IM vs MMO

A lot of people around here seem to have a funny notion about what internet marketing is. Internet marketing is notthe same as hawking Make Money Online products. And it's certainly not a type of business or a business model in itself. 

Internet marketing is simply doing marketing on the internet. And as an entrepreneur, you practice internet marketing to achieve larger business goals -- it's not an end goal in itself. Those business goals may include selling MMO products, but they also could include driving traffic to your e-commerce site, getting people to read your blog on penguins, promoting a charity or any number of a million other things. 

So when you say "I used to do IM, but then I stopped and did e-commerce", that just doesn't make sense. You couldn't have done e-commerce without internet marketing. Moreover, when you talk about every offer and every sales page being about telling others how to make money, you're ignoring 99.9% of the internet. 

• The sidebar ads you get when you read the news or search for something on Google probably have nothing to do with making money online. But they're still internet marketing.
• The email newsletters you get from Amazon or Dell or your favorite political candidate have nothing to do with making money online. But they're still internet marketing.
• Apple's new salespage for their recently launched iPhone 7 has nothing to do with making money online. But it's still internet marketing.

It seems to me that the problem isn't so much that internet marketing is some "lame self-fulfilling prophesy" -- it's that you don't know what internet marketing is. And if you don't get that MMO is just one -- relatively small -- part of the gigantic internet marketing universe, you're probably not ready for MMO marketing anyway. If you want IM without the pyramid scheme all you gotta do is simply jump of the merry-go-round and work in one of the millions of other niches that are out there. You'll probably be more successful that way too.

Originally Posted by MValmont  Why wouldn't I do BOTH to make MORE money? Can someone explain this to me? Am I the only one on this forum who likes to make a lot of money?

For me anyway, it comes down to concepts like decreasing marginal costs and non-linear growth. 

As en example of decreasing marginal costs, whether I have 1 person on my website a day or 1 million people every second, I still only need that one website. Yes other costs do increase, I'll need bigger servers as one example. But overall the marginal cost of each additional visitor decreases as your userbase gets bigger. The same would be true if I were selling ebooks: the work involved in producing an ebook is more or less the same whether I sell one copy or a million copies.

The concept of non-linear growth is related to the above. What it boils down to is something pretty much every successful business experience: growth in a new business is often very slow at first, it then experiences a period of faster growth, and then it tapers off again. This is the classic sigmoid function or S-curve (see:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function). What it means to an entrepreneur is that you'll almost certainly make less money running two businesses at the early growth phase than you will running a single business at a faster growth phase. Splitting your energies between two businesses as you're suggesting (for instance a non-MMO niche and an MMO niche) to leverage the non-linear growth characteristic in internet businesses to maximize your profit.

What all this means is that -- for me at least -- it's far more lucrative to stay out of MMO businesses. It's a lot easier and a lot more profitable to develop new features or products to expand my current customer base rather than essentially starting a new business from scratch, developing an entirely different customer base in an entirely different industry that I have no experience in. I suppose if your business has saturated its growth potential, adding a new business might make you more money. But I'd argue that's generally only the case for businesses that are either very mature and dominating their industries or for geographically constrained businesses. Otherwise, if you find your business's growth to be "saturated", I suspect you're just not being creative enough.