You’ve probably come across sales pages before that promise instant success. These magic bullets are constantly on sale in all sorts of areas but especially so in internet marketing. Partly because so much of internet marketing is repetitive and fairly boring – if you’ve ever tried to write 10 or 20 or 100 articles on near enough the same topic, you’ll know exactly what I mean there. But partly because we’re human and always looking for short cuts.

One magic bullet that people are attracted to is “spinning” content. The idea is that you use a piece of software that will examine the words and phrases and will then use a supposedly intelligent thesaurus function to rewrite the article, making it unique and therefore able to act as fresh content.

The snag is that the English language is far too complicated for that to happen.

Google’s algorithm can back calculate the meaning of words according to the context of the sentence they’re in and the rest of the page. But it has cost them a lot of money to do that and back calculating is a lot easier than creating good spun content in the first place.

If you need confirmation of this, go to a thesaurus website and see how many alternative words don’t really make sense to you. Most people I suggest this to have around a 75% failure rate for most words. But the magic bullet software doesn’t have that experience so it churns out garbage. Which gets filtered out by Google or, if they fail to filter it, a human will know instinctively that the content is rubbish and will ignore it.

The next magic bullet that doesn’t work is automatic submission of whatever. Whether it’s sending articles out to hundreds of sites, asking hundreds or thousands of directories to list your business, spamming forums or anything else that automatic submission software claims will boost your site to to the top of Google, usually in some stupidly short period of time.

And actually that may be kind-of true.

The mass submission could be enough to trigger Google to think that something important has happened.

Because the algorithm is tuned to take account of current events. So a while ago, the whole of the front page of Google for the word “Katrina” would have been about the hurricane of that name. Now, the hurricane is still there but there are also other results mixed in. And once the next name in the hurricane list appears, chances are that Katrina the hurricane will be relegated in the results.

Now if that’s the case for a really big event, you can imagine that you’d fall off the list even faster for your own automatically submitted content. So you may well get the short term “hit” of lots of traffic but it will fall away just as fast, never to be seen again.

So the magic bullet has done what it promised. But it neglected to tell you that it would actually sink your website days or weeks after you used it. Which makes it rather less good than you originally thought.

In fact, instant “anything” is usually not a good idea. Not just instant solutions in internet marketing – I’m sure you can think of other areas where the instant solution is a pale cousin of the real product.

So although the temptation is strong – and the sales pitch will sound really, really convincing – internet marketing magic bullets are almost always something you shouldn’t touch, even with a long barge pole.

If you’d like help with your internet marketing and want to avoid the lure of magic bullets, contact me here.