Make Millions Online, No Value Required

Before writing this post I did a bit of visualization and I tried to imagine exactly what would be the most valuable topic for me to write about today.  I started to ask myself what kind of information my readers would like to read that would make an impact in their lives.  I started asking myself questions like: What are my readers really looking for?  How can I make this article the most valuable thing they’ve read in a long time?

Since I know a rather large percentage of my readers have at least a passing interest in making money online, I thought I’d write a bit on that subject.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of research on “How to Make Money Online” topics ranging from how to make money online by blogging, to affiliate marketing and recently to running membership sites.  I’ve signed up for dozens and dozens of email lists, read dozens of eBooks, purchased products and memberships from dozens of online marketers and I think I’m subscribed to every email list known to man because I think I get every single product launch announcement on the Internet now.

What’s been cracking me up lately is just how many products, courses, eBooks and “systems” are being launched almost every day all promising to help you make money online if you purchase their product and so many of them have what I consider “the flaw“.

What is “the flaw“?  The Flaw is what I call the promise of success without creating value.

There are all these sales pages that promise to teach you the next big crazy secret that’s going to catapult your online success to millionaire status faster than you can say “Refund”, but buried in their message are little hints of “the flaw“.

I’ve imbelished them a little bit, but here’s some excerpts of what they might look like, typically found as a bullet point on a sales page.

• “Want to run a Blog, but have no original content of your own to write about?  No problem, we’ll show you 15 different ways you can build an ultra successful Blog without ever writing any content.  Our secret robot tool will automatically arrange random words in sequences that resemble content and nobody will ever notice.  By the time people catch on, you’ll be a multi-milionaire anyways!”
• “Want to really leverage the power of social media?  We’ll show you how to make a stinky poo link bait that’s so smelly everyone on the Internets is going to be sending it to their friends saying ‘Oh my God, look at how stinky this poo is!  Don’t forget to forward this to all your friends on Facebook!’”
• “Be an eBook Millionaire without ever writing your own eBook.  We’ll give you the eBook we wrote, and you just put your name on it and go out there and sell a million copies at ten bucks and you too can have ten million dollars.  Why would we do this?  Because we’ve already made all of our money, the bank called and said there’s no more digits left to track our bank account balance so if we add any more funds the counter will reset back to zero, so you see we have no choice but to get rid of this thing!”
• “Don’t know how to use a computer?  Do you still own a VCR and the clock is flashing 12:00?  No Internet?  No problem!  Our 1-2-3 formula for Internet Social Media Web 2.0 Traffic Blueprint Marketing just requires you to click one button (the one on your sweater will do) and all the work is done for you.  If you know how to operate a light-switch, our system will work for you.”
• “Do no work.  Make lots of money.  Click here to pay.”

Ok, so I embelished a lot.   However, I think you guys get the point.  It’s this little tiny flaw in philosophy that I continue to see over and over again in all these programs on the Internet.  What’s scary is that they are selling product by the hundreds.

I have an interesting question to ask everyone who looks for that kind of crap on the Internet.  Here’s my question:  Instead of jumping from one ‘miracle system for making money doing nothing’ to the next, isn’t it easier to just create some actual value?

It’s really not that hard.  I just think everyone’s so busy looking at these crazy ways to try to package and sell the “empty box” to people and it’s increasingly getting more and more complicated and difficult to sell nothing to someone, why not try to fill the box with something?

What?  You mean you actually want me to write articles for my Blog? Uhm…yeah!

What?  You mean I can’t just scam a bunch of stuff from others? Uhm…no.

But I can write a tool that will re-organize all the top articles from the best blogs on the net and intermix them in such a way that Google will never tell the difference! Uhm….so?

Do I have to learn something? Yes.

Will it take more than a few days to make a million? Most likely, yup.

This value thing you speak of…Is there a 30 day guarantee? No.

Then why should I do it if I have 10 other emails here from people who are promising me that I can make money online without creating this ‘value’ stuff you keep talking about? Because it works.

I’ll have to think about it after I check out these emails. (sigh)

Seriously now, is it really so hard to create something of value that everyone avoids it like the plague?  I know there are a few people out there who are making money online and they provide very little value for what they do outside of teaching the people who buy into their hype a lesson, but honestly it’s really not that hard to build valuable content so why not do it?

If you can get good at just these three things, you can make money online.  They are very simple:

1. Learn to create valuable content.
   
2. Learn to market / promote your valuable content.
   
3. Learn to effectively monetize your content.

That’s it.  If you can get good at those three basic things, everything else is just gravy.

If you are too lazy to do those three things and instead go chasing for the next super duper strategy to “game the system”, you’re going to be chasing your tail for a long time.

Here’s an analogy to illustrate the three steps I listed about.  Think about Muhammad Ali.

(1) For him, the “valuable content” was the fact that he could box.  He was a great boxer.  He trained hard.  He used his unique talents to truly become a great boxer.

(2) However, he didn’t just stop there.  He also knew how to promote himself.  Here are some quotes from him:

• “Frazier is so ugly that he should donate his face to the US Bureau of Wild Life.“
• “I am the astronaut of boxing. Joe Louis and Dempsey were just jet pilots. I’m in a world of my own.“
• “I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.“
• “It’s not bragging if you can back it up.”

(3) Finally, he didn’t just train his butt off to become an awesome fighter and promote the crap out of his fights… he ALSO made sure that when people were coming into the arena to watch him fight, they were paying for a TICKET!

• “They can boo me, yell at me and throw peanuts at me – as long as they pay to get in.” – M. Ali
  

The way I see it is that it all comes back to creating value.  If you learn how to do that, then the other two parts (promotion and monetizing) are relatively easy because you no longer have this huge guilt hanging over your head feeling like you haven’t created anything of value.

Go out there and make something valuable.  Once you’ve done that, you can run out and buy every one of those “systems” out there because most of them actually work if you have something of value to market through them, but don’t delude yourself into thinking that just learning about the systems themselves is enough value to make millions online.

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