Pseudo experts
Every webmaster forum has pseudo experts and while they tend to be well-respected members of their communities they shouldn’t be immune to criticism.
A pseudo expert is someone who posts guides and blogs regarding various internet marketing/SEO topics while making little if any money or success in the aforementioned fields. For example, a pseudo expert may write an elaborate 2000 word guide on adult marketing that gets a positive reception, yet the original poster makes very little if any money on adult marketing. Another example would be someone who runs an SEO blog but doesn’t make any money with SEO.
Since pseudo experts are unable to make money online easily though automation (SEO, clickbank, azoogle etc) they tend to do a lot of tedious grunt work instead, usually for less than minimum wage. Such tasks include content writing, banner/logo design, directory submission, website design, wordpress installation, etc. If they were truly experts they wouldn’t have to perform grunt work but would be able to make automated income through affiliate marketing or adsense.
In addition, pseudo experts tend to create so called ‘marketing blogs’ where they ramble about internet marketing and various widgets. The only problem is that they lack the skillset to establish any meaningful reader base or monitization.
Pseudo experts also make a lot of faulty assumptions in their writings. Eli, for example, whom I respect his efforts is a pseudo expert and he reveals that by making this noobish post regarding a so called free amazon.com link.
Blue Hat SEO-Advanced SEO Tactics ยป Free Amazon.com Link. While it is obvious that astore.amazon.com is an authority site it doesn’t pass any of its link authority to the individual anazon stores. It is no different than having a blogger blog or a myspace account. True myspace and blogger are very well trusted domains, but they don’t pass any authority to thier subpages which are actually orphan pages.
Pseudo experts aren’t bad people; they are noobs though. And there is nothing with being a noob. But just don’t pass yourself off as someone with expertise when you are unable to apply it to yourself.
Examples:
SEO_mike from wickedfire: noob
Recently he began advertising an autoblog service on wickedfire whereiIn exchange for signing up for a hostgator account via an affiliate link he would set up five autoblogs on your hostgator account. The irony is that if autoblogs were so profitable he would be able to make money though the auto blogs instead of trying to hustle money from hostgator. I’m not sure how many signups Mike has gotten but I doubt he made much money. Hostgator pays affiliates $1000/referral for the first 11-19 referrals so if Mike gets 15 signups he will have made $1,500, good but nothing to write home about. Meanwhile, he has to wait 60 days before he gets his affiliate income. Making matters worse is since he already tapped the wickedfire userbase the rate of new referrals will decline and eventuall fall to zero, which makes his revenue unsustainable.
Forums are full of noobs and pseudo experts.
Another example is mixcat or mrcat who runs a crappy directory and search engine service (mixcat.com). He frequently posts obvous garbage on sitepoint and webtalkforums while pimping his website. He is the epitome of the forum noob.