Aside from bullets being inherently violent and death producing, it seems that a lot of people are in search of “the magic bullet”.  Sometimes it’s the “silver bullet”.  Sometimes it’s not a bullet at all.  It can be the “holy grail” or the “big kahuna” or, maybe, “the whole enchilada”.  It may be on the “ship that comes in”.

No matter how people describe it what they really are looking for it some easy and, preferably, quick way to success which usually means lots and lots of money.

Some success gurus like to describe the word, success, as things other than money — health, good relationships, a fulfilling lifestyle — but most people could care less about the intangibles.  They want the money.  To that end, there is no shortage of sites on the Internet that promise you a quick road to riches.  Pay the fee for whatever the system is that they’re selling and they’ll provide you with the secrets they have uncovered that will put you on Easy Street.

Internet Marketing honcho, Joel Comm, has written an interesting post called What’s Wrong With Internet Marketing about the recent phenomenon of Internet Marketers crowding into the “make money online” niche.  I guess there was a time when the “make money online” strategy to, er, make money online wasn’t quite as crowded and the people in that niche became Internet Famous which helped them make even more money online showing people how to make money online.

If this seems overly circular to you.  You are not alone.

The bottom line in Joel’s post is that there seems to be a lot of people offering pretty much they same product in different packages. They call their individual systems by different names, they various phases of their system have different names but when it comes right down to it, they’re all the same.  They’re even all the same price — a whopping $1997.  That’s right.  Just three dollars shy of two grand!

There Is More To Internet Marketing

Joel has his own take on this but here’s mine:

There are probably a ton of ways to make money on the Internet.  Selling a product or system to show people how to make money is one of them.  Selling stuff on eBay is one of them. Selling widgets and gizmos that are actual physical products is one of them.

Finding a niche that will have some search engine juice so people can find you is the hard part and, for my money, I buy into the findings of Chris Anderson in his classic book (newly revised), The Long Tail:Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.

The gist of the book is that there will always be a lot of people standing in line to buy the blockbuster product.  But those come far and few between. You have a better chance of finding a small but committed audience from a product or service that doesn’t have such a huge herd effect.

The beauty of the Internet is that it’s really, really big. Global.  Crowding into a space that already has a ton of competition doesn’t always make sense.