A note to all new and learning online marketers,

I have been reading SEO & PPC resources, blogs and forums for much longer then I have been contributing to them. In fact, it is only in the last year, and more seriously in the last 6 months, that I have spent any real time in the online SEO communities. So I don't know how some who have been around for much longer have managed to stick around without killing someone. No wonder Darren sometimes comes across as cranky!

In no other online community have I seen so many people so unwilling to find out information for themselves, and in no other online community have I seen so many people be so helpful, almost to their own detriment. It seems to me that every other forum thread is someone asking questions of the community that are not just basic, but quite frankly demonstrate a fundamental lack of respect for the community at large. Questions to which they could get an answer quicker by googling than they ever could by joining a forum, waiting for a confirmation email, clicking the email link, and typing out their life story before asking "How do I open an Adwords account" or "How should my title tag be written". 

I don't think anyone should be discouraged from learning SEM in any way, shape or form, but I have to say, if you haven't the strength of mind and perseverance to go out and find information for yourself, to read what others write, disseminate that information, draw your own conclusions, put them to the test and look at what worked and what didn't, then perhaps this isn't the industry for you. Online marketing isn't about reading through a checklist and doing everything on it. It requires you to think for yourself, and that is something you should be doing from day one. 

None of us know everything, and the SEM community is amazingly helpful considering we are a bunch of people who are essentially in competition with each other, but if you are new to search and looking for the first steps, please (and you will thank me for this when you have been around a while and are sick to the hind teeth of seeing people looking for free answers) GFGI.