If you are into internet marketing, you would have heard of the term 'guru' and probably know who they are. Now, most gurus are really nice people. Some aren't, though. But even the good ones do these following things. If you know what they are, you will have a more realistic perspective of the offers gurus make to you.

Have you read lines like, "You can work only 2-3 hours a day..." in a sales letter? Actually, if you work only 2-3 hours a day right from the start of your internet marketing career, you won't make much money. If you intend to make internet marketing merely a hobby, then 3 hours a day is fine. But if you're serious about making it a career, 2-3 hours a day is a fallacy, at least at the beginning.

The problem is most gurus show you only the final result. They have the luxury of working so few hours a day because they have a support team doing the technical work, answering emails, manning their support desk, web-mastering and a host of other tedious tasks for them. But when they first started out, they worked their tails off, putting in hours and hours of work trying to understand and implement it all.

That's the first guru tactic you must be aware of. They usually only show you the final result but don't tell you how they got there. Here's the second tactic.

Gurus, more often than not, leave out crucial parts of the puzzle. Every guru will tell you to write articles that link back to your website. So you find a bunch of articles from the Web, edit them and submit them to an article directory. After a week or so, you check your stats. A paltry 30 or 40 views. You wait another few days. The count increases to about 70 views. So few! You decide to write your own articles. "Original content will definitely do better," is what you think. After a week you check your stats. This time, it's about 50 views. What's wrong? You thought article marketing was the panacea to all the ills of traffic generation. You look at the gurus and their articles (which are worse than yours) get thousands of views within a couple of weeks.

The thing is the gurus never told you the most crucial part about article marketing. Here it is...

Your articles must be keyword-laden, especially long-tail keyword-laden. THAT'S how you get lots of page views. Do you find gurus teaching you that in their coaching courses? Very few do.

Here's the final guru tactic. They tell you half-truths. If you've come across claims like, "I made $68,495.57 in my first month in internet marketing...", welcome to the club. Is such a statement true? Yes, it is. Is that all there is to it? Not on your life. The full truth is, "I made $68,495.57 in my first month in internet marketing...but I spent $5,892.97 in advertising, software, a coaching course, reports, recurring expenses etc." Is spending $5,892.97 to earn $68,495.57 good R.O.I.? Of course, but what if you don't have $5,892.97 to spend in one month when you're first starting out?

Many gurus' coaching courses contain hidden costs which they don't reveal in their sales letters. Well, unless you've got very deep pockets, you can't keep up with the spending while you wait for your income to increase.

These are some of the tactics gurus use to get a response from you. Now that you know what they really mean, you have the correct perspective of what they are saying. Then you can respond more intelligently to what the gurus offer you.