Proven Instant Automatic Wealth Attraction Secrets - Autopilot Cash

Everywhere you look on the internet, there are people who try to convince you that marketing success can be reduced to a formula.

Get rich quick ebooks are a classic example. Hand over $97, follow the guaranteed steps, and you'll get the exact results the author claims. Yes, you, too, will be able to hold up a huge, comedy check, featuring lots of zeros!

SEO forums are filled with questions that presume prescriptive answers: "what keyword density should I use?", "How many links do I need to rank #1?" "How many words should I have on a page?" "How many outbound links are too many? "

Unfortunately, a successful internet business can't be reduced to a simple, paint-by-numbers prescription. If it could, those e-books would be selling for a lot more money, and nobody would be giving away tips in forums.

Paint-by-numbers marketing produces a facsimile of where someone has already been, but the market has long since moved on.

Take A Holistic Approach

The way to approach internet marketing is to do so in a holistic manner.

Once you understand the underlying philosophy of various tactics and strategies, you'll be more likely to apply them successfully, and adapt them to devise new strategies.

There are underlying patterns common to the most successful sites. Once you identify and and internalize these patterns, you can easily out-maneuver any competitors who may be locked into a more inflexible, prescriptive approach.

Bad Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal

That quote is often attributed to Pablo Picasso. What I suspect he was getting at is that bad artists copy surface techniques. Great artists, on the other hand, get inside an idea. They internalize it. Then they innovate to produce something genuinely new.

For example, many people will advise you to start a blog.

Whilst that might have been an attention-getting idea in 2001, starting a blog today isn't worth remarking upon. Blogs generated a lot of attention early on because they provided an easy way for people to become citizen journalists, and the writing style was somewhat new, at least in when compared to conventional journalism.

Blogging used the personal voice of the opinions pages, as opposed to impersonal voice to the reporting pages. Blogs also provided immediacy in the days before Google News. Twitter has now leap-frogged blogs and news outlets to provide that very function.

These days, the biggest sites on the internet use nothing but the personal voice i.e Twitter, Facebook etc - and the barriers to producing content are very low. Anyone can publish web content. So the blogging Cluetrain has long since left the station.

Instead of copying the format - the surface - try to provide the type of information people want. That's where the idea for blogs came from. That's where newspapers came from. They solved an information problem for people.

One trend right now is social networking, but this results in a shallow surface of unreliable information. There is a growing flight to quality information, which people will pay to read. Some of the best information on the web is now being locked up behind pay walls.

Ask yourself the fundamental questions. What need is your site serving? Is that need changing? Where will your sites audience be in six months or a years time?

That's where you should aim now.

The future is where Google focuses their efforts:

We started with the early-adopter crowd. That was on purpose. We wanted to build a product for people who were getting hundreds of e-mails a day, because we believe by focusing on the power user, you're designing the product the rest of the market will want in a couple years when everyone's usage habits catch up to the most active users.

Barrier To Entry

When some guru tells you "a secret" - i.e. to get into mobile ring tones - he's safe in the knowledge the area is already saturated and he has moved on.

Once you see that sort of information published in the public domain, it's too late. The horse has bolted. But he will still tell you the market is ripe and that you should sign up under his affiliate link. Even if you lose money he still profits from your efforts. You are the key ingredient of their wealth generation formula, you just don't know it yet. ;)

One good way to evaluate the worth of such prescriptions is to evaluate the barrier to entry. A barrier to entry is some condition that makes it difficult for late entrants to enter a market. An example of a barrier to entry would be, say, the start-up cost of an airline. The capital investment required is significant, which disqualifies most of us ever starting one.

On the internet, if anyone can copy a technique cheaply and easily, then it almost certainly won't work. Once a technique is out there, too many people will copy it, which dilutes the market to the point where it fast becomes uneconomic. Do you think starting a blog today and running Adsense on it will make you money? It might, but it will also require a lot of work, luck and a significant point of difference. Without those fundamentals, it will remain unread, and is highly unlikely to make money.

So look for areas that have a barrier to entry. Do you have an established brand you can leverage? Can you partner with someone who does? Can you spot a niche where none of the players are spending much? What happens if you throw some money at it? Do you have a means of grabbing attention that other people don't have?

What is your point of difference? And can you make it defensible?

Steal A Business Plan, Apply It To A Different Niche

In the financial world, investment firms often use forensic accountants to deconstruct the tactics and strategies of their competitors.

One famous example is Harry Markopolus, who worked out that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. Markopolus bosses wanted to learn how they could match Madoff's double-digit returns. He was assigned to deconstruct Madoff's strategy to see if he could replicate it.

If you've found a new niche, try applying a model that has already proved to be successful in another niche. Deconstruct the features, tactics and philosophies of the successful site, and either go head to head, or even better, apply those same strategies to a new niche.

For example, one characteristic common to many successful sites is that they were first movers. They were in the niche early enough to command attention simply by existing. Can you slice the niche you're in even finer in order to be seen as a first mover?

You could also try the same idea in different geographic locations. TradeMe is a New Zealand version of Ebay. New Zealand is a tiny market, but TradeMe recently sold for $700 million, mainly because it was a big fish in a small pond. The business idea was the same proven idea as Ebay, simply applied to a different regional niche.

Show Leadership & Connect People

As Seth Godin notes, what works today is leading:

Leading a (relatively) small group of people. Taking them somewhere they'd like to go. Connecting them to one another....a tiny sliver of the market is enough. Bill Niman used to run Niman Ranch, a cooperative raising meat for fancy restaurants and markets. That was already a sliver of the huge huge market for meat. He moved on to start BN, a 1000 acre farm raising goats for a subset of that subset. It's enough. It's enough if the tribe you lead knows about you and cares about you and wants to follow you.....go down the list of online success stories. The big winners are organizations that give tribes of people a platform to connect.....People want to connect. They want you to do the connecting.

If you look around the search niche, you'll find the biggest sites have very clear leadership. These sites also serve as connectors for the community. The least significant search blogs follow others and repeat information. But the audience doesn't want that. Someone who follows the followers isn't valuable to them.

You don't need to pull in a big community, you simply need to lead whatever niche you happen to be in. Look for ways you can carve out you own leadership niche, then connect people within that niche.

People want to be led. They want someone to follow.

What can you teach others? What can you help them to do? How can you connect them to each other?

Published: April 2, 2009 by A Reader in marketing

Comments

hugoguzman
April 3, 2009 - 12:36am

I'm seriously tired of you and Aaron writing these ridiculously solid posts ; )

Makes me mad because I've been too bogged down with new business to write as much as I would like, so I feel like I'm falling off while you guys continue cranking out gems.

In any case, your points are well taken, and I would argue that they apply to would-be agency/search firm just as much as they apply to the would-be entrepreneur.

Identify a true business need for clients, deliver a unique/quality solution, service a specific niche and become a voice of authority for that niche.

If you build a barrier of entry by delivering a service offering and/or technology platform that's heads and shoulders above the competition, you can't lose.

Patrick
April 3, 2009 - 1:12am

Hahaha, this was my reaction when I read the first part of the title:

"Oh no, is he kidding, now?"

and then the second part of the title:

"haha he obviously is!"

;-).

reminds me of all the people who come to SEO forums asking how they can promote this product with GREAT information about making money online. They have a website, but they don't know how to get traffic to come to their site.........

PS: the whole thing about connecting and leading people and them wanting to be lead/connected just made me see an idea Ive had for my site/niche in another (more appealing) light. thanks

DavidMTL
April 3, 2009 - 2:22pm

Clearly one of the best post ever published on SEO Book. I will print it out, pass it around my employees, and will meet to discuss our vision and where we want to be in a few years. You are right on the spot, we should never be designing solutions for the existing market, but for what this market will be in a few years. We already knew this, yet we keep going after the easy, shallow and short-term solutions.

Thank you again for sharing your expertise with us, you are a blessing to the community.

PeterD
April 4, 2009 - 12:41am

Thankyou for your kind words :)

Would be great to hear about the changes you make.

wordful
April 4, 2009 - 12:43am

Another fine post, and ironic, too, because it got caught in my gmail spam folder thanks to that wacky headline!!

The hardest part about being a leader is not always knowing you're leading. It can be lonely and maddening. This is especially true in the early stages of taking that leap of faith on a breakthrough idea.

The formula of "proven-wealth-strategy" "gurus" is all too transparent. You can tell in less than second what they're up to based on tone of their copy and the in-your-face flashiness of their design. Easy come easy go.

The idea that geniuses steal and beggars borrow is indeed a good starting point for true innovator. It's just as important to be current on something than it is to start innovating it.

Kind of like being in college -- it doesn't really pay to be a lifetime student. Take what you've learned and do something great with it.

April 4, 2009 - 11:43am

Not surprised the post was flagged as spam based on the title...almost anything with a title like that has a 99.9%+ chance of being spam. :)

Martypants
April 6, 2009 - 1:43pm

Another stellar post Peter - thanks.
Particularly liked the barrier for entry point - and since you guys are not usually shameless self-promoters, I'll say that your low-level barrier for the forums kept me out of them until the trust level from blogposts like this pushed me to want to see more behind the veil. Now, I know that the only reason why I didn't do it sooner, was I hadn't built up enough trust to erode my natural skepticism. But time made trust grow, and you guys ended up with a brand evangelist who is glad to pay monthly fees to see more - I am not just a single sale. I think SEO Book is a great example of the actions that lurk behind the directions of this post.

dr00t
April 7, 2009 - 5:05am

This is a good post. However, the quote goes...

"Good artists copy. Great artists steal."

Just wanted to clear that up. :D

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