Insider Marketing Tips

What on earth do I mean by that?

“Chase the money” usually means that you’re getting into a known lucrative field. For example, imagine for a moment that you were about to enter a University to a get a degree in the field of your choice. If you wanted to “chase the money,” would you become a doctor …or an artist? Would you get a business degree …or an elementary education degree? Would you get a law degree …or a degree in philosophy?

Naturally if you wanted to chase the money, you’d choose the first degree from the above three choices (doctor, business, or law degree).

But here’s something for you to chew on: not everyone who “chases the money” is rich. And not everyone who chose a path related to their passions is poor.

Think about it in terms of online success. If you decided to chase the money, would you jump into the known-lucrative gambling markets? Or would you jump into the sock niche?

The knee-jerk response is to say one should choose the gambling niche if they want to make more than a few bucks online. And yet I know dozens of people who have hundreds of gambling sites online that aren’t making enough to pay their hosting fees. They’re chasing the money, yes …but apparently they’re not running fast enough because they haven’t caught up with it yet!

On the flip side, check out blacksocks.com. There’s a simple site where the owner sells “sockscriptions.” Yes, he sells black socks – and last I heard he sold over a million dollars worth of socks per year.

It’s almost counter-intuitive, isn’t it? Who’d have known you could make that much selling socks …while you could completely bomb out in a market that’s known to be a billion dollar industry?

The best part is that you can see these exceptions everywhere you look. There are people in lucrative niches who don’t have two nickels to rub together, meanwhile there are millionaires in niches that most folks didn’t even realize could be turned into something profitable.

Now you may be thinking that if it makes money for you – if you see results – that you don’t care if you enjoy it or not. Sure, if you’re one of those people I described before (where money is your main motivator), then this will work for you.

But I bet you’ve dropped things in your life before even though they were creating the results you wanted.

For example, have you ever taken up an exercise or diet plan that you didn’t like? Perhaps you took up running in the morning. But you hate running. And you’re a night owl.

But dang it, you made a promise to yourself that you were going to lose weight and get in shape. So every morning you get up and jog. A few weeks pass and you step on the scale. Yep, you’re losing weight. A few more weeks pass and your clothes are fitting better, you don’t gasp for air when you run up a flight of stairs, and you feel and look better than you’ve ever felt.

In short – you are getting AMAZING results. You are getting exactly what you wanted and more. Hell, you’re getting downright sexy …not to mention the health benefits.

And then it starts…

One morning the alarm goes off at zero-dark-thirty and you hit snooze. Your bed is so warm and cozy that the thought of getting up to go jogging makes you feel a little queasy. “No problem, I’ll just skip a day,” you say to yourself as you settle back in for another hour of sleep.

The next morning you rationalize it again. And the next morning…and so.

Pretty soon you’re jogging just once or twice a week. Then once or twice a month. Next thing you know, you jogging in the morning is just a fuzzy memory of something you used to do.

If you hate jogging and you hate mornings …what made you think that you could ever keep with a commitment to jog in the morning? Even the benefits of losing weight and getting in shape aren’t enough of a reward to overcome the hatred of jogging.

Do you see what I mean? There are many things in our lives that we drop even though we’re getting results we wanted!

I had a professor in college who used to be in the lucrative field of marketing testing. He hated it and become an instructor instead. His happiness increased tenfold.

Another example: when I first started out online I sold collectibles and antiques on eBay. Turns out that for someone who was just starting out making money online, it was a pretty lucrative gig.

So how come I’m not still selling antiques on eBay? Simple – because I hated all the packing and shipping that went with the territory. Yes, it brought in a nice chunk of change (i.e., I got the results I wanted since I was a “poor” college student at the time) – but I moved on and chose something else that I enjoyed a little more.

So here is what I’m proposing to you: start off doing something you enjoy.

Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do market research, or that you should purposely pick something where you can’t even think of a way to make ten bucks. No, not at all. That’s foolish.

What I’m saying is that you should start with your passions, your interests, and things that bring you enjoyment. From that starting point, find a way to make it profitable! Don’t buck the market – but don’t bow down and drop your passions just because there are other markets out there that are known to be more lucrative. All you need is a little creativity.

Look at the gentleman who created the blacksocks.com site. He took something that seemed “ho hum” and perhaps even a low profit margin, and he repacked it into something interesting (“sockscriptions” – which undoubtedly have a higher profit margin).

Look at Amazon.com’s site for all sorts of neat ideas that took a seemingly ho-hum idea (selling books) and turned it into a multi-million dollar affair. Perhaps one of their greatest creative moves was to integrate an affiliate program (they were one of the first to do it online).

There are people that have taken interests like housecleaning, cooking, vacuuming and the like, and turned those passions into multi-million dollar ventures (who’d have known?).

If these people can turn these sorts of interests into full-time professions, why can’t you?

I’d much rather do what I like and let the money follow, then do what I hate and hope I can eventually catch the money.