I Need an Intervention!

(Note: this is a looong thread!)

Those of you over 40 probably remember growing up hearing about people who got involved with cults.

In many cases, their involvement took them down a bad path to the point where they were virtually dysfunctional in some ways.

This occasionally led friends and family to intervene in an effort to snap the cult follower out of their "trance" and bring them back to reality.

Well, if there's a parallel in all this, perhaps it's fitting that we still refer to Internet Marketing authority figures as "gurus," because I think I need an intervention.

I'm at a critical point in my online marketing journey. So this is sort of a confessional and if that's the case, perhaps some of you can relate to my story.

I hope that what I write here can serve both as a cautionary tale to absolute newbies --- specifically, those just starting out searching for a way to make money online -- and a public "coming clean" for me. At the least, it's a way for me to get closer to clarity, which I've been lacking for a long time.

Normally, I think it's a waste of time to focus on the past. For the sake of being real, I'm going to give a glimpse of the chronology involved in what, for a lack of better terms, I'm going to call my Biz Op Addiction.

I'm a journalist by training. I started out writing for newspapers in my early 20s (late teens, really but not for money). I've written thousands of articles and interviewed close to 2,000 people either by phone or in person. I even got a masters degree in a very specific type of journalism. By the time I was 30, I'd written for four daily newspapers, including one of the largest dailies in the United States.

At 31, I began hearing about the advantages of owning your own business. This was 1991 and I'd just found out about the Internet. In 1992, I got my first AOL account. Some guys I met talked me into joining their multi-level marketing company ("hey, me and my partner have a business and we're looking for another partner -- can you do coffee?").
Wow, I thought. Multi-level marketing sounds great. I just introduce a whole bunch of my friends and family to these videos, hold a few home parties and pretty soon I'll have my own jet. I signed up and began recruiting people --anyone. Lawyers on the street. The next door neighbor. The folks at the office. My family. My friends. I held parties.
Yikes! I hated doing that. So I stopped.

A few weeks later, I watched a late-night infomercial. It featured a guy named Carlton Sheets. He presented himself as a real estate expert.
"Wow", I thought." I can get a bunch of property owners to agree to sign a piece of paper and I'll get rich!"

So I got the course, went through the audios, tried to picture myself actually doing the work and made a decision: "I'm sending the course back for a refund."

That was the first non-MLM business opportunity I ever purchased ( and, interestingly, began only after I started using a credit card at age 30.)
That marked the beginning of a very long pattern of business opportunity-seeking behavior in which I signed up to lots of direct marketers' lists (before Internet Marketing), read hundreds of sales letters, sent off my $25 hoping for the pot of gold, which usually got me a video or phony product and a lot of promises but nothing real. I read those sales letters and kept dreaming. Yeah, the scam artists were all over the place, even then.

Meanwhile, in 1993, I started a real (brick and mortar) business after earning a massage therapy license. Yeah, I told myself my journalism days were over -- at least, my newspaper days. I started Touchworks Massage and man, I did everything myself: I created all my invoices from scratch, set up bookkeeping, paid for advertising, bought lots of equipment and supplies, rented office space and ventured out to rake in $40/hr trading my time for what seemed like a fortune compared to the piddly money I was making writing for a living.

I'd had no business training up to that point. I didn't know what marketing was, really. I mean I sort of knew but..

So in 1997, I was intrigued enough by one of the direct marketers from Oregon who kept sending me a catalogue of info products that I called him on the phone. I remember him well because he'd overcome a bout with cancer and his wife was a very well known marketer. We chatted and I can remember him telling me "you're like a leaf blowing in the wind."
He told me he could use a writer. He didn't offer to pay me to write. Instead, he told me how I could use my writing skills to create information products, which he'd then sell. He wanted me to create a whole bunch of information products for him. In exchange, he'd coach me through the process of putting those products on the market. I didnt' realize it at the time but he was offering to mentor me. I started the process with him by focusing on an issue that was bothering me at the time: hemorrhoids. I called a clinic that specializes in hemorrhoids and offered to interview one of the doctors. I seem to recall doing the interview but never putting the info product together.
I felt excitement but worried whether I could trust the marketer. In the end, I passed up on his offer. I essentially let my fear dictate my action.

...Anyway. Fast-forward to 2000. I'm back writing for newspapers after the massage thing didn't work out and still looking for that other income stream to supplement my day job and lead me to the promised land of home business nirvana. But now I'm married and have a mortgage.

I'd briefly been a distributor for an MLM company called LifeForce International in 1999. While doing that, I was connected with an online team that was doing something unconventional: generating leads using online gateways. In those days, the technology was a bit crude. We called this team "Taproot" and managed to build downlines generating leads off message boards and such.

This intrigued me. So I started looking in to what other people were doing online and I found a new site called "The Warrior Forum" and Allen Says.

In those days, Allen was marketing products so I got on his list. And I had this idea that maybe I could make a living just proof reading websites, 'cause I noticed a lot of major, big-league errors on marketers' sites. Some of these marketers were already big-name gurus. I offered to proof some of Allen's sales letters free, just as an act of good will. And I did. I repeated this with a few other gurus and some non-gurus who wanted help. I didn't charge but hey, it was great karma and I learned a little bit here and there.

Then I signed up for a very inexpensive how to program that basically provided you with an all-in-one shopping cart/autoresponder. It was very basic and it introduced me to the concept of autoresponders. I managed to drum up some sign ups to a LIST but never really followed up with them.
Then I signed up for a list for a service that offered free access to expired domains. Hmmm, I thought, If I could figure out a way to make money with these expired domains, I could make a killing.

I then bought Ken Evoy's "Make Your Site Sell," book in 2001 and followed that up with "Make Your Words Sell."

And folks, this process just continued on and on for the next 10 years. I've read hundreds of sales letters. I've watched zillions of webinars and sales videos. I've attended only one live event: IMC's intro to IM seminar back in 2007.

One product after another product; one training program after another program. One guru's list after another guru's list.

Another fast forward to today:

Here I am, broke, unemployed and still searching.......I need just one more
time, the buzz of that next purchase, the high of buying that shiny new object.

Just ... One ..... More...... The Next one is the one that's going to do it....Biff!!! It's who you know, Biff!!