It occurred to me the other day, as I was browsing through a Borders Book Store, that book stores are especially dangerous places for internet marketers to get information.

The reason is simple. Information there is likely to be hopelessly out of date.

Here’s what happened…

I was browsing through the marketing section and I saw a book called “Maximize Web Traffic”. I’m never one to turn down web traffic, so I picked it up to start browsing.

The back cover was all I needed to read. It explained how important it was to get your site ranked highly on the major search engines like Alta Vista, Excite and Lycos. Anyone with experience knows that not a single one of these search engines exists any more! (I remember running banner ads on all of them back in 1998.)

Turns out the book was copyright 2000. That’s six years ago – or more than 50% of the life span of the world wide web. Frankly, that book does not belong on the shelves and it is a travesty to sell it to anyone.

And there you have one of the great benefits of an eBook. Not only is it easy to update them to keep them current, but you can easily email updated information to your customers. This provides a massive benefit over printed books. And, if you sell an e-book, it is one you should seriously consider promoting.

Software companies have long used the promise of continual updates. E-book authors would be smart to do the same.

And if you are a fledgling Internet marketer, stay out of the bookstores. You would do as well shopping for your marketing information at an antique store.