This article comes as a response to a comment on Erica Douglass’s forum.
Dean, a commenter, notes he seems to be missing something something with respect to success in Internet Marketing.
I’m missing something too, but I think I know what it is.
Successful internet marketers are marketers first, and internet second. If there was no internet, they would still be successful marketers.
Here’s a few other things to keep in mind:
- All marketing of any product anywhere is essentially a pyramid scheme of who can get in first and either lock up the market, leaving the crumbs for everyone else, or commoditising the money completely out of it. You can see this in IM with stupendously valuable products now being given away for the cost of monthly memberships. But it works the same way with laundry detergent, etc. (Think about starting a new laundry detergent company)
- Related to the previous comment is that there is an implicit MLM — multi-level-marketing scheme — built into all of this. The first person that gets ahead, stays ahead, everyone else falls into line behind them, getting a radically smaller share of the market at each step.
- The rich get richer. The internet is just exposing this at a much more rapid pace. This includes things like blog links, they all flow pretty much one way: from the lesser to the greater, or sideways to peers. Very rarely will someone “bleed their link juice” to an unranked or unknown blog, no matter how technically good the content. I link to provide value to readers, and as far as I know, there is not one single contextual link to any of my blogs anywhere on the whole web. I don’t worry about it, and I don’t attempt to trade links with people.
- Quitters never succeed. If you’ve only been doing this 2 years, you need to listen to Brad Fallon on one of Eben’s videos: “We’ve been working on this almost 20 years… it’s nice to finally see a payoff.” (After a $13M launch IIRC).
- EVERYTHING is difficult to master. If it wasn’t difficult, anyone could do it.
I’m in it for long haul myself. All of my blogs exist primarily as advertisement providing me with technical credibility.
Feedback welcome, let me know what you think.
