Very true.

But there are many obvious "tells" to suggest that a person is bullshitting, or, at least, unable to teach you. Just because someone is successful doesn't mean they are able (or willing) to impart knowledge into others.

Either way, it's best to not waste your time with said person.

Some "gurus" just like to string people along, always promising the "next bit of big wisdom" but never delivering. Or the people who write novel-length posts but don't actually say anything. I don't know about you guys, but I don't have time to waste on that kind of shit.

It's why I advocate gratuitous use of the Ignore List feature (which I haven't been able to find on this forum???)

Always, always, ALWAYS ask yourself, objectively, "did I learn anything from this?" Were you imparted with a feeling (bullshit) or actual, objective knowledge (useful).

If you think you learned something, can you quantify it?

For example: "Build niche websites and sell affiliate products." That doesn't really help, does it? I mean, you guys probably already knew that that was a possible method to make money. Yet there are 100+ ebooks out there that are like 50 pages long, yet all they really tell you is "build niche websites and sell affiliate products." The other 49.9 pages are full of bullshit feel-good fluff. So after you read that, did you know how to do those things? Let's examine a brief list of the knowledge that is actually required in order to "build niche websites and sell affiliate products."

- You have to know what a niche is
- You have to know how to identify low competition/high profit niches
- You have to understand why high competition niches may not work as well

---(up through this point, if you don't understand those 3 things, you're likely to choose the wrong niche and even if you do everything else perfectly, you will still fail)---

- You have to know what affiliate sales is
- You have to know how to build a website
--- You have to understand the various hosting options (free, paid, shared, etc.)
- You have to know how to get an affiliate account
- You have to learn how to build your own hoplink (or whatever they're calling them now
- You have to know if any type of masking/cloaking is required
--- If so, you have to know what cloaking is
--- If so, you have to know how to cloak
--- If so, you have to know if cloaking violates the TOS of your affiliate

---(so now you have a website with your affiliate links in place. Did you make $1,000,000 yet? Of course not. What good is a website without traffic)---

- You have to know how to write effective sales copy (hint: it's not by outsourcing to ESL people "You should can and buy of this product because the best is why it is good" is not going to sell shit to anyone)
- You have to know how to get traffic
--- There are different ways of getting traffic. Do you want to buy traffic (mostly useless), do you want to use adwords to get traffic (don't spend more than you make!), or do you want to do SEO and get to the #1 spot in Google? (which I could write a 400 page book on that subject alone))
- About 100 other bullet points about getting traffic

So now, if you picked a good niche and if you picked a good product and if your sales copy isn't ESL drivel and if you get traffic and if a good percentage of traffic converts and if you didn't spend more on advertising than you're making from sales, then you might actually start making money online.

That is, if you didn't fuck up somewhere along the way by following some bad advice on the forums and getting your account banned or your site blacklisted or deindexed or sandboxed or labeled as spam or any of the things that can go wrong if you blindly follow morons who don't know what they're talking about.

So if you paid for a book and all it told you was "build niche websites and sell affiliate products" and it didn't go into specific detail about everything I've listed above, at the bare fucking minimum, then you probably got ripped off because shit, just come here and I would've told you for free "build niche websites and sell affiliate products." PM me for my PayPal address

You also see that shit in the forums. Someone asks a specific question and gets a general vague bullshit answer. Do you know WHY? It's because either 1) the guy doesn't want to share, or, more likely 2) he's just bullshitting you by pretending to be a guru. Ignore List (again, where is the IL feature on this forum software?).


If I want to FEEL GOOD I'll go read a Tony Robbins book. Feeling good will not make you money in IM. Objective knowledge will. The last time I built a profitable website, I didn't open up my editor and tell it how good I felt and how much money I was going to make and how I was going to tell my boss to fuck off and how I was going to fuck supermodels on my yacht; I had to enter html code (objective knowledge) in order for it to work.