Extrapolation, Not Duplication

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"You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That's* the *Chicago* way! And that's how you get Capone. Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that? I'm offering you a deal. Do you want this deal?" - Sean Connery, The Untouchables

And that's the deal I'm offering you. Internet marketing is war at times. And although one of the best ways to learn to make money online is to pick someone from the crowd of internet marketers, copy what they do, read everything they have written and do everything they tell you to say without question, it will only get you so far.

Copycats won't win because they aren't competing with anyone. They are following them. And you are never going to tap into all your chosen guru's secrets. That's just not the way it works. They give away enough to keep you coming back, hopefully with your credit card.

In fact, once you start getting an idea of what you are doing here online, you will realize this. You will visit a guru's site and see that he doesn't follow his own rules. In fact, you can sometimes learn more techniques by just observing rather than reading. Guru's skip things they think are common knowledge. And they don't write about things they are currently testing. And the stuff they do write about, may be new to you, but chances are, have been around for a while.

So for a second quote:

"There are many things my father taught me here in this room. He taught me: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer." - Al Pacino, The Godfather Part II

You aren't going to get everything from the horses mouth. You have to use your brain. You have to analyze the top sites in your niche and anything that makes you go, "I wonder why he did that? That's not normal.", you have to investigate.

And the ultimate way to learn internet marketing is just jumping in and failing a few times so that you get used to it and failing becomes second nature. Because every now and then, you will be surprised and not fail.

And the route to successful surprises is extrapolation, see the first quote for the definition.

After you have been beat up, knocked down and left for dead a few times, you start learning how this thing works. You are done with the table scraps and realize this stuff is easy. You have been just stuck in the tunnel of copycatting.

You just take what you learned and expand it a bit. Stretch it. Mix marketers A's techniques with marketer B's and test your results. Look at marketer C's techniques through a microscope, through a telescope and then through your 68 year old grandmother's eyes. Be the first one at the new social networks. But know when your tests are done.

And I just bet you eventually come up with something. Come on. Don't just be a marketer, make a mark.