With 2007 being a breakout year for InternetMarketingSucks.com, one could assume that internet marketing did indeed suck in 2007. The question is, how bad did it suck?

Here’s a rundown of some of the bigger events that occurred:

The MillionDollarWiki launched, got publicity from John Chow and Shoemoney, and made lots of money. Now the site is forgotten.

StumbleUpon got bigger and more popular, and obviously, got more spam. Although my stumbling experience is still enjoyable.

Sphinn launched. Good thing, because Digg sucks.

DealDotCom, a copy of Woot, launched in the internet marketing niche. It sucks.

BlogRush launched… and sucked. But nevertheless, a competitor popped up.

WidgetBucks launched, got praised and criticized, but finally paid out.

Then after all that, Joel Comm revealed it to the masses. A couple months late, but what do you expect, as we also found out about his sites that employ what some may call “dubious” Adsense placement tactics.

All the while, Google dished out penalties to anyone that was trying to make money with their site using anything other than Adsense. TLA really got hit hard. Google also screwed with David Airey a number of times.

No wonder Google gets a bad rap.

AuctionAds went to shit. Then ShoppingAds launched. And people were smart enough to avoid it.

To top things off, I’m still getting link exchange emails like it’s 1999.

That’s not even all the stuff that sucked, so I guess 2007 did suck quite a bit!

What do you think was the worst part?

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While my initial test of Exoclick seemed promising, long-term results make me question whether it’s worth using at all. I want to believe that it will send me quality traffic at 1.3 cents per click, but it looks more and more like Brainfox-quality traffic (and that’s about the worst traffic you can get.)

See, I’ve been checking things out, and even when Exoclick sends me 100 clicks to a specific page, 0 of those show up in Google Analytics. Their traffic used to show up, but it looks like there are too many spammers partaking in Exoclick these days.

(I should point out that some campaigns do get traffic from the actual Exoclick search engine, but I think the problems stem from some scammers in the content network that are ruining things for everyone.)

I guess the time has come where we’re limited to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

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One of the hardest feats out there in online marketing is to start a new forum. Popular forums are great, stable websites. But how do you build one??

You need lots of good discussion to attract users, but you need lots of users to start the discussions… It’s the fabled “chicken or egg?” problem. One common method is to actually pay some people to post on your forum to get the ball rolling. But I just found another one, which more suitable to the standard internet marketing practices.

Create a sales page for your forum!

Maybe it’s been done before, but this was the first forum I witnessed that used this cheesy technique. It makes you read a sales letter and then check a box to confirm your interest (and build up lots of suspense) before you are directed to the forum.

The site is conqueryourniche.com and you can see the forum here if you aren’t interested in the sales letter. Maybe this technique works, because there are quite a few members! (There’s also some sort of way to make money in the deal, so that could have something to do with it…)

But there’s one problem, and I’d expect better from a seasoned internet marketer… There is no email collection form! They need to add a signup form so that if you do not immediately register for the forum, they can blast you with emails telling you why you should register and post on the forum!

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