Goodbye IM
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As you may have noticed, it’s been about 10 months since I’ve posted to the blog. I started to become disenchanted with the whole internet marketing scene almost two years ago. Here I will discuss my feelings on this issue a bit. Please excuse the rambling format, but it’s difficult to put so many thoughts into a readable post.
IM to me just became about creating or promoting the New Big Thing. All of the salesmanship is not what I wanted when I got into this. I sincerely wanted to find something that I could make money at, AND help others make money from.
Unfortunately, I came to realize that IM was not the place for that. It’s not really about helping others become financially independent. It’s about selling others that dream. Only a handful of marketers make money, and they are the one’s who stick around for the long haul. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. As the big-time marketers make more money, they expand their audience until they become gurus. All the while they are making more and more money off of their ever growing status as a professional marketer.
I’ve come to view internet marketing essentially as a zero sum game. That view may not be completely accurate, because it neglects advertising revenues. However, I’m sure that the money made from ad revenues pales in comparison to the money made by people selling education and tools.
In a way it’s little more than an elaborate pyramid scheme (albeit a legal one). If I want to make money, I need to come up with a product or service to sell to others. This product will be marketed as something to help others succeed in IM. However, if these others REALLY want to succeed, they will usually need to abandon their original business, and jump on the same bandwagon as me.
To make the big bucks, they will have to create a product or service that they can market to others as a resource for building businesses. Very few people will ever be able to take this information and tools and use them to extract money from outsiders. The vast majority of the time, they will end up targeting their own competition as potential customers.
There are only two sources of money in this situation. There is the old money, and the new money. The old money comes from the big marketers. They just seem to pass back and forth as they promote each others products. The new money comes from the noobs. They will come in wanting to learn how to make money online, and they will pay for the tools and knowledge that teach them how. In time they will come to see that the real money is in creating the tools and services for other new marketers to use. Then the big guys will hype this stuff as the best new thing, and take the commissions.
What happens though if and when the noobs start to dry up? All that will be left is the big guys passing commissions back and forth, all the while getting charged a vig by PayPal or ClickBank.
While that is an issue I see with this system, I don’t want to give the impression that all I care about is the sustainability of the biz. That’s not the case. I am more concerned with the idea of brining new members into the fold under the false pretense of money to be made.
There is a finite amount of external advertising money available on the web. There are far too many people coming online trying to make their nut for everyone to get a share of it. That leads us back to the problem of marketing to ourselves.
I just don’t feel that I can help regular people learn to make money in this unsustainable system. I don’t mean to imply that IM doesn’t work. It definitely does. There are some folks out there making an absolute killing, but it’s by taking money out of the pockets of the little guy. That’s just not what I want to be about.
I’m sure that some will consider the quitting cry of a loser. That’s just not the case. I considered myself to be well on my way in the IM universe. I was already consistently making money every month, but it just wasn’t enough for me.
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