Hi and welcome to my blog!

My name is Steve Tomassen and I am a web marketer based in London, UK. I have been involved in the web industry on and off for years through my professional career which was in Mobile Telecoms but I am now spending more and more time with web marketing as my various sites takes off and I am starting to see some real return on investment.

The internet and the blogosphere in general is filled with various techniques of how to build successful online businesses and it is pretty tough to cut through the bullshit to find out what techniques work and which should best be avoided.

My aim was initially to dig deep below the surface of loads of so called cutting edge systems and techniques used by the best internet marketers, or so called 'Gurus', which are designed to make cash on the internet, and find out if any of them actually do themselves any justice.

When considering any direction in webmarketing (and believe me there are many!), the most important questions to ask are quite obviously in the first instance:

- Is it worth spending time on this system?
- Is there any real money to be made or is this all just hot air?
- How long is this technique or opportunity going to last?
- Is this really a no risk strategy or am I going to get burned?

but also,

- Can I afford not to get involved?
- What if this is really a solid new business to work with?
- Are the guys running the company providing top technical and motivational support?

Essentially, the bottom line is this - Is it a genuine opportunity or just another waste of time and money?

Growing numbers of people connecting to the internet and the increase in online sales of products and services is at an all-time high and this growth is set to continue as more and more people connect via broadband, as well as the massive potential of the growth in the sector in emerging markets. These factors will ensure that there will be more and more opportunities appearing and almost as many disappearing, thus making things even more difficult for the budding entrepreneur to get a foothold in what has already become a very competitive industry.

However there is hope! As technology progresses, systems become more and more advanced due to the tools being developed by top programmers and designers. Less time is needed for messing around with html and mind boggling php scripts, cron jobs, htaccess regular expressions and all the other things that seem to invade the day. This leaves us marketers more time to spend actually using the tools to make our businesses grow and leaves more time for leisure and doing what we really want to do with our not-so-hard-earned cash ;-)