Yes, I am completely serious: I DO have the secret to online marketing success, a secret capable of making you a whole lot of money. And yes, I’m ready to spill the beans.

But more on that in a minute.

You probably hear from a lot of marketing experts in your day-to-day life, the Search Engine Optimization expert who guarantees you number one rankings on Google; the social media maven who promises thousands of fans and followers on Twitter and Facebook; the local AdWords rep who tells you that buying into their advertising strategies will basically be like having your own private ATM.

Sound gimmicky and too-good-to-be-true? They are. And they’re all missing one crucial ingredient…

That’s right, I have something in my toolkit that NONE of these guys have, even if you disregard a few semi-important qualities like honesty and integrity.

The root of the problem with most gimmicky marketing services is that they all venture to convince you that you’ll be able to skip a step in your marketing evolution, that paying them will somehow get you near-instant success. If I was a fitness expert and I told you that, with my system,  you could  go to bed Tuesday night as an overweight couch potato and rise on Wednesday morning as an Abercrombie and Fitch model, would you believe me?

We all know those kinds of transformations don’t happen overnight in regular life so why should we ever believe they will in our businesses?

The first step towards a marketing plan that will make you money is embracing the process and understanding that a fair amount of time, planning and hard work separate you from your goals. There are no shortcuts, no quick fixes, no Abercrombie and Fitch miracles.

If you’re ready to accept that fact, then you’re also ready for my secret: my anti-gimmick, if you will.

We’ve all heard the expression “don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” and we see it applied effectively in many aspects of life. Financial planners, for example, will rarely advise you to invest your life’s savings in a single stock. Marketing works the same way. Business owners shouldn’t look at the online marketing landscape, see social media, SEO, AdWords, email marketing, ebooks, landing pages and the rest and think, “Which one of these things should I implement?”

They should be thinking, “How can I implement as much of this stuff as possible?”

The secret is content. Content is everything online because it can become anything you need it be, like a ball of clay. A single article, posted to your website on a weekly basis, can drive your social media, your search engine optimization, your advertising strategy and your email marketing all at once. The details as to how this works are in this white paper and, in more detail in my new book, Blog For Business, which will arrive in bookstores this fall.

No, it’s not a get rich quick scheme. But content marketing is as foolproof a strategy that exists in marketing: a strategy that, when executed well and executed consistently, nearly always brings BIG results. The foolproof strategy that the gimmicky marketers employ is guaranteed as well — to benefit them and not you.