Do smart people lose and dumb people win in IM?

Yeah, that's pretty much what I do too, and I'm one of those "smart" guys. I spent way too much time putting my brains to work for other people. I struggle working for myself in 2 ways:

1. I find it hard to work as HARD for myself as I will for someone else. I don't know why that is.

2. I will often not take action on things due to the idea never being good enough or just needs a little bit more extra something. I DO know why I do this - a lot of IM people call it "paralysis by analysis" but I know it as the Fallacy of Information.

The trap is that you often continue to pursue much more information than is necessary to make the decisions required for execution. It's a well studied phenomena, but I find it somewhat easier to overcome when you're aware that it influences you.

Once you can break free of that, it's easy to get some actionable momentum going. Perfection is the enemy of "good enough" - and planning will never make profits - only ACTION will make profits.

I wanted to comment on this one separately, because I think it underlines that mass direct marketing is an art that pertains to dealing with the lowest common denominator of the population. Often, "smart" people have trouble separating themselves from that, and thinking about what people really WANT to buy and WHY, vs. thinking "that won't work because it would never work on me."

I'm certainly NOT my own ideal web surfer or customer. If you can overcome that hurdle and understand that you need to get outside yourself to be an effective "all around" marketer of varying products to varying people, you'll do a lot better.

And to re-iterate what someone said above, it's not really "smart" vs. "dumb" but rather "educated"
and "uneducated" - which ties directly to "self-aware" vs. not.

EDIT: This came up after I finished typing the above, but I wanted to comment, so I just added it below:

Wrong. Automation, systamatization, and delegation are the keys to running multiple domains and sites. I have 75+ now, and my goal is 250 by the end of the year. If you take the proper mindset (that of an editor or producer, rather than author/creator) it's easy to pre-select a whole year's worth of niche based content. You can auto-post all that content, and then you're really only responding if necessary.

If you're doing anadvertising and affiliate based sales model, that's pretty much all there is to it.

So in that particular case, you're wrong. Respectfully. It's not true that few bigger businesses are the ONLY way to go.

That being said, I agree that it's not a "newbie" thing unless you take the approach of this original poster or mine. Build massively and automate. Especially with blogs, it's literally impossible NOT to gain ranking and traffic if you post regularly. IMPOSSIBLE. At that point, it's just a matter of learning to select the right content, the right keywords for linking, the right places to link from.

One good part is, if you get analytics and LOOK while you're building, you'll learn that stuff as you go. Anyway, not to threadjack. Carry on!