I was doing one of my favourite things in the world yesterday: grabbing a coffee and reading on my iPad (in this case, Guy Kawasaki's book on book publishing: APE). This time my rather pleasant afternoon was interrupted by a conversation at a nearby table that I just couldn't help listening into.

“Don't worry, leave all that stuff to us. Barry'll build you two or three backlinks every day and that'll get you up to the top of Google sharpish. And we'll knock out a blog post or two for you every week. No hassle. You don't have to worry about any of that”.

To someone with a basic understanding of how Google works and how these days it's got pretty darned good at ignoring (and penalising) artificial link building that sounds like a recipe for disaster.

And when you understand that the real value of blog posts isn't about churning out mindless drivel so that you've “got some content” on your site, but instead can be the very best way of establishing your expertise and authority in your marketing; then your heart just sinks when you hear about someone “knocking out a blog post”.

But unfortunately, the man and two women listening seemed to lap it up. I guess it sounded like their prayers had been answered. Winning clients online seems complicated and the rules seem to change all the time. How wonderful for this nice man to say he can do it all for us and get us tons of website visitors and customers.

Of course, a few months later and a few hundreds if not thousands of pounds lighter, they might be thinking something different.

That's why it's so important as a professional or business owner to get yourself a basic grounding in effective marketing. Both online and offline. Outsourcing all that stuff sounds great, but unfortunately the marketing world is full of wide boys who'll promise you the earth and bamboozle you with sensible sounding jargon. But who really don't have a clue what they're doing.

Your only weapon is education. Even if you're not going to be doing any of this stuff yourself, make sure you know how it should be done so you can spot these cowboys and steer clear of them.

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Image by Edmond Wells