A Must Read article by Rand Fishkin

[dichotom]

sparktoro is rand's site

OK don't take too much seriously
I just said what i think and look to me.

 

[splishsplash]

This is really scary but it is 102% true.

It's not scary. It's an even bigger opportunity for real business people.

Create products with real value. Manage your money properly and don't just be another youtube millionaire that buys a ferrari when he makes his first $100k. All these guys will be wiped the hell out when we come to the end of easy street. If you're making $1mil/year and you take a salary of $50k/year, you're going to dominate regardless of whether we are in a golden age or the dark ages. If you are really motivated you could go to almost any period in history and succeed. Marcus Crassus became the richest man in Rome. He didn't start out particularly wealthy. Granted, it would have been pretty fucking hard to go from nothing to something in those times, but you could still do very well. There's always opportunities. Humans have been trading since the beginning of time. The only thing you need is determination and you can achieve almost anything.

Actually this is not true, the failure rate of new businesses is higher than it was last century.

We are living in the world of Standard Oil 2.0 with toothless regulators.

This is an irrelevant statistic. It doesn't tell us anything about how easy or hard it is to make money. It also doesn't say anything about how many of those failures went on to success. If anything you could argue that this statistic tells us more average people are trying to run businesses.

Let's look at some hard facts.

You live in the 1950's. You want to start a business. You're a 21 year old with no money. What do you do?

Where do you even get your information? Accounting, finance, copywriting.. There's nothing. You can go to a library and get some archaic books at best.

How do you advertise? There's no cheap advertising.

How do you do anything. You're so limited. The only way to succeed is to GRIND for decades. It'll take you 10 years of very hard work with endless failures to even get a foothold. You will need to be ultra determined.

Let's fast forward to the 90's.

Still pretty hard. We have the Internet, but there's not that much information out there, but it's way easier. You can reach a decent sized market in the 90's online. Test products. Sell information a lot easier. You can learn about the copywriting greats. In the 50's you wouldn't even know what copywriting was unless you were exposed to it by chance or until you've spent enough years in business that you come across the term and the literature.


Now fast forward to the late 2000's.

Very easy at this point. Requires way less effort, but you still need to spend a lot of time researching and trying. Nothing is handed on a plate.

Now fast forward to the golden era, which was 2015-2016.

It just became ridiculously easy at this point.

You have stripe. Take payments globally. Easily. Try getting set up with a payment processor and merchant account before Stripe. It was hell.

You have shopify.

You have clickfunnels.

Then you have courses that teach you how to use all these things to start your business. It's on a fucking plate for you at this point. You can literally just copy someone's funnel, pump a little money into facebook ads and make a million dollars.

2016 was the golden year.

Now in 2020 the market is SATURATED.

It's no longer handed to you on a plate. You need to be creating unique products that have real value and be on the level where you can further refine your funnels and advertising and not just copy someone else. It's getting harder again.

Fast forward 50 years and it's going to be extremely hard to start from scratch. You won't have cheap facebook advertising, cheap youtube advertising.. None of that will be accessible. The digital space will be dominated by mega corporations like regular business is. You will again be at a point where you need to be something special to create wealth from scratch. Until the next boom comes along of course.

 

[rafark]

I believe it as well; even from personal experience I am often searching on google and finding the answer direct from the results.

I can relate to this as well. I barely, if at all, click on a serp link if I'm given the answe right in the SERPS, which happens a lot. It's made searching for us users super simple and fast for it's shit for webmasters.

 

[Deleted member 1313244]

It's not scary. It's an even bigger opportunity for real business people.

You have stripe. Take payments globally. Easily. Try getting set up with a payment processor and merchant account before Stripe. It was hell.

You have shopify.

You have clickfunnels.

So if all the traditional things that were difficult to start a business are commoditised at the margin you get very small business and profit is made at the margin. Good for society. But this also means that proprietary data which is controlled by big networks and is not commoditised so we have the big oligopolies that are going to come after you eventually and take your business. Obviously you can sell clickbank stuff all day but good luck starting a new mattress company when Amazon prints one at almost zero cost and is bespoke for you using its health records project that it is starting out with Berkshire Hathaway to know you need extra firmness on one side of the bed because your genetic data suggests you are at higher risk of a rupture in your abdomen. Or Whatever. Probably 20 years off.

 

[splishsplash]

So if all the traditional things that were difficult to start a business are commoditised at the margin you get very small business and profit is made at the margin. Good for society. But this also means that proprietary data which is controlled by big networks and is not commoditised so we have the big oligopolies that are going to come after you eventually and take your business. Obviously you can sell clickbank stuff all day but good luck starting a new mattress company when Amazon prints one at almost zero cost and is bespoke for you using its health records project that it is starting out with Berkshire Hathaway to know you need extra firmness on one side of the bed because your genetic data suggests you are at higher risk of a rupture in your abdomen. Or Whatever. Probably 20 years off.

Good luck to anyone starting a new mattress company.

You need to solve a problem that hasn't been solved before, or you need to solve it in a significantly better way. If you can't do that you are only using superior marketing, logistics and management skill to succeed, and that's not where the big money is because those things should be combined with a product that solves a new problem anyway.

No one's going to do well starting a new ahrefs for example. The problem is solved, by several companies. Doesn't matter if you pump $1 bil into it. You're going to struggle. Ahrefs is good enough. We don't need another solution.

But the main point is, there's a lot of information/tools for entrepreneurs now, so all you need to do is come up with a solution to a problem that's not been done before and use the information/tools at your disposal. In the 60's a new solution to a problem wasn't enough. Now it is.

 

[BilBozA]

SEO is very complex though, no matter which strategy you implement, there is just no guarantee of you ranking for competitive keywords.

This report is very helpful though. thanks

 

[mizeman]

Well. Zero click searches - It's not new.

 

[terrycody]

Even now, it's becoming harder and harder. 10 years ago you could get started in SEO with $100. 5 years ago you could get up to $10k/mo pretty easily with only $1k-$2k to spend. Now if you've got anything less than $5k it's going to be extremely hard to make money in SEO unless you get lucky with your niche.

You can see the same across all sectors. The people who were disciplined and smart and used those first few millions to grow and dominate are now eating up all the space. Big corporations are jumping in too.

Bro, so well said, so well, all are in my heart...

Seriously, nowadays, the rich is becoming richer, poor guys poorer, no fair anymore.

So glad we always have sane guys like you @splishsplash