly thought through strategies. And then the search engines, because most of the brilliant new strategies seem to involve gaming the search engines in some way, develop a way to filter out all that dross.

Accompanied, as always, by much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the me-too marketers who are all trying pile onto the latest money making scam.

If only they had realized that the tortoise had the right idea. Far better to plod on with good, old-fashioned, tried and trusted ways that may not be the latest thing, but which just go on working year in year out. The alternative is to be a hare that burns out every time something changes.

When you get right down to it, Internet marketing is here to stay. If anything, it gets bigger and bigger each year. Yes, people who adopt the latest and greatest scammy approaches can, if they are very lucky, make a return for a short time. But for them, it is vital they keep on reinventing themselves because their own brand of Internet marketing does keep on dying.

But for the rest of us - the white hat, common-sense website builders and writers who have always known that good content, honest business practices and high ethics are the only real recipe for long term success, Internet marketing is not only alive, but it is kicking too!