You have heard it so many times from countless internet marketing gurus: the internet allows regular people to start a business online and compete with the big guys, hence what they describe “a level playing field“. They have been preaching this mantra for the last 15 years, and while that may have been true in the early days of the internet, come 2010 things certainly don’t look so glamorous anymore.

Anybody who starts a business online faces numerous challenges such as stiff competition, picking the wrong niche in the market place, pay-per-click ads that are overpriced, spam, website attacks, black hat SEO techniques to bring down your site, malicious code placed on your site through vulnerabilities in software you site is running (such as WordPress) etc.

Many people still (wrongly) believe that all they need is traffic. Work on SEO, rise in the search engines and you’ll make money guaranteed. Of course, many internet marketing gurus claim that SEO is the most important piece to success on the internet (just watch a few videos and see how THEY are getting top rankings in Google and making big bucks in their affiliate accounts, it’s like making money on autopilot while you’re sleeping). But SEO should only be a small portion of your entire marketing scheme. What is almost equally important these days, is security. Security as in securing your webserver.

I have been dealing with some security issues myself and will write about them in upcoming posts. There is so much money to be made on the internet these days that crooks, parasites and con artists are constantly finding new clever ways to rip people off (both your customers and you, the business owner). Right now, I would like to mention 2 excellent blogs (about security) that will give everyone who owns a website an idea what they’re up against:

• Dancho Danchev’s blog Very detailed and entertaining blog with frequent posts about the scum of the internet. See how cyber criminals and internet parasites find security holes in almost everything to lure/force people in buying fake security scanners for their PC and other rip-off schemes.
• Unmask Parasites blog Read about obfuscated javascripts, twitter exploits, worms, viruses, WordPress hacks and more. If you weren’t paranoid before, you might as well be. Unmask Parasites also offers a free vulnerability scan for you site: you need to scan every page separately, but I would start with your homepage and some of your blog pages.

So it may well be that you are doing everything right in one area (SEO) and the reason that your site is lacking in the SERPs is because of exploits on your server or nasty black hat SEO attacks by your competition.

Some people don’t believe in internet marketing anymore. On the following blog, you can read some entertaining posts about why internet marketing sucks…