Making Money Online: Focus or Fan Out?

I’ve read a lot of articles recently on internet marketing strategies and it seems there are two main camps of internet marketers: those who focus and those who fan out.

The Focus Group
The Focus Folks choose a few money-makers and work them ’til they start bleeding money. Often these people are willing to invest some money to make their profits so they end up with business-in-a-box type systems that tend to be easier to implement and faster for profit-making. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the Focus group makes more money, they just tend to need less patience and skill to get rolling.

While many of the pay-to-start programs offer money-back guarantees, you still have to fron the cash. And you don’t really know what you’re getting. Of course they’re going to have 627 quotes from people who’ve “bought my dream home” and are “living the life I always wanted”. These people are trying to sell the product, too. I would suspect that as people get started, they’re already saying things like: “this is what worked for me” and “I make $51,786 a month.” And then they have screenshots of their photoshopped bank statements.

I’m not saying that all MLMs and paid ways to make money online are scams. I just think you have to go in with your eyes wide open and realize that perhaps you’re getting what you pay for. If a system costs you $47.95 and promises to make you $5,000 in your first month, you might not want to start spending that money until it’s in your bank account.

Fanning Out for Funds

Being that this is my plan of attack, I can tell you that it can be really exhausting. Before I launched my blog last week, I’d done tons of research. And now that it’s live, I’m simultaneously trying to join every free site, send out all the free mailings to safelists that I can and get my link posted as many places as possible. I’ve found it to be very addictive and the hours of sleep I get a night have about halved. Seriously.

There are seemingly endless sites to join that offer “everything you need to be successful and get rich.” But among these lumps of coal lie several diamonds. And that’s really what it’s all about. At least for me.

As you can see from my blog, I enjoy (so far) the challenge of gathering information, pulling it all together and trying to make enough sense of it to make some cents. My goal is to see if you really do have to spend money to make money. So far I’m in the black, but only by about $25. Not bad for a week, though. My hypothesis is that at about the time I’m tired of joining every free site on the world weary web, my patience will pay off and some systems will really start making me money. I call it a hypothesis because I’m a follower of The Secret and the last thing I want to do is put out some negative energy by saying “I hope” or “fingers crossed.” Plus it makes my experiment sound all serious and scientific.

Whichever path you choose to take on your way up the link ladder, may it bring you happiness and a healthy bank account. And for those of you joiners like myself, I’ll be here to help.