We hear it all the time. Sell your own product. I don’t discount the idea at all. I KNOW for a fact that it is the way to big bucks. Whether you sell something on Crapbank or have some membership service, you want to make it big in this business: Grow a list and sell some crap. Yes folks like Griz and Court have the passive income route figured out. I have nowhere near the success these guys do. They’ll write about building a Hubpage or a blog and making $25+ a day in three weeks. I’ve never had that success no matter how much to the letter I follow their methods. I might be lucky to make that after 3-4 months. More typical is that any site I build will yield like $5 in Adsense after 3-4 months. I guess I just do not have the touch.
Thought I would bring this, make your own product or service and sell it deal, to your attention. But with my own cynical twist. See I find it mostly is a sham. Of sorts. You know how guys sell their shit and you wonder if they actually make money from the technique or do they simply make money from the sales? Well interestingly this one guy that is surprisingly transparent indicates how lucrative it is to get people believing in your crap.
I follow the stock market a great deal. I’ve been investing/trading since college to make extra money. I find it far more interesting to find the right stock and make $100 in a half hour than spend 4 hours building a bullshit website for Adsense. Conversely you never really lose money with a website, only time. Obviously if you trade bad you can lose money. Anyway, there is a website that I follow via Twitter and Stocktwits from a guy named Timothy Sykes. He’s apparently a self proclaimed big stick that has made some cash shorting penny stocks. He seems successful and is happy to let you know about it. Tons of people follow the guy and apparently pay huge dollars to learn his techniques. And that is the point of this post. He makes far more selling his shit than actually playing the stock game. Props that he is so transparent about it. He’s not an affiliate marketer trying to sell to other affiliate marketers so he’s a little different.
He bragged this weekend how he generated $150,000 this month. Pretty impressive no? I thought, damn he is a trading savant. Until you look at the numbers:
Bragging aside, how did I just DOUBLE my blog’s monthly earnings from the $80,000 range to $153,450 in May 2009?
Here’s the breakdown:
May 2009: $153,450
$29,968 TIMalerts
$85,514 Instructional DVDs
$25,725 Advertising & Affiliates
$980 An American Hedge Fund
$11,263 Trading Profits
TIMalerts is a trading service. The rest is self-explanatory. $11,263 in trading profits? Really? Now given that he is a big stick I would have thought he’d deliver more than that. I mean, you’d be hard pressed to quit your full-time job after paying short term taxes on that.
$85,514 selling DVDs. Holy shiot. Monthly residuals of $30K. Holy shiot. This guy is a freakin Internet marketing genius. Check out his site. He knows how to sell himself.
Look, without getting into it, the last couple of months haven’t exactly been hard to make money in the market. The game has been rigged by the amount of money being pumped into the system. You simply can’t fight the Fed…or the Treasury. I’m just having a hard time getting impressed with how much he made trading versus how much he sold. Though he did make profits so I guess I’m being an asshole.
My point is that he makes the big money on servicing his products. A small percentage of his profits is actually him doing what he sells to the wannabes. We see this all over affiliate marketing. I always question these guberus about how they make their money. Do you make money actually doing what you are selling or are you simply making money on the product?
I would love to know what the Internet marketing guberus actually make with Adsense and affiliate sales versus product sales and memberships. Bet it looks a lot worse than Sykes. I have no idea why he feels the need to splash the data up on his website. Guess he wanted to brag about the money. That’s cool, but it really helps amplify a point I’ve been trying to make on this blog for a couple of years now. The money is in the product. Not the technique.
Let me be clear: I have no problem that people make the big money doing this. It’s fine. It’s cool. I just don’t find affiliate marketers very credible when they talk about how much money they make and how great their product is, etc. It makes me wonder if they make the money with the technique/product or selling the shit to the sheeple. Sykes helps make my point.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
I don’t know if you realise it, but you have hit on some very lucrative keywords just in your post above.
Check out “trading penny shares” and related keywords in the Adwords tool.
There’s probably lots of scope in writing a decent hubpage pointing out how most people lose money on penny shares (because they are illiquid) and that most tipsters are ramping their markets and by the time their tipsheets have been released, the price has already jumped. Given that most of the sites on penny shares in the SERPs ramp up the shares, you should do well with a page that warns about the risks (they might include it for diversity).
Splork,
You have hit the marketing game right on the head.
The money is not in the techniques, but in selling the dream! You can make tons of money selling what people want to hear. Not what really makes the money.
Look at how many Twitter books are being promoted every day.
Interesting keyword combination or not, you do make a very valid point
I have an old webmaster blog, set up as a diary and then ‘transformed’ to get a few extra bucks from webmaster signups.
Although a bit dated, it has some pretty good info for my line of business, but because it makes me very little money, I haven’t touched it for months apart from to do link trade posts.
You see, I don’t have the time to update it, as I’m too busy working on the stuff which does make me money.
And that’s the thing – you can look at those figures from a purely monetary sense, but if you then add in time as a factor, it’s just not possible to be a ‘guru’ and actually do the stuff you are ‘teaching’ people about.
Okay you can outsource, and most people do.
I didn’t see that calculated in those figures from Timothy Sykes, but I don’t know how he works.
‘Guberus’ would certainly have to outsource however, but most of them forget to mention things like that when they tell you how much money they make.
Yep, it’s all about selling your own crap
“….it’s just not possible to be a ‘guru’ and actually do the stuff you are ‘teaching’ people about.”
Exactly.
What appalling stupidity! Showing people that he only made ~7% of his income from trading? What a brilliant illustration of how important it is for people to do their due diligence before forking over their credit card. Reuters’ story on Sykes was titled “Failed hedge fund manager tries again on Internet”. That should have told people something, but apparently not. P.T. Barnum was right – there is “a sucker born every minute”, and they all apparently head straight for the Internet.
Great article, Splork. You hit the proverbial “infoguru” nail right on the head. All the big names can’t possibly be making the amount of cash doing what they teach as they generate from selling info about it. Maybe someone should sell info about how to make money teaching how to do what you teach. Now that would be a killer money-getting niche…
kidding of course.
Yea, unfortunately with the economy where it is and unemployment rising people will do/try anything to make some money. The quicker the better. The easier the better. Trading stocks daily like this dude does where he holds for only a couple of days is incredibly difficult. He obviously does OK based on his results.
But here’s the thing: look at Griz and Court to a slightly lesser extent. They make their money doing what they talk about. They don’t service a product of membership. They figure they make enough actually doing than being a marketer.
I would be more impressed with this guy (Sykes) if he poured his efforts into trading and if you wanted to you could follow him. Maybe his “alerts” is enough to service. Then again I get what he’s trying to do which is teach a man to fish instead of just giving him the food. But couldn’t that be accomplished with daily (free) tutorials? Apparently there is never enough money and the easy money is to sit down and produce a bunch of DVDs that you flog constantly. It’s not how I would run my business as I think it looks cheesy and smells, but then again I’m not motivated to making tens of millions of dollars from people buying crap that I could give away for free given that the techniques should be enough to live on. dig?
Actually, the problem is, trading isn’t a part time pursuit, if you want to be successful at it.
So its no wonder he’s not making much.
But as you say, it doesn’t look too good, and isn’t really selling how successful his methods are.
From that basis, they could be shit, or they could be great. Who is to know?
This is how he should have played it. Taken 3 months off marketing, devoted it to trading using his methods, then come back and tell how much he made per month full time.
if the numbers are good, he will sell his product like nothing else.
If his methods are garbage, best to keep his pitiful earnings to himself…..
True enough Gary.
I think probably his methods are as good as any. Trading is an extremely hard thing to make money at. He is just an extremely effective marketer of himself. I’ve never seen anyone pump themself up like he does. On Twitter. On his blog. He REALLY knows how to market. I’m cynical enough to look at his whole enterprise sideways, meaning if he is that badass of a trader then why all rah-rah look at me trying to sell all his shit? Why not just make millions a day trading? Most likely he is a good trader but he just likes the attention.
Why not just make millions trading?
Two guesses. One you answered: He likes the attention.
The other is that trading is very stressful. Esp compared to selling stuff.
Making money trading gets harder and harder as you put more money in to play. Like it is much easier to make 100% a year on 50K than it is on 500K.
But Splork – I am most curious about explanations for why you have not done as well as Court and Griz with your efforts in adsense websites. Does it come down to not being able to get the backlinks? Any clues?
haha, Tim Sykes Self promotion machine.
You can’t make much money with his system because it can’t be scaled up. Not Liquid enough.
But you can make a little change.