Online Marketing Landscape Chart

I decided to take GoogleSearchSucks in another direction. I realized I can not compete on being first to break online marketing news. I also can’t take away the attention people seem to focus on the Gurus. From now on every post will be either a graph, a cartoon, or a funny image having to do with Online Marketing.

This first graph was my attempt of trying to explain to a buddy how online marketing works.

So here is the explanation of this graph.

This is my attempt of showing where money flows.

It all started with the idea of “make money online”

Quickly so called Gurus and Networks realized they can leverage this idea and find plenty of suckers who will buy anything to help them make money.

The suckers are the people who buy into the make money online idea. They are the ones who do the “real” legwork of building sites and capturing traffic to try to monetize it.

About 90% of Suckers never make more than pocket change a month. In aggregate suckers make enough money to give huge profits for the networks and Gurus.

The gurus have advanced beyond simple make money online by selling the promise of making money online to SEO, PPC, and Affiliate marketing.

Because of this, corporations started to take note. SEM Agencies where created to support the needs of corporations by leveraging what the Gurus are saying and scaling it to enterprise levels.

And of course the online consumer holds up the whole infrastructure.

As I see it the “make money online” is still going strong with most people ending up as the Suckers who make everyone up stream a lot of money.

Are you a sucker or are you trying to be a Guru? Or are you one of those “mystery” online marketers who clears 1 million in one month but will never “reveal” your identity.

Only way to ever make real money online is to have your own product, either by selling your Guru status by going to trade shows, selling e-books, or consulting, or by becoming a corporation and selling your own product through the never ending stream of suckers.