First of all, thank you for responding to the post. I greatly appreciate it.

Yes, you can become successful by finding the “right” mentor and then follow that mentor’s teachings. I agree with you there. But the point of the post is that you can also get a terrific internet marketing education “without spending a dime” simply by watching how these successful marketers market.

Mentors can be expensive — and not everyone who is in this business has the money to purchase a coaching program from someone who knows what they are doing. Then there is the challenge of finding the right mentor.

Michel — I do both. I belong to an excellent marketing forum run by James Schramko and Andy Grand called Super Fast Results. These guys are my mentors along with some other very successful people in that forum. I learn a lot from the people inside Super Fast Results, but I also get a great internet marketing education by watching how other successful marketers market (and this education is free).

For example, Frank Kern is a brilliant marketer who is now selling a $10,000 coaching program on how to build successful businesses by promoting your product with webinars. $10K is a ton of money, especially for someone who is relatively new to internet marketing. But even if you don’t have $10,000 for Frank’s coaching, you can still reverse engineer his marketing campaign and get a great online marketing education simply by “studying” how Frank Kern markets.

I know this to be true: Even the most successful people in this business are always learning, and one of the ways they learn is by watching how other people market. Dan Kennedy has been doing this for more than 30 years.

You say in your article: “A terrific way to learn internet marketing is to simply reverse engineer the marketing campaigns of these successful online business builders.”

A better way is to have one of these successful internet markets become your mentor and follow their teaching.

Unfortunately, we live in a society where a lot of people want “quick success” and they are not willing to do things the right way. I am certainly guilty of getting impatient and wanting things in my business to happen “right now.” But when it comes to building and operating a web business, we are all so much better off in the “long run” if we do it right.

Because of the huge buzz surrounding the recent launch of Perpetual Traffic Formula, I decided to do some research of the top ranked pages for the keyword “Perpetual Traffic Formula.” What surprised me was the high number of marketers who had pages ranked for this term but had no Disclosure Agreement on their sites.

I don’t get it. These guys go to all the work to get their pages ranked high for that very profitable keyphrase, then they don’t take a few minutes to put up a Disclosure Agreement to make sure they are FTC compliant.

I think they are asking for trouble.