Can You Make Money Online, Without Teaching About Making Money Online?

One of my readers, Badrulnazar left a comment yesterday which suggested that the only way to really make ‘big’ money online was to work within the ‘make money online’ niche and thus teach others how to make money or get traffic, or do seo, or social media and so on.

If you look at the biggest names in the Internet Marketing industry, it certainly seems that way, but is it true? I don’t think so…

The ‘Evidence’ of the Big Names

So, let me take a handful of big names within the industry, people who we know have made millions of dollars online and take a look at the products that have made them rich:

• Ed Dale, sells Dominiche & The Immediate Edge
• Frank Kern, sells Mass Control
• Jeff Walker, sells the Product Launch Formula
• Joel Comm, sells The AdSense Code
• John Reese, sells Traffic Secrets & Marketing Secrets
• Marlon Sanders, sells over a dozen marketing related products
• Mike Filsaime, sells the Butterfly Marketing System
• Yanik Silver, sells a wide range of marketing products

Every one of these guys now makes the majority of their income by selling their knowledge, tools and systems to allow other people to also make money online or do something else related to that endeavour so of course I can see why my commenter came to his conclusion.

The Illusion of This Industry

I wonder if there is anybody reading this post who has never heard of any of the names I mentioned above or their products. I suspect that most of you are familiar with at least some of them. Why is that? It’s because the very nature of the industry requires than in order for these people to be successful with their products they need to get their message out about how they made their money or drove traffic or created their marketing system or whatever their product teaches.

The people who make money in the make money online niche can only make that money if they are prominent within the niche. If nobody has ever heard of them, how can they make money with those products? They can’t. However, the point that so many people forget is that many other niches and industries do not have this requirement.

There are plenty of people who make a fortune in niches that have nothing to do with Internet Marketing but the reason we don’t know about these people is because they have no reason to tell their story! For example, a common and simple method of making money online is via niche blogging using monetized blogs. We know some of the prominent people who make money in this way, for example Darren Rowse. But we only know about Darren because of his ProBlogger blog where he shares his story.

How many other people out there who are busy working away in their niches but don’t have a blog where they document their journey, and don’t have an ebook or course that teaches others how to copy their system? These are the people you don’t see, that you never heard about. But just because you don’t see them does not mean they do not exist!

An ex of mine has been involved in Internet Marketing for many years. He is the creator of a popular Facebook application that was bringing in $200k a month until recently but he doesn’t teach other people how he did that! Nobody knows who he is. If I told you his name you would never have heard of him. He doesn’t have a blog like this one, he just works at his work privately and rakes in his money without anybody knowing about it.

So Don’t Worry!

The reason for this post is to encourage people such as my original commenter above. I’m one of those people who is recording their journey but of course I don’t have a lot to share yet. Of course, the fact that my first paid product is a course about social media only serves to reinforce the original assumption! However, one of my other projects that is scheduled for either late in the year or early next year will be to build some websites in niches that have nothing to do with Internet Marketing. If I make my millions doing that I’ll be sure to let you know!

Also, don’t forget that the Internet Marketing niche is open to anybody but of course you cannot teach somebody else how to do something unless you have done it yourself first. So if you are still at the stage where you are trying to figure out how to make an income from the Internet, that’s fine. But when you do figure out, there is nothing stopping you from going on to package that information into a product that teaches others to do the same.

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