Hi all,
My word doesn´t time fly? I cannot believe that it´s been so long since I last posted.
I am sure that after writing this post I may well get a lot of flack but, in the words of Clark Gable “quite frankly my dear I don´t give a damn”. Since the end of the Alex Jeffreys training course I have been beavering away at quite a few projects and I´m pleased to say that they are all coming along quite nicely. The thing is only one of these projects is remotely connected to the IM niche.
The main thing Alex´s course brought out in me was the ability to focus and , as he describes in his own words, not jump on and off the chaos wagon, i.e. stick with one method.
My main reasons for working predominantly outside the IM niche are as follows:
1. Whilst we all know that the IM niche is a burgeoning market, it is one of the hardest nuts to crack and the percentage of new marketers who are actually able to break through is tiny. Obviously there are exceptions to the rule and a couple of the students on the course appear to be breaking eggs with big sticks, i.e. Dean Holland and Garry Parkes, and all good luck to them.
2. My main gripe, and its a very big gripe about the IM niche, is the fact that it is almost solely information based. Taking into consideration the plethora of new products which are hitting the market virtually on a daily basis makes one wonder how many more spins you can give to setting up the basics, a hosting pack, your autoresponder, and driving traffic?
Fair enough each one of these new packages may have a slight twist on a specific point, but if you were to run them all through Copyscape I doubt very much whether more than 10% of them would pass as original content. A prime example of this was a product which had a huge fanfare launch yesterday, but after reading a few reviews from various forums, the concensus of opinion was that it was 99.99% the same as another well known product with just an extra traffic module.
This is what annoys me about the IM niche. Thankfully I have a bit of experience now and am able to recognise, after myself purchasing a number of different products, what is new and what is re-hashed with a Sunday bonnet, but for the thousands of newbies entering into the bear pit who know no better, will only see a very enticing sales page with funky music and videos and will think it´s the best thing since sliced bread.
I am not naive enough to think for one moment that these tactics don´t work as it is patently obvious that they do and they are able to produce some fantastic financial returns for the authors of these products. It just leaves a nasty taste in my mouth seeing the number of people taken in by the promises of quick and easy money, i.e. the promise of $52,000 in 48 hours!! As anybody who has been in internet marketing for a while and knows the score, will readily know that there is no feasible way that as a newbie this can be atained. I for one am working on my own non-IM niche sites a huge number of hours each day and all of them bar one are selling visceral products, ranging from kitchen appliances to guitars.
I know that there are only a few IM products at the moment that I will ever feel comfortable promoting, one of them being Alex´s course because as I said, he really has set the wheels in motion for me, the other couple are Sarah Brown and Tony Shepherd´s Kickstart course, because this, in my opinion, is probably one of the best internet marketing starter programmes. No fluff, no flashy sales pages, no wild promises of overnight wealth, just pure content. The other main starter product is Chris Farrell´s membership site, again, no bloated promises just a very genuine sincere guy who has made the membership site for newbies to learn the basics. There are a couple more, one being Andrew Hanson´s Firepow system, again a superb programme for niche blogging. I realise that by writing this post I am probably committing commercial suicide because you would have every right to question me if I ever come up with another product to promote, but I would hope after reading this, you would appreciate that whatever I do promote I believe in wholeheartedly.
Don´t get the impression that I am sitting here seething because I am not. As Alex pointed out in the course if you can use the IM niche as a proving ground to hone your skills you can pretty much guarantee success in any other niche. To prove this point less than a week ago I set up a blog based around a very well searched keyword phrase for a well known brand of kitchen appliances and my blog is on page 1, out of 1,300,000 pages. Now this last comment isn´t to brag, its just to prove that if you are able to get the basics in place this kind of ranking is possible. As a lot of you know my main passion is video marketing and I run in conjunction with the building of the marketing sites, a video campaign, but funnily enough with this example, I didn´t, maybe a lucky strike, I don´t know but I am not complaining. The point I am making is that after learning the basics, if you put them into practice properly, and when I say put them into practice, I mean take proper action. You don´t actually need to purchase every conceivable product that hits the market, because as my Mum says, if it aint broke – don´t fix it.
