How to See Through B.S. — Fast

When you're in the field of Internet marketing, the b.s. can fly fast and furious.

Let's say someone claims they're making all this money with niche sites. You can check out those claims.

Step 1: Check out their pay-per-click bids

Go to http://www.keycompete.com — Do they have any bids on pay-per-click ads? You can tell this with the FREE version. You don't need a subscription. You can also use Spyfu.com and keywordspy.com. You will see a very large variation in the results reported by those 3 tools. I'm not sure why that is.

Step 2: Check out the traffic of their domains

You can use: http://siteanalytics.compete.com

And, of course, alexa.com.

Step 3: Check out quantcast.com

You can see if Quantcast has anything on the domain or domains.

None of the above tests are conclusive. It's fair to say that in niches, the traffic may not appear on the radar. But, if there are no signs of traffic AND there are no ppc ads, you start to wonder if the person is REALLY making money on those sites.

Now, let's say the person is indeed getting traffic. Domaintools.com will give you an estimate of the number of visitors. So all you do is take that figure and multiply it by 1% to get an idea of the number of sales per month. Keep in milnd, they could be converting 1/2% or 4%. But probably, they're at 1% or 2%.

You can also use the above tools on the Clickbank Marketplace to get a better picture of how hot a product is or isn't. Now, if you see a giant spike of traffic, then the traffic disappears, that is fairly normal in today's market.

It's a sign of promoting the product to an in-house list or a big product launch via affiliates. So on the one hand you don't want to read too much into the above. But you will get an idea of whether or not someone is shooting straight with you.

Marlon