Thursday, November 6, 2008

Internet Marketing

I have been categorizing all the make-money-fast schemes I can find on the Internet into categories. I have learned about every kind of pyramid scheme and the various types, including the pass-ups, 1-ups, 2-ups, and the perpetual leverage payment plan. Some of these are marketing legitimately valuable products and services, usually overpriced, and some are selling collections of public domain ebooks, software, or information which one could find elsewhere by simply searching for it. The problem is that 95% of them want money up front. So, I'm sorting them according to the size of the barrier to entry. Some of them have a small initial barrier to entry, but if you read further, you find that that's just an application fee, and the actual product they're pushing is much more expensive. Of course, in the name of integrity, you have to have purchased it for the opportunity to then sell it. The hottest items are "information products". This is some presentation or packaged educational material, sometimes a DVD of a seminar, or a flash version of a lecture with slides. The cost to produce this stuff is so minimal. It makes great business sense to sell this multi-level marketing style, because the main cost is the marketing. The interesting ones are the travel resort clubs, legal insurance, or even a membership based web service that prints and mails customized greeting cards.

After the MLM stuff, there are the affiliate marketing programs. This is much more straightforward. You get a reward for helping customers find the product they're looking for, or maybe a product they might buy, whether they're looking for it or not. The barrier to entry is zero. You just need a web site or a blog to put web links or banners online where people can see them and click them. Commission Junction and Google Adwords are huge.

Another thing I have found is the very rare community of people freely giving out information to better themselves and anyone interested in following in their footsteps. The absolute best one of these is a group of Internet marketing folks who are selling software and web hosting, but teaching people how to make lots of money using the tools that they are selling, and they're not asking for anything on the back side. It's really free. If you want to spend a few hours a day not only learning about internet marketing, but actually watching a video that shows you how to do it, with the expectation that you actually will, I highly recommend the Thirty Day Challenge. It's a group of Aussies who are master Internet marketers, spending tens of thousands of dollars to spread this knowledge and the prosperity that goes with it.

2 comments:

  1. These "get rich quick and easily" schemes rarely work. For every person that succeeds there are many who end up losing money. I've watched people for years that fall for many of them over and over....like our neighbor when you were young on the corner who had 2 sons. They are still not anywhere close to "rich". BEWARE.

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  2. Kinda gives new meaning to the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses"

    LOL.

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