The Golden Age of Internet Marketing is Over! (What's next..?)

SamLewis said:

10 years ago the same post would have been written saying how easy it was in the early 2000s to make splash blogs and rank just by KW stuffing.

10 years ago was just as easy or as difficult as today, depending on your perspective.

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Interesting argument.

It's hard to prove such statement as "hard" is subjectively. One might struggle in a niche, whereas someone else might completely slay. Moreover, such declaration is extremely vague - in which "niches" has it gotten harder? What has it changed / made it harder? etc.
In my opinion, the difficulty has grown alongside the potential. We've all been evolving hand in hand with the Internet. It's a mouse and cat game. Surely, it has gotten harder, but so have we.

However, I agree with your mentality of criticizing the "Back then it was easier" as this attitude will get you nowhere.

BbHhWwVM said:

Turn OFF your brain > read the OP = its a nice read

Turn ON your brain > read the OP = what a joke man

Just look at CPA networks, people earn $100+ so easy, and trust me.. most of em keep their stuff auto-pilot

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You want to imply that there are people who make $100/day with the same methods and the same effort like ten years ago?

Podcasting is not dead, and neither is blogging, but MySpace really has left us

AestheticHustler said:

You want to imply that there are people who make $100/day with the same methods and the same effort like ten years ago?

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Bro, that's not possible

But we don't live 10 years back, but now.

Things evolved, but some old marketers didn't, that's it.


Overall, making money in almost any niche is very profitable, and you can invest $0 (just domain/host) to compete in the most saturated markets and win a decent piece often.


Guys make thousands monthly only uploading other people content to YouTube (still)

How can anybody here claim or believe that making money is hard nowadays, come on!

splishsplash said:

You can either learn what works and how to be successful, or you can cling to old ideas and dreams of easy money. Your choice. I have nothing to sell you. I don't really care whether you succeed or fail. I'm not here to convince you to do something that'll get you results.

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I enjoy reading your posts splish, but you were a bit exaggerating here.

As long as there's internet connection, internet marketing won't be "dead". It evolves, you just have to adapt. New opportunities arises. I've been in this business for a long time, and not a year passes without me reading "internet marketing is dead" threads or blog posts.

splishsplash said:

The golden age of internet marketing REALLY is over!

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It's over for you, because you're using your techniques and knowledge from 10 years ago and expect them to work now. While all the old-timers get stuck, and all the people reading the strategies of the old times get stuck, the young blood will make all the money

For me nothing has change since 2007. Maybe the number of competitors instead.

Perfect post.
What happening is that these people who say: I want to start a business, I can do it, I can sell, I want and want and want ... the problem here is THEY NEVER DO RESEARCH !
So they spend $$ and waste months or a year trying to get in some sort of business and nothing happens.
When you decide about having a business, you have to know who are you competitors and put yourself in their customers shoes and then find out what are the competitors weakness, you can create a great business and niche from your competitors weakness or on something your competitors don’t want to deal with anymore because it’s not bringing them this much money BUT you can actually build a great business on that “shit“ and take over their customers in few years.
people always want to start at the top of the pyramid but you can only do good if you start from the bottom and do slow, foundation is the most important thing.
great post Tom!

splishsplash said:

I'm not here to sell you anything. I'm just telling it like it is.

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Then why are you pushing pbn links?
Joking apart , yes I agree SaaS is hard. Micro SaaS is something to look into. Create MVP fast. Theres are hundreds of ways to slice and dice any problem.

hadnerd said:

It as a good read, but the "make money online" isn't dead. People need to think outside the box that's how growth hacking was born alongside traditional marketing strategy. Techniques, method needs to evolve.

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There's a reason "make money online" is quoted. Most aren't really understanding what I'm saying. If a few people get value from this then that's all I'd aimed for. I only write posts because I enjoy writing about my experiences and what I learn from growing my own company.

amoon said:

great post, I enjoyed reading it,

I think making money online will never be dead, even in the near future, focusing only on making money online the traditional way, will not be enough these days, maybe you can bank for 3 months or even 6, but after that, you cant keep with the same level, sooner or later the method or whatever it is will die,

so the solution to that as you said, is mainly on shifting the mind to build a business, a structured online business, that why many technologies will emerge like NO-CODE. when we can build tools without touching the code, bubble , zapier...are just the beginning.

.

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If you want to build real wealth, then you need to focus on creating something of value and not just making money. Most people aren't adding ANY value whatsoever. They are just spamming affiliate links to get some money in. What the biggest affiliates make is absolute peanuts compared with the people building products. Try making $500k/mo with affiliate marketing media buys. That's not much for a decent business with a quality product. You'll struggle to find any affiliates doing even close to that unless it's ultra blackhat illegal stuff.

AestheticHustler said:

I'm somewhat agreeing with your philosophy of the "mentality change" (in respect to the customers), however a big problem is the consumption spirale nowadays. It's all about getting information 24/7, no matter the quality - it's all about quantity. It's perfectly depicted on Social Medias: Just scroll half a thumb down and you got a new picture, text, video, whatever. Breaking the chain and getting customer who actually give a sh't and are willing to invest time in a purchase is only possible if a.) the product differs extremely from merchant to merchant or b.) it's a high-valued product, such as real estate.
It's still about better marketing, not better quality. More than ever.

-> So the process of making money hasn't changed, as long as you're solving a problem (to which extent doesn't matter) - and advertise properly, you're able to make money on this mysterious medium "Internet".

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Nope, you are so incredibly wrong with this. This is exactly what you need to change in order to start seeing long term success. If you want to make a million a year, then yes, create a crap product and market the hell out of it. It'll just be a constant headache trying to grow it beyond that and eventually it'll die out.

Where the magic lies is creating a quality product, not scaling it too early, refining it and making it great, THEN hitting it with excellent marketing and scaling hard. Go watch some interviews with CEOs of the various successful SaaS companies, guys. All the companies that made it do this. There is no garbage out there. Slack is amazing. Zapier is amazing. Stripe is amazing. Integromat is amazing, Metorik is amazing, Shopfiy is amazing, Segmetrics is amazing. All these companies have produced unbelievably good products. They didn't produce some garbage, then build a great funnel around it. ;-)

Read https://metorik.com/behind

See how he's doing it. Slow, steady and focusing on the product. Watch this company get bigger and bigger. In 5 years this guy will be a multi millionaire. He didn't just create something and try to market it heavily early on.

SamLewis said:

10 years ago the same post would have been written saying how easy it was in the early 2000s to make splash blogs and rank just by KW stuffing.

10 years ago was just as easy or as difficult as today, depending on your perspective.

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This isn't about that, and it wasn't easy in the 2000's to make money. It was waaay harder. There was less people online. Almost no tools. It was hard to take payments. People were very wary of paying for anything online. It wasn't until 2006-2007 that the golden age of affiliate marketing started. One of the first easy money methods was ringtone offers.

What's changed now is that everyone is online, and a TON of people want to make money online. It's not a niche anymore. Look at youtube. It's become the "in-thing" to be an entrepreneur.

BbHhWwVM said:

Turn OFF your brain > read the OP = its a nice read

Turn ON your brain > read the OP = what a joke man

Just look at CPA networks, people earn $100+ so easy, and trust me.. most of em keep their stuff auto-pilot

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Look at what exactly?

No one's making $100+ per day easily. Look in the journey section here. Look in the other forum secitons. Most people are not even making $100/day, and $100/day is pretty terrible. Minimum wage in the UK is $90/day for working 8 hours with a lunchbreak. I've been around a long time and trust *me* most people don't have anything on autopilot. Auto pilot is a big myth. Go on holiday for 3 months and if you can make $100/day every day for those 3 months, then congraulations, you've got a passive business, but the only companies that have that are real companies with staff. People have been talking about auto pilot methods for a long time. It's just clickbait. Even bots require you to be constantly working and tweaking things. As someone who's made money in more ways than most of you have even heard of, I know straight away when someone talks about "autopilot" they're new to the game and clinging to a dream.

hadnerd said:

It's a good read, but the "make money online" isn't dead. People need to think outside the box that's how growth hacking was born alongside traditional marketing strategy. Techniques, method needs to evolve.

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Best of luck.

Pedro Leonardo said:

Podcasting is not dead, and neither is blogging, but MySpace really has left us

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Blogging is not dead?

Most youtubers can't even get more than a few 100 subscribers let alone bloggers.

The % of bloggers that make more than coffee money is incredibly slim.

Look at Matt Diggity. He doesn't even bother blogging much. The return you get from it is tiny. It adds a little bit of authority building for certain businesses, but it's not a good way to get customers. Youtube can get you 10's of thousands of views for your retargeting list with ease. To get anywhere near that in blogging requires quite the slog.

splishsplash said:

Nope, you are so incredibly wrong with this. This is exactly what you need to change in order to start seeing long term success. If you want to make a million a year, then yes, create a crap product and market the hell out of it. It'll just be a constant headache trying to grow it beyond that and eventually it'll die out.

Where the magic lies is creating a quality product, not scaling it too early, refining it and making it great, THEN hitting it with excellent marketing and scaling hard. Go watch some interviews with CEOs of the various successful SaaS companies, guys. All the companies that made it do this. There is no garbage out there. Slack is amazing. Zapier is amazing. Stripe is amazing. Integromat is amazing, Metorik is amazing, Shopfiy is amazing, Segmetrics is amazing. All these companies have produced unbelievably good products. They didn't produce some garbage, then build a great funnel around it. ;-)

Read https://metorik.com/behind

See how he's doing it. Slow, steady and focusing on the product. Watch this company get bigger and bigger. In 5 years this guy will be a multi millionaire. He didn't just create something and try to market it heavily early on.

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It's incredibly cowardly to proclaim a sort of "only-truth" agenda in a conversation. I even partially agreed to your statement and now I'm "incredibly wrong", thus you admitted to be partially wrong yourself?
Nonetheless, a million a year (I suppose profit; and let's infer at least 10% profit) is something not even (just guessing) 5% of the whole forum ended up achieving. ... so stating that this isn't an achievement by itself is indeed confusing.

As far as you're quality argument is concerned: To a certain extent you're (in my opinion) right, however you can still, as you admitted yourself, make money with good advertising. I added to my previous statement that marketing is more important than ever. This argument is based upon the fact that more and more competitors will arise in the flourishing "Internet Marketing" scene, thus more quality (as well as more non-qualitative services) will come up.
What can you do to stand out? Genius marketing.

A "good product" is the fundamental basis of starting anything.. Do you have to be amazing / perfect? No, not at all. As long as your product is in the vast range of your competitors, you can make up your blind spots with clever marketing. (and a little bit of luck obviously)

//EDIT: Thanks for your linked article, I'm going to check it out.

Magmaspace said:

Then why are you pushing pbn links?
Joking apart , yes I agree SaaS is hard. Micro SaaS is something to look into. Create MVP fast. Theres are hundreds of ways to slice and dice any problem.

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I don't recall pushing any pbn links. I actually said in my original post to avoid seo unless you have 4 figures a month to invest. My service isn't for newbies and it's currently full.

Caspooor said:

I enjoy reading your posts splish, but you were a bit exaggerating here.

As long as there's internet connection, internet marketing won't be "dead". It evolves, you just have to adapt. New opportunities arises. I've been in this business for a long time, and not a year passes without me reading "internet marketing is dead" threads or blog posts.

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yherrliche said:

It's over for you, because you're using your techniques and knowledge from 10 years ago and expect them to work now. While all the old-timers get stuck, and all the people reading the strategies of the old times get stuck, the young blood will make all the money

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I think people have perhaps misunderstood here..

This isn't another failure thread saying "Oh no, IM is dead. I can't make money".

If you're interested in making $100/day, $500/day, $1k/day and having ups and downs along the way then this thread is NOT for you. Go and run whatever methods you want and do what everyone else is doing.

I consider $1k/day for a business very early stage startup. Really, that's not a lot, and I'm talking about $1k profit, not turnover.

$1k/day is barely enough to get an office and some staff let alone grow a real company.

So enough with the "old-timer", "young-blood", "bankin hard y0" crap. It's just.. Weird.

I also never said "internet marketing is dead". I said "make money online" is dead. IE, if your goal and focus is to make a buck with some bots then you're going to get absolutely crushed in the coming years by guys who are focused on creating a quality product, then utilizing smart marketing. I am attempting to explain to people that 5, 6, 7 years ago, you could make a fortune with a shit product and great marketing, but times are changing now and if you want to make some real money, 8 figure turnover companies, then focus on your product first, your marketing second. Take the advice or leave it.

I'm out.

What a long and boring read. It's like a lomg blog post with no pics.

Well described about present scenario.

Easy money dead, yes. But making money online is not dead and never will be

splishsplash said:

If you're happy making a few hundred bucks a day on tiktok sending DMs with a bot then go for it. Why are you here? This thread is aimed at people who want to build 7 and 8 figure companies. In a couple of years when you realize that crap won't lead anywhere then you might come back and understand what I was talking about.

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if you find my language offensive, that's on you. If you pull out of context two words that you dont like - that's on you as well. nowadays everybody is such a snowflakes. I come from background that includes building such companies and I have seen what is the kitchen there. If you think its a delightful journey, you will be surprised. It all depends on perspective and profit margins. One can earn a lot more with 'make money online' than being a CEO of such 7 figure company. it ain't so simple. Will take 1k/day with ups and down any day instead of being a CEO of 7 figure business..

Pointing fingers to successful examples like slack, Shopify, and then saying - let's build next Shopify, its so extremely delusional that I can't even express ..

What the biggest affiliates make is absolute peanuts compared with the people building products. Try making $500k/mo with affiliate marketing media buys. That's not much for a decent business with a quality product.

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Can you give a few examples of those companies where ceo's of 7 figure company earns 500k/month? without fortune 5x examples.

$1k/day is barely enough to get an office and some staff let alone grow a real company.

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mind blown.. if you as a individual can produce 1k/day profit, e.g. 20k, then scaling what you do - should be enough to afford something.. if you take employees and cant scale, then of course, but then its not a business..

Magmaspace said:

Success rate of solving a problem "business" or "job" is very low. For example :
An estimated 92% of SaaS companies fail within 3 years despite growth and funding.
What do you say to that?

By the way good to know about bubble. I am moving towards design from coding and bubble seems interesting.

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95% of businesses started don't make it past year 5. There are stats for everything.

splishsplash said:

I consider $1k/day for a business very early stage startup. Really, that's not a lot, and I'm talking about $1k profit, not turnover.

$1k/day is barely enough to get an office and some staff let alone grow a real company.

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$1K profit should be plenty. Profit where I come from is calculated after all my costs. So If I'm not paying my staff before then I have issues with the business anyway...

THAT aside. Assuming your talking BEFORE expenses.

This post isn't for most of us here in BHW. It is not everyone's dream to be featured in Forbes or own a multi million dollar company.
The goal for most of us here is $500-$1000 days.
You don't need a million dollar to be happy or live a decent life.

splishsplash said:

$1k/day is barely enough to get an office and some staff let alone grow a real company

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With 700$ per month you can live a decent life with a wife and 2 kids here in India and rest of the world.
If you are in USA UK Canada Australia western Europe you gotta work for the man, bottom line, or else you are screwed.

Now the competition is over. Although the demand for work is high, the opportunities are not so great, Now that one is adept at doing his own thing.

t2van said:

95% of businesses started don't make it past year 5. There are stats for everything.




$1K profit should be plenty. Profit where I come from is calculated after all my costs. So If I'm not paying my staff before then I have issues with the business anyway...

THAT aside. Assuming your talking BEFORE expenses.

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$30k per month profit isn't that much to build out a company.

It's a start, yes, which is why I said it's an early-stage company.

It's much easier to grow a company to $5mil/year and sell it than it is to try to maintain a small company at $30k/month profit.

Even if you create an amazing product, someone else will come along, replicate what you've done and scale it. If a company isn't growing then it's in a dangerous position.

If you're running a SaaS company your lead engineer should be on $15k to $25k/mo salary, hence why $30k/mo isn't a lot

A support team of 5 people will be about $3k/mo per person if you hire decent people that can learn about your product enough to actually help rather than just cheap offshore workers that will piss off your customers.

$1k/day for advertising isn't much.

But just saying $30k/mo profit doesn't mean much. If that's gross profit, then that's low. $30k gross profit for a SaaS company will be about $40k-$50k turnover max.

A company doing about $40k to $45k turnover, with $30k profit is a one man band, or someone with maybe 1 employee.

If it's $30k net profit, and your turnover is $500k/month then you're good to go, and you already have a big team and likely have an advertising budget.

Gross profit is your turnover minus your cost of goods sold, which for a traditional company is the inventory cost, and for a SaaS company is a bit different. SaaS companies usually do a custom chart of accounts where they'll put things like the core engineerring team and support team's salaries as a CoGS.

Magmaspace said:

With 700$ per month you can live a decent life with a wife and 2 kids here in India and rest of the world.
If you are in USA UK Canada Australia western Europe you gotta work for the man, bottom line, or else you are screwed.

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The biggest problem with this type of thinking is that you'll have that $700/mo forever. There's almost nothing that's going to generate you $1k/mo for the next 60-80 years of your life unless you have high 6 figures invested, and even that isn't guaranteed forever.

If you want real financial freedom then it's best to do something you enjoy and build a quality product that solves a real problem, then combine that with great marketing. Grow it, then sell it. If this wasn't the case we would see millions of people around the world, on youtube, on blackhatworld talking about how they created true financial freedom with their bot or website and have been living the dream ever since. We don't, and we never will. Instead, what you'll see is countless people struggling, endless journeys to make $50/day, $100/day, most of them never succeeding, and a bunch of people who are trying to achieve this, and will aggressively defend it as you can see here in this thread. Someone who is genuinely making a lot of money would not come on this thread and tell me I am wrong. This is people who have a dream and feel I am squashing their dream of easy money.