If you look at internet marketing a great metaphorical picture would be selling shovels. This

will give you a good understanding of how internet marketing works and how best to approach it

if you decide to enter into that niche.

In the Internet Marketing Dirt I did talk about selling Shovels. Actually, I said you want to

sell picks and shovels... let me explain.

If you look at the history of the Gold Rush, think about who made the most money. Was it the

prospectors, the people going out looking for gold? Actually, it wasn’t them. Not many of them

made money. They didn’t really find gold or find enough gold to really become rich. The ones

that made it rich during the Gold Rush were the ones that built the stores that sold the picks

and the shovels and the pans and everything else to the people that were out digging for the

gold. So if you look at it that way you can get a better understanding of how you should

monetize your internet business.

Let’s look into internet marketing for a good example. There are a lot of people out there that

want to do internet marketing which, you know, is like gold on the internet. So, if you sell

the information about how to do it, that’s like selling the picks and shovels. However, it is

also important to build the infrastructures to be able to support that. For example, there are

software programs out there that people need – for example, autoresponder software or Audio

Generators, the audios. You’re basically selling the picks and the shovels when you’re selling

the audio programs that people need. That’s like selling the shovels. Selling teleconferencing

services is also like selling picks and shovels as well.

If you’re in a non internet marketing related niche like tennis you can use the same analogy.

Instead of selling picks and shovels you can sell the information on tennis, but you can also

sell your market the tennis rackets and tennis items they’ll need to play a better game.

Basically that’s kind of what we’re talking about.

You have to sell your market something that they will continuously need and that’s where

there’s a lot of money made. So what you want to do is you want to look inside your

marketplace. Look inside your niche and say to yourself, "What are the things that people

absolutely need to have in order to make it in this niche"? The sky is the limit!