This might not be a ‘positive’ message, but it has to be said: there are a lot of ‘bottom feeders’ in the Internet marketing arena and you’ll benefit from knowing how to spot – and AVOID – them.

Having built, run and monetized many, many niche websites over the years… having reported on Internet marketing news… and having promoted numerous Internet marketing how-to products, I’ve concluded that the ‘how-to’ Internet marketing industry is rife with three main types of bottom feeder you’ll want to avoid:

I’d rather be a player who loses… than a spectator who watches.

“Fearlessness comes about inside of a man or a woman when they understand that everything that happens to them takes place so they can grow as an individual”

- Guy Finley

It’s time to celebrate. So, from the team here at Kikabink…

If you celebrate Christmas… Merry Christmas!

If you’re taking a holiday… Happy Holidays!

And if you’re continuing to plug away at your Internet business… keep up the great work!

We’ve got your back and will continue providing you with interesting, informative and inspiring news, views, tips, tools and more in the coming year.

Christmas Day is a widely celebrated holiday to commemorate the birth of Jesus Christ – the man who inspired (if not founded) Christianity and began a movement that has touched millions of lives over many centuries. Christians and non-Christians alike also celebrate Christmas as a time to be with family and to exchange gifts. Many people, in fact, view Christmas as a time for giving.

Giving, of course, means buying… since most people don’t hand-make gifts these days. This in turn, has seen the period leading up to Christmas become the biggest shopping season in many countries, prompting criticisms that Christmas is ‘commercial’ or ‘too commercial’ and the like.

Not all ideas are good ideas. Before you risk a lot of time, energy, money or other resources on a new idea, you want to make sure it justifies your investment.

But you also want to avoid prematurely dismissing an idea that could turn out to be good. You want to give it a chance to fly before you start shooting at it, looking for weaknesses.

It’s pretty rare for a digital clock to go too fast or too slow, as you might expect with a mechanical clock. If, however, a digital clock speeds up or slows down, it’s often due a malfunctioning frequency receiver. Since digital clocks are set to a 60 hertz frequency, any deviation from that will cause them to gain or lose time.

But that wasn’t why MY digital clock ran too fast. It turned out that something else was to blame. What was it… and why mention it on an Internet marketing blog?

I tend to get fired up by ‘tough love’. Don’t tell me that life is easy and all I need to do is wish for things to happen… tell me that life is TOUGH and that if I want to achieve anything of substance I’ve got to crawl through mud – not skip across flower beds – to get it.

Do I assume things will be difficult… and thereby get caught in a self-fulfilling philosophy, where things end up being more difficult than they need to be?

Have you ever noticed how disaster, in a business context at least, seems to strike at the worst possible time?

Just when you’re about to launch your brand new product, the server crashes. Just when you’ve secured an important meeting with a major client, you’re delayed at the airport. Just when you’ve landed a huge sale, your merchant account provider freezes your account.

Why does it often happen like this? Why does disaster strike at the worst possible time… and what can we do about it?

Should you drop out of college to start a company? Should you raise capital or bootstrap your startup? Is it true that women don’t want to run companies because they’d rather have children? Or do men and women have the same motivations for wanting (or not wanting) to run companies?

TechCrunch and other online news and discussion sites have recently published items debating these kinds of issues. Whilst they may make for interesting topics for discussion, what is more interesting to me is my own instinctive response to such debates… and what I suspect may be the instinctive response of other entrepreneurs.