What draws noobies to the IM niche?

"It's the lure of easy money. It's the Smugglers Blues." ~ Glen Frey

Quite seriously, it's the lure of easy money, propagated by many "less than truthful" people.

What did Wille Sutton say?....that's the most obvious answer!

There's nothing wrong.

If you boil marketing down to its principles, you're always
wanting to move into a rabid niche, and this IM niche IS a
rabid crowd with a high amount of demand.

But here's the biggest problem newbies have. Not just the
IM niche, but in EVERY other niche out there.

They try to go against the strongholds of market leaders.
That, my friend, is committing business suicide.

What most newbies do in IM, fitness, weight loss, stocks,
forex, travel, software, dating, etc.

They jump into the ultimate conclusion that:

• If I'm interested in it, I'm going to market it
• I'm the only one who is thinking of this
• I'm just going to copy business models out there

Or at least one of the 3 on top.

Most newbies don't have a good foundation in marketing, and
they're always drawn to the "quick fixes" or diluted knowledge.

Here's the secret they don't realize:

As every market grows larger and larger... Its population
increases. However, as time passes, a phenomenon surfaces.

Subdivision of markets.

Just as how the hardware market branched out into operating
systems and then into software. Just like how huge personal
computers branched out into laptops and then into tablets
and smart phones.

Just like how weight loss programs branched out into diet pills
and into exotic miracle foods. How IM branched out into
ebook marketing and into Clickbank and into Kindle.

How American Idol branched out into Xfactor etc...

It's a huge characteristic of markets. And when you are the
first to market, you have the first-mover's advantage to claim
a huge portion of market share (aka customers).

I say that everyone else who claims that IM is not a good
market needs to revise their marketing foundations.

The only reason why the IM market is slightly different is that
there is a buyer-affiliate-seller loop.

1. The vendor sells the info-product to the buyer.
2a. The buyer promotes for the vendor or...
2b. The buyer tries to sell information to other buyers.
3. They might end up cross-promoting.

And this is a huge headache for newbies, because this blurs
the line between vendors and buyers. It's like a magician
showing magic to a crowd of trained magicians.

The marketing is less effective and more competitive. But if
you can position yourself well, you're going to be able to
undercut a particular sub-niche, and slowly build your way up.

I say: promote your strengths, not your passion. Strengths
eventually become a form of passion.

If you're good at doing something, leverage that ability instead
of starting from scratch. It's going to accelerate your startup.

It's far easier to go from something to expertise, than to go from
nothing to expertise.

For sure - it's almost certainly the single biggest cause of failure among beginning internet marketers.

To try to start out by advising people about internet marketing when you yourself have no successful experience of internet marketing is obviously ill-advised, and some would say it's of questionable morality, too.

I've run out of "thanks" for the day, but it seems to me that nobody can seriously question the value of the points made by both Micah and Caliban above (posts #2 and #11)?

Another reason why so many try the IM niches first, in my opinion, is that they've bought guidebooks full of misinformation written by people who found that the only way they could make anything online was by writing guidebooks full of their own beliefs (which - guess what? - are highly likely to be mistaken ones, and that's why they're selling shovels, having themseves failed at digging for gold). So the reality is that people often fail because they follow advice that never made any sense in the first place.

I think belittling them is rather nasty.

I don't think discouraging them from that niche is "nasty" at all: I think that overall, it's doing them an important and significant favor, and greatly increasing their chances of success, by suggesting that they avoid effectively trying to teach others something of which they themselves have no experience.

I only wish more people had explained it to me like that, when I started: it might have saved me a lot of time and started my income a few months earlier.

This forum even has some members who've been struggling with this for 2 years, partly because nobody ever explained this to them clearly enough 2 years ago: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...tion-gone.html