Recently, I went to an evening seminar presented by a Google Adwords certified web developer who runs a business not 5 minutess from my home. He was talking about how often newbies to Google Adwords, target the most competitive keywords, end up copping very high Costs-per-click (CPC) and finding themselves in the position where they have "paid the Google Dumb Tax", as this guy rather humorously put it, I thought :-)

(I actually saw a classic - though painful - example of this in a forum recently, titled 'HELP!! I OWE GOOGLE $500 FOR ONE DAY!" He had only made sales worth $68: Youch! Poor guy.... that's one mistake he won't make again!)

In fact I think the "Dumb Tax" concept is not restricted to only Google Adwords! I reckon just about every aspect of internet Marketing (IM) attracts Dumb Tax. Furthermore, I reckon I must have paid my own dues to just about every department of this "IM Dumb Tax Office"! There can't be any other departments can there ??

Anyway, one would think one would be fairly safe with article marketing, which I have had as a major focus of mine for the last many months. But with astounding panache and alacrity, I have managed to find a way to pay the "IM Dumb Tax" even in Article Marketing!

Let me explain...

Recently a company I'm associated with has been building suites of sites for VRE investors. The scope of works we were offering for each site involved TWO original articles on each site, and TWO "re-written" original articles syndicated through the article directories, to secure, hopefully traffic, and certainly link backs to boost PR etc.

Now, there was a total of 180 sites ordered over a couple of month period, and I thought things were going gang-busters!

Being a great believer in the "Ready - Fire - Aim", and "Massive Action" principles, we had secured a few PLR article memberships, and identified a couple of econmical article writing sources, so we forged ahead...

All was going well, till we discovered some rather horrifying quality (or lack thereof) in some of the articles we had commissioned. Clearly many of them were being written by er.. people from a non-English speaking background...

So, no problems, I thought, I'll search around and just find another provider - simple Google search, some negotiation, and we're done... right?

Well, I found one service, who's name I'd better not mention. Looked great, and the guy was based in the Germany,- with used US based writers... YAY! Prices were competitive, but he did mention they were overhauling the website system, but he could happily take my orders.

Well, the initial original articles that came back were prompt, and not too bad - needed a little tweaking, but overall OK for the money. THEN, we came to the rewrites.!! That's when the trouble started. The first 10 or so, had HUGE blocks of exact duplicate content in them from the original - despite a very comprehensive and clear brief on what I wanted.. I'd say 85% ++ was identical - huge slabs of paragraphs copied verbatim. AGGGHHHHHHH!! Long story short, after many backwards and forwards with emails to the owner, communication finally stopped, and we had to pretty well rewrite the articles ourselves.

IM Article Marketing Dumb Tax Lesson #1: You often can't rely on article writing services to deliver as promised in their spiel!!

IM Article Marketing Dumb Tax Lesson #2: You should NEVER pay full price upfront for articles! Fortunately, I actually had learned this second lesson without having to pay the Dumb Tax, amazing though that may seem!, and I had only paid a 50% deposit, so I probably got close to my moneys worth LOL!

Stay tuned for the next article when I discuss what happened when we finally found an article writing and rewrite resource that actually is pretty good, and find out how I had to pay a "Renta-coder IM Dumb Tax" installment !