Trust online

One of the most difficult aspects of internet marketing is managing your own time. This is because there is always an almost infinite amount to get done and because you get bombarded with new ideas, new products, new techniques and new opportunities 24 hours a day.

For example, I've just sent an email to someone who has a really interesting product under development that I'd like to mention to my AdSense newsletter. He and I have been in email discussion for a couple of weeks and I'd like to do some sort of Joint Venture with him.

I've also just read an email from a marketer who is pitching a book on AdSense to me. It looks good and it may also be very topical for my newsletter but I don't want to mention it without reviewing it. So I've asked the author for a review copy.

And then I'm in the middle of a JV with the author of a book about a special AdSense technique and we're looking into the statistics for that campaign plus I'm testing new subscription pages for my AdSense subscribers.

But my main task today in fact is doing something completely different. I'm building a new site right now that will provide detailed step by step internet training. Yes, I know it's been done before but this one is a little different for reasons I won't go into right now - that would be giving away my unique selling point.

And I've had an email from someone in New Zealand who wants some help with his AdWords campaigns - I've offered to take a quick look at his account. This in itself raises some interesting questions about trust on the internet.

How do you work out who is trustworthy online? There are so many fraudsters out there that you do need to develop a feel for who is trustworthy and who isn't. I think (probably erroneously) that I'm quite a good judge but I'd be very hard put to explain the exact basis on which I make a judgement. It's down to that old-fashioned gut feel and whether people respond to your emails and so on.