Last night I had a weird dream. I dreamt I was in a vast crowded hall packed with thousands of shouting people. I desperately needed to get out of there. The atmosphere was tense, the lack of air was making me claustrophobic. As I squeezed my way towards the exit, I noticed hundreds of people posting huge bundles of letters into what appeared to be bottomless postboxes.
I managed to find my way to one of the many exits. Outside I found rows of kiosks with long queues of people lining up to pay for their tickets to get into the hall. The noise was even worse out here. The atmosphere was electric with excitement.

There were brightly dressed spruikers with megaphones, like the ones you see at a circus sideshow. Walking up and down, they were expounding what delights awaited the shuffling lines of customers inside. "Hurry, Hurry, Hurry, get your tickets for the greatest show on earth!", "don't be shy folks, step right up and get your tickets now!", "See the world's richest man!", "Join the millionaires inside!" "Hurry, Hurry, Hurry!" 

At the back of each ticket counter were one or two people sitting at desks, calmly counting through big piles of cash.

On exiting the building I found myself in a busy street with shop windows and many people going about their daily business. A few people had full shopping bags and some were looking in store windows. Much as you would see in any city today.

The Meaning of Dreams
It occurred to me today that my dream represented life on the Internet. The hall full of shouting people represented the majority of Internet Entrepreneurs.

Their shouting represents their desperate efforts to sell things to each other using every means possible including ezine ads, email ads and spam.

As newbies, they had paid various amounts of cash to get into that hall. Some had snuck in the back for free. Most were optimistic and assumed they were going to meet genuine customers, only to find that the hall was overcrowded with like-minded fellow individuals, all trying to sell the same sort of products to each other. It was like a cross between the NY Stock exchange and a huge Amway convention - gone totally mad!  The bundles of letters were falling into an abyss where nobody goes.

The ticket sellers at the door were the people making huge profits out of all those excited newbies lining up to pay their money. These were the Yahoos and GoTos selling tickets to would-be entrepreneurs. The spruikers were the Gurus of internet marketing. They were obviously getting a good cut of the takings.

The Real World
The almost normal street scene outside represents the real world. Where shoppers and traders follow the conventional way of doing business.

The store owners have attractive window displays, and invite passers-by to come in and make a purchase from their well stocked niche store. They advertise in all the right places. In newspapers, on Television and Radio. If they give good service, many of new customers hear about them by word of mouth and come back again. These are your Amazons of the Internet.

Sound Advice
So don't bother paying to get into that noisy crowded hall, you will waste a lot of your money and time. 
At a time when you would be better devoted to saving money and learning about marketing.

Stick with the conventional methods, build an attractive niche store with good products and advertise to the public, not to your fellow salesmen.

If necessary give gifts as incentives to get people in the door to see your products. 
If necessary, sell other peoples products, but make sure they are useful products, not just hype dressed up.  If you sell hype or scams, your reputation will suffer, people will despise you and nobody will be coming back. There's no future in hype.

Tempting Scams
Just because others appear to be getting away with scams, don't be tempted to join them.
Build your marketing skills, sell a useful product and your self esteem will skyrocket, not necessarily your profits. Start an affiliate program.
Help others and you will build friendships and people will return your favor by helping you.

Your profits may start out tiny, but with patience, skill and perseverance they will gradually climb to the point where you may really consider "firing the boss!" - to coin the hackneyed phrase, it won't happen overnight, but it will happen.

Too Good to be True
Treat all offers that seem "too good to be true" as just that. In fact, treat all offers as scams until you get real proof that they are not.

Avoid contributing any money to any scheme, you will only be lining someone else's pockets.
If it's a genuine "money making" offer, then you shouldn't be expected to pay anything. Your participation in the program should be all that's required. 

Opt-in Mail Lists
Don't try buying opt-in lists of subscribers. They're all scams. What may appear to be large numbers of genuine subscribers, soon leave. They only stay long enough to get paid. Did you ever consider that the majority are fake anyway? Anyone can own tens of thousands of bogus email boxes and get paid for "reading email". You need to be dishonest to do it. "Thousands of responsive buyers are waiting to read your email offer!" 
Yea sure .. and they get paid to delete their overflowing mail boxes every day!

Pay Per Click
Notice how they're not called "earn per click"!
Don't bother with pay-per-click search engines. You will get a lot of "traffic" but your sales won't be any better. These are your pay-per-click rip-offs like Goto.

Pay to Join Lists
Why pay Yahoo.com $300 to get listed in position 134,265, or not at all if they don't happen to like your web site?  That's a lotta dough!  It can take years to earn that money back when you're just starting out. Wait until you have heaps of spare cash before risking that sort of money!

If you're basically an honest person, then I urge you to concentrate on being that. It will take hard work, and it will take a long time, but in the end the money will really belong to you and you'll have the real satisfaction of knowing that you made it happen with your own sweat and toil and not stolen it from others.

Treat Customers Well
Above all, treat your customers well.  If they're unhappy, give them a refund and a gift. They will be back when you have another offer. 
People will thank you for your products and not despise you. Once the groundwork is finished and you're making a steady income, then you can afford the luxury of spending time inventing new products and expanding your customer list.

After all the years of honest hard work, when you've got that elusive million dollars safely tucked away in the bank, you will sleep very well at night - without any weird dreams! 
Take your time and do it well and whatever you do, don't "hurry hurry hurry"!

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Dr John Flynn publishes a monthly HTML ezine called:
"The Xerostar Times" and his motto is:
"Caring for Creative People"
You can subscribe at: 
http://www.xerotron.com/cgi-bin/mail/mail.cgi
The free eBook "The Xerotron Story" is available at:
http://midi-ebooks.com  mailto:xerostar@iinet.net.au

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