Sadly, today I am withdrawing all support and recommendation for products and services from The Internet Marketing Center, 906 Robinson St, Coquitlam BC . This action is based both on my own experience and the increasing number and nature of consumer complaints surrounding this company. While the company appears to still be in business, I recommend consumers seeking Internet marketing advice and training look for alternative sources. I have placed several suggestions for training from established experts on my main website.
What makes this action so difficult is that the Internet Marketing Center has a history and relationship with me that dates back to the beginnings of my Internet Marketing journey that started nearly 12 years ago. There were very few Internet Marketing training resources in those days. It was back then that I searched the net looking for some training and direction in a field I had quickly come to realize I knew very little about. It was the genius of the late Corey Rudl that introduced me to the world of marketing online.
It was clear that Corey’s untimely death in 2005 was huge blow to a then wildly successful company. When Corey’s friend, Derek Gehl, took the helm of the company, he did an admirable job of staying the course in terms of producing quality products and marketing advice in the rapidly changing Internet landscape. With Derek’s separation from the company in 2009 and a new ownership, the Internet Marketing Center began a slow drift into oblivion.
As an affiliate with IMC since 2003, I stayed the course these past 3 years keeping a positive attitude that the company would again find its way to brilliance. However, you get a bad feeling when a company takes a course that clearly violates the basic marketing principals they originally taught you as a student. I commented about this in a few posts in 2009. A second ownership change occurred early this year with nothing more than a one line notice in their newsletter. Communication from the company all but stopped after January. Much to my surprise I recently found my affiliate links where not operating.
On investigating, I found the IMC websites a complete mess with multiple broken links and a Wordpress blog operating as the main site. Even a rank armature could have kept the websites in better shape. Someone clearly does not know what they are doing. I sent a letter to support and was informed: “Sorry the Internet Marketing Center no longer has an affiliate program.” This response came from a company that not only had one of the earliest affiliate programs, but also practically invented affiliate marketing. IMC was a company that advocated affiliates as a way to grow and prosper. It came from a company management that today doesn’t have the decency to inform its affiliates they were terminating the program. They have also walked with over $100 in my hard earned commissions and who knows how many of my sales they lost or diverted. In 12 years of marketing online I have never been treated so poorly as an affiliate.
I remember a specific tidbit from one of Corey’s Marketing Tips newsletters that talked about how a website should always be current and that all the links should work. An interesting truth is that the decay of IMC’s websites had already prompted me to stop active promotion of their products. Sadly, what drew me to the Internet Marketing Center many years ago was that their website was one of the few that actually worked in those early days of the Internet.
Corey Rudl and Derek Gehl followed specific style of personal marketing that is still widely used on the Internet today. It was always radically different from the fortune 500 big company style. That’s why it worked on the Internet with minimal investment while multimillion dollar companies failed online. I’ve heard the style referred to as “Guru Marketing” and “Hype Marketing”. Many today have equated this style with being dishonest. In fact, nothing is further from the truth. I prefer to think of it as Renegade Marketing a term coined by Dan Kennedy who was also one of Corey Rudl’s early mentors. Dishonesty is what I have now experienced from this faceless company.
There are occasionally uninformed owners and investors who gain control of companies that strive to depersonalize the buyer experience and eliminate the hype. Simply put, they are dead wrong and their business endeavor will fail. Being originally trained as an engineer, I often struggled with the sales and marketing mindset. I am reminded of an important lesson I learned from an early tele-seminar with Jeff Paul and Shawn Casey both of whom are now seasoned successful Internet marketers. Jeff elaborated about his early experience and failures. He noted that at least 2 of his early endeavors failed AFTER his partners refused to use his more outlandish style to market their products.
For those who believe that everything is different on the Internet and that old tried and true marketing principals don’t work, I give this case history of The Internet Marketing Center.
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