What's Your Big Picture?

I've been thinking about my marketing approach, lately.

I browse several IM forums (too often...) and as I'm sure everyone does, I like to check out what other marketers are doing - visiting their sites, looking at their offers, sales-funnels, mails they send to their lists etc.

I'm seeing a certain contrast between what I find on the forums and what I see in my competition research (if I can call it that).

In the forums, there's always a lot of buzz about... well, about little things. "Will doing X get my site slapped?" "What is the best way to make $X in X days?" "Does this technique still work?" (a.k.a. "[Insert popular method here] is DEAD!!") "Best place to submit articles?" Etc. etc.

Successful marketers have businesses set up for themselves that go way beyond those little things. Sometimes, I'm just blown away when I see how a marketer integrates a new product into a whole network of information and other products.
You arrive at a landing page and there's something there for everyone. Mostly not on one page, but you find the different offers depending on what you do on the inital page. Maybe there's a free report or video training-course, just to get you on the list. Then there might be some lower-end offers, at very affordable prices, then there are higher-end offers you get access to through the list or after a sales etc.
And if you don't want to buy anything, there's a great affiliates-section with tons of helpful resources.

People with such a business are definitely making lots of money. And you know what?
If you had such a business set up, it would be you making lots of money.

Sure, it takes ages to set that all up and you need to take it step by step. But are you building towards something like that? Do you have a big picture project that you are continually working on?
Or is it just about sending that next promotional mail or cranking out some more articles to get a trickle of traffic to your minisite, or tweaking that landing page to bump up the ROI of a PPC campaign by a bit?

Those are the questions I've been asking myself. I'm always prone to experiment and try new stuff and while I like doing that and it's a lot of fun (and I've also had success with it), my online marketing is not following a big picture. Actually, it is, but the picture isn't big enough.


Okay, some self-reflection:
It's a bit of an issue that "market research" uncovers largely the workings of those marketeres who are product creators. I'm sure there are people killing it with "just" PPC or "just" list-marketing, but they don't really show up on the radar.
Also, I'm generalizing the contrast between forums and big marketers. I know it's more complicated than that.

Enough rambling for now. No-one's gonna read all this but that's okay, I just had to write this down somewhere.