Just after I wrote my rather negative post entitled Six reasons NOT to try to be an online retailer, I read Aaron Wall’s post about how hard it is to sell yourself if you are too negative. Ouch! Good thing I am not trying to be a consultant or I would be starving.

Several people wrote interesting comments after the last post. Some of pointed out that the term “profitable” is relative and I agree. For example, if you are investing a ton of your time to make an extra thousand dollars a month, I do not consider that profitable. It is more like working for minimum wage. Also, I do not believe that those kind of sites have a future. I firmly believe that if you want an online business that is going to stand the test of time, you have to really go for it rather than just dabbling.

The internet retailing landscape has changed dramatically over the past eight years. In a summary, it used to be very easy but now it is hard and getting harder every year. The gold rush is over, and if you are someone without much money or business experience that thinks you can build a reasonably profitable ecommerce site, you are fooling yourself.

I am about to become very unpopular with the consultant types out there but here is a simple truth as I see it… This is no time to be starting an ecommerce business unless you have a way to address the six issues below.

I want to clarify a few things from yesterday’s post and give a few more thoughts about my philosophy of SEO. I think that some of my points were misunderstood and I perhaps I could have worded them differently.

1) I do not discount the need for planning keyword density, well-designed meta-tags, and similar on-site tactics. You should make sure all of those things are done right. However, I believe that in the scheme of things, the weighting that search engines put on these elements is decreasing rapidly, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. That is why I would be wary of an SEO consultant that focused on these items and tried to make you believe that their rewriting of your metatags is likely to make a big difference in your rankings.

Yesterday, I sat in a meeting with an SEO consultant for about six hours listening to him discuss his philosophy of search engine optimization. Since we started in 1999, we have relied heavily on SEO, but in the last few years, really have struggled. Here are some random things I have learned over this time.

1. The SEO industry is full of consultants that are either incompetent or crooked. How many? I would guess well over 90%. As a result, there is an unbelievable amount of noise in the industry that makes it almost impossible to actually get to the truth. If you want to hire an SEO consultant or contract out your SEO, I feel for you. We as a rule do not do that, so I really cannot make any good recommendations. We have hired for short periods of time some of the top names in the industry, but have in general, been disappointed.