Warrior Forum like Yahoo Answers? [Newbie Self-Help Thread]

Well, if someone use Common Sense, then it can easily be identified

People not using common sense whether he is a newbie or so called guru, will always be lost...

As experienced marketers, it's easy for us to see because we understand the material at hand.

There's really no way to help a new person understand it, than to provide a solid action plan and help them stick to it and avoid other marketing hype until they're profiting and ready to expand into other areas.

I think Victor said it best. Experience is a great bull detector. It's really hard to determine what is real and what may be garbage without having some forms of study behind the question.

If I was brand new at something I would not ask the forum first. The logic behind the topic would have to come from some other area. Then once I reach a sticking point I MAY ask the community.

The question may or may not go unanswered, depending on where I ask for the most part because they are high level questions and the high level guys are busy....lol

So to answer your question, knowledge in a topic would have to be a marker first else how would you begin to know that damp feeling on your back is not rain?

Who has other ways, or knows patterns, to identify and separate a reliable answer from a misleading one?

It's simple. Just take the old adage of "what have you done for me lately" and turn it into "what have you proven to me lately". If you see advice anywhere on the Internet, assume it is BS until proven otherwise. On the Internet nobody knows that you're a dog.

The advice worth following should have one of the two following hallmarks:

Proof: By taking enough time, I could rope at least a few hundred suckers into believing that reading this post has actually burned calories and upped their libido. The human brain is frighteningly easy to trick. How do you attempt to save yourself? By remembering that seeing is believing.

Example: Let's say that there is this Warrior named Ernesto (who I'm making up) and he is saying that he pulls in thousands of views by posting his content to Reddit. If he's blowing smoke up your rear end about not showing traffic stats, or maybe even a specific article that has front-paged, you should be suspicious. If Ernesto says "hey, you can see one of my articles that are getting a ton of views on the front page now" you can say "alright, so we have a starting point of proof". From there you see if he has done it more than once because it is foolish to pull a pattern from a single data point. If there's enough proof you reverse engineer and optimize for your specific campaigns.

If newbies spend enough time lurking on the many IM forums out there something that you will see a lot is people that say they won't provide proof because it would give away their niches/campaigns. I can see where they're coming from with that. I don't agree with it, if copycats can bring you down then you're probably on borrowed time anyways, but I do understand that. The only thing that you should accept in lieu of outright proof is...

Testability: Scientific Method y'all. If I were to tell you that adding a suggestive winky face to every third sentence would up your conversion rates by 22%, then I better be able to provide you with an exact, measurable way to back up the claim. This is a great way to root out people that pull ideas and numbers out of their rear ends, because the only real way to observe those results and prove that they aren't flukes is if they tested themselves. Once again, people that beat around the bush are people you should be wary of.

Example: So Steve from Providence (he's fake too, probably) tells you that by starting off his SEO content with his keyword phrase (e.g. The best bikes in Providence comes from Steve's) he achieves an average of five spots higher in the Google SERPs than he would have otherwise. If you want to be smart, you ask "Yo, Steve from Providence, how did you come to that conclusion?"

Steve from Providence should say something along the lines of "Well, I had 2 articles of similar length written for five sets of keywords. One started off with the keyword, the other had it whereva (Steve has an accent). Each article was posted with its counterpart at the exact same time and had the exact same amount of SEO work done to it. Over a period of 3 months, the article that started with the keyword would have an average spot of 2, while the other had an average spot of 7."

See what Steve did there? He outlined a clear method that could be used to verify his claims. You'll see wannabe newbies and personalities give something like this for an answer instead: "Well, you're just gonna have to trust Steve on this one. I've been doing it for years, look I even have an SEO product/WSO that shows I'm totes an expert."

Anyways. Even with this advice, most people won't ever be able to separate the wheat from the chaff for obvious reasons. As alluded to above we are psychologically conditioned to trust our own, people want to believe what they read because they believe in the inherent good of people and that the species is working towards the good of the whole. On the Internet (and not just IM: you titled this "Yahoo Answers" so we both know the kind of stuff that gets put on there) anyone can say anything.

Hey Saul.. I was answering this question.. how would I tell a newbie to be careful about it.

I'd teach them 1 on 1 and tell them, don't worry about that other crap until you're successful with the basics. After someone learns the basics.. they'll know to test theories and try things on their own, unless they weren't taught very well.

A good education is the best answer.

If you don't know, now you know

I certainly agree that a good education is the best answer, but I'm trying to bring out pieces of advice, pearls of wisdom that newbies can use in this forum, right now, for real... not "in theory".

If you don't mind me piggybacking/adding a bit more to this point: a novice will face quite a few problems when trying to take the "get an education" advice at face value (which to your credit this thread is meant to warn against, I'm just speaking on the point in general).

Here's the thing: most colleges build their curricula based on tested, accredited information. If you go and study psychology, your education is based off of studies and theories that have either been proven or just not refuted yet. Regardless, there is information backing it up. If you go into mathematics/accounting there are real principles that have been honed over decades. They are verifiable and actually used in the industry. In marketing and business, there are fundamentals that have been proven to work. Now that's not to say that any college course load is perfect or that the information that you learn will be useful: there are moronic professors and old ideas are disproved (and sadly slowly adopted) all the time, even in STEM courses.

That's the thing though: in college there is at least some level of certainty that the information that you're learning is good information and that it will help you do whatever you need to do. Obviously a lot more goes into making a college education worthwhile (that's another discussion for another day) but still, that is more certainty than you can ever really get trying to find someone on the Internet to teach you online marketing. How many accredited marketing professionals are there on here? I don't mean self-proclaimed millionaires, I mean people that can show you what they do? There are some, but not in the numbers that some think. They're often off working anyways and of those that actually post you can guarantee that less than 100% possess the skills and understanding of people to be able to teach what they know.

Yet there are 500k+ people here, and a surprising number giving out advice as if it is gospel. So yes, you have to get an education to succeed; but you're not going to be able to get an education as you have been raised to see an education (in most countries at least). There is no classroom setting where you can safely learn what works and what doesn't. There is no vetting system that will unequivocally prove that someone is worth listening to. You'll waste years and your sanity trying to figure out who to listen to and who not to listen to.

If you want to escape the newbie track of online marketing: put your big boy/girl pants on. You're going to have to work, and hard, to get this stuff right. Your education does not, cannot, involve learning all the steps from some hero guru. You have to treat everything as potential bulls**t until you see otherwise and prove otherwise yourself. That's not wholesome. It certainly isn't encouraging; but the sales letters are wrong. Not everyone can do this. Hell, most people can't. Newbies need to figure out what kind of person that they are quickly.