One of the things that has always bothered me about the internet marketing space is the sleaze factor. There are too many people making unrealistic income claims, trading on people's fear, and taking advantage of people's hopes and dreams. It drove me crazy in 2010 when I first wrote about this, and it still drives me crazy in 2026.<\/p>\n
But here is the other side of that coin: there are also internet marketers who build their entire businesses on a foundation of ethics and genuinely helping people. They exist. They are out there. You just have to know where to look.<\/p>\n
Everyone asks the same questions. What is the secret to making money online? What is the magical product I can promote? What is the special niche that will make me rich in two weeks?<\/p>\n
There are no magic bullets. The closest thing to a secret I have found in over fifteen years of online business is this: focus on helping people get what they need, and the money will follow. Zig Ziglar said it best: “You can get everything you want in life by giving other people what they want.” That is as true in internet business as it is anywhere else.<\/p>\n
But there is a deeper question here, one that my friend Nicole Dean raised years ago: what do your internet marketing skills allow you to do outside of your business to help people?<\/p>\n
When Nicole asked that question, my honest answer was: not much. I was so focused on building my own business that I had not thought about using my skills for something bigger. Then an opportunity showed up. A musician friend needed help getting a charity Christmas CD online. All proceeds went to fund education for children in Liberia, West Africa, where just one hundred dollars could pay for a child's entire year of schooling.<\/p>\n
I knew how to build a website, set up payment processing, and drive traffic. Those skills that I had spent years developing for my own business could be deployed in a weekend to help kids on the other side of the world get an education. That experience changed how I thought about what we do as internet marketers.<\/p>\n
The tools available to internet marketers today are exponentially more powerful than what we had in 2010. You can build a professional website in hours, not weeks. You can reach thousands of people through email, social media, and content marketing without spending a dime on advertising. You can set up donation processing, e-commerce, and automated fulfillment with off-the-shelf tools.<\/p>\n
If you have these skills, you have the ability to make a real difference for causes and people who need help. A local charity that is struggling to raise money online. A nonprofit that needs a better website. A community organization that does not know how to build an email list. A friend with a passion project that could reach more people with some basic marketing knowledge applied to it.<\/p>\n
I am not saying you should work for free all the time. Your skills have value and you deserve to be compensated for your work. But I am saying that part of building a reputation as an ethical internet marketer — and part of building a life you are proud of — is using what you know to make things better for someone other than yourself.<\/p>\n
The internet marketing industry still has image problems. The way we fix that is not by complaining about the scammers. It is by being the example of what ethical internet marketing looks like. Help people in your business. Help people outside your business. Build things that add value to the internet instead of cluttering it with garbage.<\/p>\n
That is how we change the reputation of this industry, one project at a time.<\/p>\n