© 2004, John Calder
http://www.TheEzine.net

I know what you are thinking. "Why should I pay for content when I can get content online on any subject imaginable --- and I can get it for free?"

If you are running an online business and you are seeking information concerning how to take your business to the next level, you should not want anything but paid content. Why?

AN EXAMPLE FROM THE SHORT HISTORY OF INTERNET COMMERCE

Let's take a look at "FFA link farms" first. Along about 1997-98, someone came up with the idea of putting together a webpage that has 20 links on it for 20 separate businesses.

By providing a 25 word description, each link made its own contribution to permitting the page to deliver up to 500 keywords to the search engines, and to provide an opportunity for website owners to gain additional visitors to their websites.

Soon, hundreds of thousands of people were utilizing free-for-all link farms to promote their businesses, providing tons of junk to the search engine databases.

Eventually, spider search engine managers realized that the key to their own success was high-quality, content-related, search results. As a result, the spiders blocked the FFA link farms from their database, and penalized people who utilized them on their websites. Soon, whole domains were blocked from the search engine databases as a result of their utilization of FFA link farms.

When only 200 people used the FFA link farm approach to promote their businesses, the idea was useful and perhaps even very effective. But once the idea was advertised and hundreds of thousands of people were using the system, the system lost all of its original value.

If this concept was kept between its first 200 participants, then the idea could have still been producing tremendous results for its users. Instead, it was turned over to the masses that sucked all of the life out of the value of the program.

EVEN SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION SPECIALISTS HAVE COME FULL CIRCLE

A few days ago, I read a note from a SEO specialist about how she had looked at a site she had optimized many years ago. She was stunned to realize that in those early days that she had stuffed keywords into the ALT tag connected to the images on the web page.

Once again, the ALT tag in the image was a good idea that could have been utilized to enhance one's rankings in the spider search engines.

The sad thing is that this small piece of information was spread around and hundreds of thousands of people utilized it on their websites. Ideally, if one were to use this to a good cause, they would include one or two keywords that helped to describe the context of the image shown. That was the intended purpose of harvesting this information into the search engine databases.

Abuse of this technique led people to stuff hundreds of keywords into the image ALT tag. When thousands of people began to abuse this tool, the spider search engines management team began to crack down once again. Today, few engines record the image ALT tag words in their databases.

THE KEY IS IN THE SIZE OF THE KEYHOLE

The lesson is that the traffic generation ideas that can produce significant results tend to lose their value as more and more people begin to learn about them and then utilize them.

People who give away their best traffic generation ideas for free are always walking a very fine line between attracting readers and giving away the tools that they rely upon to keep their business profitable.

"Free" always ends up in the hands of the masses, and the masses destroy the value of a promotional technique. "Exclusive" ends up in the hands of only the select few who will be able to squeeze the technique for every penny it can produce.

The best reason to pay for content is that it will assure that the best information is always in your own arsenal. It will also assure that the materials that can make you money will not have their real value washed away by the masses.

IN CONCLUSION

Pre-Internet history has shown us that the people who found the greatest successes in the marketplace, were those that had the best ideas. Ideas are simply the best resource for the aspiring entrepreneur.

By paying money to receive the best Internet marketing and business ideas, you are assuring yourself the ability to succeed beyond the wildest dreams of the masses that surround us.