John Reese is the owner of affiliate opportunity site, Opportunity.com, along with the somewhat mysterious Income.com. He’s also known within Internet marketing niche circles as the first Internet marketer to generate $1 million in sales of an Internet marketing information product within one day.  John is also the author of the just-released report, ‘Internet Marketing 2010 – The Road Ahead’.

Firstly, I should note that John Reese’s Internet Marketing 2010 – The Road Ahead is not any kind of definitive report on the future of Internet marketing. And you can relax – it’s not some kind of prelude to a product launch (well, it certainly doesn’t read like one).

Rather, John Reese’s Internet Marketing 2010 – The Road Ahead is more like an open letter to John’s customers and followers which discusses some of his recent business experiences and his thoughts on the current – and future – state of Internet marketing.

John Reese begins the report by discussing the failure of a couple of his business ventures, and then goes on to comment on, among other things: social media, the U.S. FTC’s new guidelines on the use of testimonials and endorsements in marketing promotions, and the latest opportunities in online traffic
generation.

Internet Marketing 2010 – The Road Ahead is an interesting, thought-provoking and refreshingly quick read that provides a helpful glimpse into the entrepreneurial reality faced by many Internet marketers. And although – as John admits himself – the report contains a bit of rambling and ranting… well, that just makes the report all the more entertaining!

Most noteworthy in my view is John Reese’s discussion about his original plans for Income.com and his experiences with software development firms.

A couple of years ago, when John first announced his plans for Income.com, our company also began working on a major software development project (yet to be launched).

Similar to John, we experienced a number of difficulties with software developers that persisted for over a year and severely delayed our progress. In our case, we always hired individual developers directly (rather than hiring a software development firm), but we still ended up burning through a string of developers who delivered very little, before we finally found some good people and started making significant progress.

Not that our experience – or John Reese’s experience in developing the originally envisaged Income.com – is anything special. My work in the corporate world indicates that the situation is far worse in large corporations, where software development projects are even more likely to be delayed and go over budget! We’re talking about projects costing millions of dollars that sometimes never even see the light of day!

That’s not to say you shouldn’t strive to hire great people or manage software development – or any other kinds of – projects properly; it’s just worth recognizing that big undertakings like these are fraught with challenges and things often don’t go to plan. Indeed, the likelihood of things not going to plan is exactly why you need a lot of resilience as an entrepreneur – the ability to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and keep marching forward.

Reading Internet Marketing 2010 – The Road Ahead, it seems John Reese has had to pick himself up, dust himself off, and keep marching forward on a number of occasions. But he also appears to have entrepreneurial resilience in spades.

The other item in John Reese’s Internet Marketing 2010 – The Road Ahead that particularly resonates with me is John’s discussion of social media. Essentially, John says that, when it comes to marketing, social media is severely overrated. I couldn’t agree more.

I bet most Internet marketers haven’t even measured – let alone be able to specify -  the return on investment they get from the time they spend on tweeting on Twitter or friending people on Facebook, etc.

And to those Internet marketers who reckon they get a positive ROI, here’s the question you might want to ask yourself: are you getting a higher ROI from the time you spend on social media versus the time you could spend on doing other things in your business – whether it’s product development, meeting potential joint venture partners, engaging in SEO, implementing PPC campaigns, article marketing, etc? If not, the opportunity cost of engaging in social media is too high and you are doing yourself and your business a huge disservice.

Finally, John Reese’s Internet Marketing 2010 – The Road Ahead is also worth reading for gleaning John’s thoughts on how to deal with the FTC’s new guidelines on the use of testimonials and endorsements in marketing communications, and his insights into the latest trends in traffic generation, among other things.