Who Can You Trust OnlineOne of the biggest challenges when starting out is knowing who you can trust to help you succeed with your web-business.

As with all industries there are genuine people and scam artists.

So how do you tell the difference?

Here are 5 things to ask yourself next time you receive an email from an online marketer that you’re not sure about:

1. Are They Just Promoting Products?

There exists a category of internet marketers that I like to call the “Churn And Burn” guys.

They acquire large amounts of subscribers through solo ads and adswaps. Then they simply send out affiliate promotion after affiliate promotion to make money. They don’t create their own products (too much hassle right?) and they certainly don’t see their subscribers as real people, just numbers.

I’ve been a subscriber to many mailing lists like this. Basically, if you see they are only promoting products and are not providing any value (e.g., free video training, blog posts, audio interviews, webinars etc) then it is highly likely that you’ve got a bad egg! I suggest unsubscribing immediately.

2. Are they actually implementing what they are teaching?

Is there ANY evidence that they are making money from what they are teaching? Or are they just making money out of telling others to implement their strategy.

This is crucial because there are so many duff products out there where the success rate is incredibly low. If they have made money, rest assured they’ll been keen to tell you! So if they don’t then it’s probably safe to assume they haven’t and are just promotion junkies.

3. Have they been in other niches apart from Make Money Online (MMO)?

For the record, I actually don’t believe that it is necessarily unethical to teach MMO if you’ve not been in other niches. However, many strategies that are taught only work in MMO and some marketers seem oblivious to this. So try to be careful to ascertain where these strategies are effective in other niches because often they won’t be.

4. Are they suggesting a consistent business strategy?

If you’re going to be successful online then you definitely need a road map and battle plan.

How can you possibly succeed if you don’t have one?

But if you’re getting thrown from pillar to post by marketers who are just promoting the latest hot offers in completely unrelated areas then your information overload is going to go through the roof!

Kindle on Monday, offline local businesses on Tuesday, WordPress plugins on Wednesday, membership sites on Thursday and a “done for you” solution webinar on Friday. Agggghhhh!!!!!!

5. If you send them an email, do they reply?

This is a classic test of whether they see you as a person or just a number. Seriously, for each marketer that you subscribe to, send them email with a simple question or comment in it and see what happens. The results can be very telling…

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one. Have you felt scammed in the past? Do you agree with my list or think I’m being overly harsh on others in our community? Please hit the “LIKE” button if you liked this and let me know what you think below….