By Kyle Newton

When I first decided to make my living with online marketing, I fell for every scam on the internet. I also ran across many good pieces of the total package. Sifting through what was actually good and what was a rip-off was hard to distinguish. The reason this is true is that if you use just part of the total program, you get very limited results, if any at all. Online marketing is just like any other business, you must have all of the tools of the trade, and you must learn to use them.

Let us relate this to a car. You can have a complete car and lack just one simple component and the car is 100% worthless. If the gas tank is empty, it is worthless, if you have a full tank and are missing the spark plugs or injectors, the car is worthless. Lose the keys and the car is worthless. Starting to get the picture?

An online marketing genius gave the title of this article to me in 1999 at a convention in Las Vegas. I had inquired to the secret of his success and asked how I could get the same results. The title that made you read this article was a life changing statement for me as a new online marketer. I learned to research my competition on a new front. I was not there to look for some specific "secret" that some professional was keeping from the rest of the world and me. However, I learned to look at their total program, I tried to find as much out about the top companies in my field, as I could. Then I actually made purchases to go through the whole process to see the internal system; from web design, to marketing, to relationship management.

It is not as hard as you might think, to put the whole system together, and if you research, you may actually find out ways to improve and magnify the results.

I will give you one of my favorite ways to ethically spy on your competition. Just go shopping for the service or product that you wish to market.

There are many ways to put the total packages together; gather all of the tools, and anyone can do it. It is that simple, you just have to learn to see things in a different light.

Kyle Newton is a web design and ecommerce professional with 7 years of experience in the web development and internet-marketing field. He has developed total online presence systems and has helped establish many successful online businesses.