Article by Charlie Wright

The letterbox clatters and an envelope drops onto your doormat.
 
“Aha,” you think, “This looks like another mail order offer.”
 
You open up the letter to see a bloke beaming out at you. In the background are palm trees. He’s sipping a cocktail. There’s a photo further down of his country pile in Devon.
 
Quickly, you realise this is a letter from a self-made millionaire.He’s offering to show you the amazing secrets he has discovered.
 
And really, he stumbled upon these secrets. It was an amazing  overnight transformation.
 
Because the truth is, he was once a lowly under-achieving nobody. He wore rags. He couldn’t afford to wash his own face. He could barely scrape through to the next month’s payday. His bedroom window looked out directly onto the back wall of a public toilet. He made his living on a production line, picking hair-balls and rodent’s feet out of cheap pasties.
 
When he tried to talk to a woman, he’d get slapped. Literally, people would punch him in the face repeatedly, just for existing.
 
But look at him now!
 
He’s on a yacht!
 
He has a pretty Japanese wife!
 
His office looks out onto fields….yes, FIELDS, I tell you!
 
Now, even if you don’t believe the back-story… or at least you’re unconcerned with the back-story…  you decide to accept that this guy is super-rich.
 
You’re interested in how he makes this money. Because helooks like a bit of a dweeb, so perhaps anyone can do what he does.
 
Fair enough.
 
But that’s when you get whammed in the face by an almighty objection….
 
“Why would a real millionaire bother to tell us their most prized secrets?”
 
One of my readers put it perfectly:
 
“It’s common sense that if an individual has a system or scheme to produce overnight millionaires that, unless he has?used up the potential of that system, why would he flog it to you or me for £20, £100 or even £5000? Why not just run the system himself? Most of these guys get rich not from walking the walk but from talking the talk.”
 
If you’ve been wondering the same thing, then let me offer my own insight…
 
In some instances, the truth is that the millionaire is a millionaire because he tells people the secrets of becoming a?millionaire.
 
And if he stopped telling people the secrets of how to become a millionaire, he wouldn’t be a millionaire any more.
 
Now, it depends on how you feel about this….
 
Because obviously, this way of making money does work. The few people who can successfully follow what these guys do can literally transform their wealth. I’ve seen it happen.
 
Of course, this success is funded by the thousands of people who buy the same system, yet fail. It’s a brutal Darwinian process with a small percentage of survivors dominating the rest.
 
I’m not going to be judgemental about this moral issue. I’ll let you make your own mind up.
 
It’s down to whether you’re a hungry shark, or a mellow and fragile fish.
 
In other instances, the truth is that the individual isn’t a millionaire at all. They’re “quite successful” and while they make money from their home business, they want to make an extrasource of revenue from selling their secrets.
 
In this case they’ve let an over-keen copywriter beef up theirachievements in the sales letter. Or they feel that’s how they HAVE to advertise themselves. They’re caught up in the “brag culture” of direct marketing.
 
To my mind, this shows a lack of confidence. And it’s unnecessary. Because I don’t think intelligent types like yourself NEED or DEMAND that the person selling their blueprint is a millionaire. Just that the system is genuine and workable.
 
This old “look at my massive yacht!” style promotion should have died out by now. But it lingers on. And on and on…
 
In the cases I’ve described above, I accept there may be more “talking the talk” than “walking the walk”.
 
But this isn’t true in all cases. If it were, I’d have packed up the Biz Opp Jungle years ago, driven to a beach, and swam out?into the ocean in my clothes, never to return.
 
The exceptions that make it all worthwhile
 
Many people who turn their experiences and ideas into blueprints, seminars or courses DON’T claim to be millionaires. They don’t rely on phony “rags to riches” stories. They don’t pretend success came instantly, overnight, without any effort.
 
And their businesses are real, stand-along enterprises that don’t require them to pose as gurus.
 
For instance, as you know, I’ve published my own Email Marketing systems in the past.
 
You could ask me: “Why bother telling others if you’re so successful?”
 
The reason is, as I’ve always said, the key to making money is having lots of income streams. I have helped set up manyother email businesses and websites as described in my manual (outside and beyond the Biz Opp jungle). These aren’t based on telling people how to make money. They cover alternative health, pain relief, food, health & beauty, computers and money matters.
 
The business model is transferable to other types of niche, and not just biz opp. It doesn’t require people to become biz opp entrepreneurs. It doesn’t continue the madness of marketers telling marketers how to market to marketers.
 
By selling my insights and strategies in a manual, I also get a nice little income stream to boot.
 
I’d be missing an opportunity if I didn’t, right?
 
Of course, the difference was that I didn’t pretend there was?any rags-to-riches miracle. Or that I am anywhere close to being a millionaire. I don’t have a day job, I can enjoy spending time with my family, I work for myself.
 
It’s not a bad life!
 
The perils of the 3 click culture
 
Unfortunately, the culture of “BIG INSTANT MONEY IN 3?CLICKS OF A MOUSE ” promises in many sales pitches give people a distorted idea of how much money they can make and how fast this money will appear.
 
These sales pages are advertising, so they do offer best-case scenarios.
 
My view is always that starting a successful business – home or otherwise – is never easy, never instant, and profits arenever guaranteed.
 
That said, people DO make money from home. People do generate extra cash from these projects. It’s a shame that stuff is sold on wild exaggeration and cherry picking, but it’s the culture of direct mail advertising, everyone is trying to outdo everyone else’s promises until you get crazy sales messages?based on imagination, not fact.
 
The upshot is, there is hope. Some products genuinely are written by people who have turned a business idea into a success, and who add another string to their bow by passing on their knowledge.
 
In my view, these are the people to follow.