It’s easy to reach overload levels with internet marketing.

Everyone expects you to join their list and buy their products.

The products themselves are often big – PDFs that are anything from a handful of pages through to 100’s of pages; audios and videos (one “small” product I bought the other day had 18, admittedly short, audios and videos); hour-long webinars; weekly or monthly training.

Then there are the emails you receive, the forums you read and other sources of information.

It doesn’t leave much time to do the internet marketing that actually stands a chance of earning you some cash.

So how can you overcome internet marketing information overload?

Start by doing a quick cleanse of your inbox.

Sure, you probably delete unwanted emails or mark them as read or do else something with them (even if it’s just ignore them).

But you need to do more.

Emails are relentless.

Internet marketers – myself included – often send them on a daily basis. Sometimes even more frequently.

Pressing the “delete” button is nothing more than a temporary solution as the computer sending the emails doesn’t know that’s happened.

Any reputable email sender will have an unsubscribe link at the end of each email that’s sent out.

Sometimes it may take some scrolling to reach the link but it will almost certainly be there, especially if it’s sent via any of the major email companies such as Aweber, GetResponse, etc.

And – contrary to some rumours that circulate on the web – clicking the unsubscribe link won’t subscribe you to a different list.

Instead, it will save your inbox from being quite as cluttered.

For the rare emails that don’t have an unsubscribe link – usually ones offering to rank your site on the first page of Google, that kind of trash – then click the spam button in your email program. But keep that option as a distant second choice. Unsubscribing is the best way to do this kind of thing.

Read between the lines before buying a new product

Take a bit of time to read the sales page and read between the lines.

For instance, I was reading one the other day that promised you could start earning dollars in the internet marketing niche with no list and an outlay of just $40.

“Hmm”, I thought.

That’s a familiar looking price (round figure, that kind of thing).

Especially since one or two people had asked for clarification of the outlay and the vendor had qualified it as a $20 annual fee and a $20 per advert fee.

That meant it was talking about Warrior Special Offers: putting an advert on the popular internet marketing Warrior Forum.

The $20 is for the annual membership you need to pay in order to be able to post adverts. And the adverts cost $20 apiece.

I took a raincheck on this one – I’ve been advertising products there for quite a while.

But the sales letter was written in such a way that people weren’t working out where the marketplace was, even though they were looking at an offer that was placed there.

Instead they were asking questions about scalability and other things.

To me, it was obvious what was being offered and equally obvious that I didn’t need to buy the offer. I also didn’t join up to become an affiliate because it’s something my list either know about or could easily drop me an email to double check.

Chances are that if you know a few things about a particular market you can read between the lines of a sales letter and decide whether it’s likely to offer you anything new or just a refresher course of new or old information.

Another thing to do is pay attention to any dates shown on income claims.

It’s not uncommon for people to show Paypal receipts or other things to back up their income claims.

If those are recent, they’re probably valid.

If they’re 6 or 12 or more months old, they may or may not be valid but you should at least be asking yourself whether the method being promoted still works.

If it still works, the figures should be more up to date. Always assuming the person selling the product is still using the method they’re teaching – not always a given.

And if the product is claiming that their method gets to the top of the results, check.

Even if they show you screen shots or videos as proof.

It doesn’t take long to run a search.

But it’s saved me countless dollars on products that work for a few days or weeks but not longer term.

Often if it’s a video or a web page that’s ranked, you can get an idea of the method even if the sales letter is obtuse about it.

A while back, an internet marketer was gloating about how they could rank sites at the top of Google even if the site had almost zero content and few, if any, backlinks.

They showed proof.

But looking at that proof showed they weren’t telling the whole truth.

The phrase was so uncompetitive you could almost get to page one of the results just by thinking about creating a page about it.

It wasn’t a phrase that could be monetised – there were no adverts to be seen in the results and the phrase was either a trade mark or something equally protected. Which meant it would be taken down as soon as the owner of the phrase found out about it or ignored because it wasn’t even worth the time and effort of an email.

But if you’d bought from the sales page and the glowing testimonials without doing a search, your wallet would have been lighter for no real benefit.

In that respect, snake oil has been replaced and is even more profitable than it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries since there’s near enough no production cost once the product has been created.

And if the sales page only tells you what the product isn’t, click the close button on the tab.

Give yourself a cooling off period before buying

Sales pages want you to buy instantly.

Mainly because they know that if you don’t do that, the chances of you coming back to the page in this lifetime are between slim and zero.

So they’ll use as many techniques as possible to get you to buy. Because, in reality, it’s now or never for the sale.

Countdown timers, dime sales, closing soon notices, pending price hikes.

They all conspire to push your emotional triggers to buy now.

Recently, I’ve taken to leaving the tab open in my browser and coming back to the product the following day.

• Sometimes the price is the same – which with a dime sale means no-one else has bought it since I last looked.
• Sometimes the price has risen – I’m happy with that because the amount it’s risen is rarely as much as I’ve not spent on the other products I’ve dismissed in the cold light of the following day. Paying a few cents or dollars more is, in my mind, a lot cheaper than buying lots of extra products.
• Sometimes the offer is closed. That’s rare but it does happen. I tend to take the view that there’s no such thing as a coincidence and therefore if the product is no longer available I didn’t need it. That approach has worked well for me for quite some time and unless it was something like a limited edition art print or something I desperately wanted at an auction I’m happy with it.

Use the stuff you’ve already bought

This is something most people rarely do.

You probably save the products you’ve bought somewhere on your hard drive or the logins are maybe moved to a special email folder.

Go back over the products you’ve bought in the last few weeks or months.

And go through them.

Start with a cursory glance – is this something you’re still interested in or has it fallen off your rader?

Then, for the products that meet that first test, set aside some time to go through them.

Not skimming.

Actually going through them.

This won’t necessarily help your information overload but it should stop you buying yet more things you don’t need to add to your collection.

And it will help you concentrate your efforts.

Because part of the process of going through the products you’ve already bought is to put them into practice.

That means you’ll need to set aside however many hours to do so.

Not a 5 minute “well I tried it” approach.

But real time that you spend.

Of course, you almost certainly won’t be able to do that for every product you’ve bought. That would likely take you months if not years.

So use this as part of the decluttering process.

Set aside some quality time for your internet marketing

This needs to be time that you spend on your internet marketing – putting it into practice rather than building yet more theoretical knowledge.

Doing this will crystalise what you know and what you don’t know.

Hopefully you’ll know the basics but, if not, they’re easy to brush up on and will probably be covered in enough of the products you’ve already got that you don’t need to grab yet another beginner’s guide.

Quite likely you’ll know the intermediate stuff as well.

Even though you think you don’t.

Mainly because intermediate stuff in internet marketing is like a lot of other things – the equivalent to setting the timer record on a television TiVo recorder rather than just pressing play.

Any gaps in your overloaded information knowledge, you can research that specific item. Google and YouTube are your friends for this – with the added advantage that you’ll be able to enter a very specific search that returns some very specific results.

And when your searches start to turn up blanks, you’re probably an expert. Even if you didn’t realise it.

But well before that happens you’ll have started to tame your internet marketing information overload and you’ll be spending the available time more productively.

If you’d like some regular internet marketing insights without having to wade through enough information to fill a small library, check out my internet marketing tutor group.

Each week, you’ll get a short video (usually about 10 – 15 minutes) covering an aspect of internet marketing that’s affecting other tutor group members.

You’ll also get access to the back catalog (yet more information, sorry!) and the ability to contact me and get an answer about anything you’re stuck on so long as it’s internet marketing related.

And if you’ve got anything you’d like to add about internet marketing information overload, please use the comment box below.