 What's happening guys, it's Shane here so after posting the video the other day on fake gurus and why people don't call them out very often, which by the way if you haven't watched that video go ahead and watch it to tell the YouTube algorithm that people like Bench watching my videos, a few things came to my attention. Now on one side of the spectrum people got really mad at me for not making videos calling fake gurus out myself. And then on the other side of the spectrum people thought that I was a hater because I was calling out the fact that a lot of people right now on YouTube are selling courses that don't have that much value. And like I said in the video, you know I've been involved in entrepreneurship for a while now. Ever since I was a teenager I was selling at trade shows and I ran my own business for a long time. And then of course I tried my hand at online business because I knew that it was the future and I had a little bit of success here and there. I'd sell stuff on eBay and Craigslist but I never really had anything sustainable or anything that I could scale. It was definitely nothing that was life-changing but it was really nice and I gained a lot of experience from it. And then of course during college I got stressed and also weirdly bored at the same time. I don't know how those two things happen at once but it happened and I decided to try my hand at a $997 course. The course was about affiliate marketing and of course the creator showed me all kinds of different success examples and made it sound like it was super easy and anybody could do it and blah blah blah blah blah. And if the business was so easy and anybody could do it I actually had real-life business experience and I'd been successful at it. So this was going to be a walk in the park for me, right? Now as you can imagine this didn't work out for me and when it comes to affiliate marketing basically 99% of the time you have to have an audience that's already following you for you to make money from it. So if you're not getting any traffic already you're not going to make that much money from affiliate marketing. And basically the only following I had was on Facebook where my mom and maybe a few other people like my posts about five seconds after I post them. You the real MVP. But anyways I was really surprised that I failed so hard but of course I blamed myself. I just thought I didn't try hard enough or I underestimated it. But I sort of realized I wasn't into affiliate marketing that much so I moved on to my next venture the next shiny object which was Amazon FBA. And this was a $997 course and I was ready this time. I was locked in. I was ready to work my butt off. I knew it was going to be hard but I was going to work super super hard and I was going to make it happen. I was in this for the long haul. Three failed products later and thousands and thousands of dollars down the hole I finally quit. I blamed myself again for the failure and I also kind of realized that Amazon FBA is incredibly boring and not very fulfilling and so I sort of rationalized why I was quitting. I wasn't really quitting. I just realized it wasn't for me but at this point I got really really serious about online entrepreneurship and I moved into a house full of entrepreneurs. Now in Silicon Valley I think they would call this an incubator but they didn't call it that in Las Vegas. I also joined a bunch of local entrepreneurship groups. I got really involved in online groups. I networked like crazy with people who were successful and basically I kind of ingrained myself into the online culture of entrepreneurship and I tried out the gambit. I tried just about every different way of making money online. Basically the only one I didn't try was Shopify and a few others. So I basically either tried everything or I know somebody who I've worked with really closely who has tried everything and overall I ended up spending around $10,000 over a four-year period just trying different ways of making money online and in this video I'm basically just going to go over which ones I think are worth your time and which ones are a complete waste of time and spoiler alert not all of them are scams but most of them are. Now I just want to preface this really quickly by saying that any sort of legitimate business has a very low success chance. Even traditional businesses have like a 10 or 20% chance of success and these are businesses that are proven. I mean it's a proven model you basically know exactly what you want to do. So we're talking about like a plumber or somebody who installs furnaces that sort of thing. These are proven models and still 80% maybe even more of these businesses end up failing. So if you're going into something like online entrepreneurship which is not even close to as proven your chances of success are very low. We're talking 10% max and any online course that guarantees you success is full of crap. I honestly think you should maybe run away if anybody has any sort of guarantee that you're going to succeed because they are lying. Even if it's a super amazing opportunity your chances of success on your first try are going to be pretty low. This is just a reality of entrepreneurship and if you don't realize this you're going to be in for a rude awakening. So let's talk about the most common ones and we're going to start with Amazon FBA and I'm going to try to keep this really quick just give you guys the TLDR on these but Amazon FBA was a very good opportunity back in the day. We're talking around maybe like 2015 or something like that. You had a reasonable chance of success as somebody who was getting into it with little to no entrepreneurship experience. You would probably fail with your first few products but eventually you'd get it down. You could get a successful product and you could make a lot of money. Now a lot of things have changed in Amazon FBA since then. I mean all you have to do is visit Amazon FBA forums and you will see all the complaints that people have. And just to list a few and this is definitely not an extensive list but there's lots of black hat tactics on Amazon FBA like for instance people buy fake reviews all the time. It's a huge problem and it's so bad that it's to the point where you pretty much have to buy fake reviews in order to be competitive. And it's not just fake reviews it's all kinds of other stuff. There's a lot of shady stuff going on like people will buy their own products using credit cards on different VPNs to make it seem like their product is doing really really well when in reality it's not doing that well at all and then they'll just resell the product whenever it gets to their house so just repackage it and send it back to Amazon and that way they don't really lose that much money. There's all kinds of black hat tactics going on just like that on Amazon and it's so bad that it's to the point where you almost have to cheat just to stay competitive. Now another thing is you used to be able to rank your products on Amazon without having to pay for what's known as pay per click or advertising and these days you pretty much have to pay for pay per click in order to rank on Amazon and you have to do it for a long time and then maybe if you're really lucky you can organically rank after a very long period of time. Now another thing about Amazon is if you are lucky enough to find a very very good product that does well chances are someone else is going to quickly discover that that product is doing well because there's tons of different softwares out there to detect that and then there's a lot of different things they can do. Now some of the black hat methods are them sending fake negative reviews to your listing buying your product and then returning it. This is actually quite common on Amazon and then another method which isn't necessarily black hat it's more gray hat but I see it being done quite a bit is if someone discovers that you're selling a pretty good product and they determine that they want to enter the market for that product what they'll do is they'll create like 10 different Amazon stores and then flood the market with all these different Amazon stores just to make it seem like it's a very competitive market and in doing that what they can do is they can drop the prices extremely low to the point where you can't compete it with them and if they have enough money they'll basically just drop the prices for a long period of time and then you'll run out of money you quit and then they have the entire market to themselves. It's a ruthless tactic but people do this sort of thing all the time. Now there's a lot of different tactics like that I'm just scratching the surface but my main point is is if you don't have any experience in the physical product business and you're trying to get into Amazon there is a very very steep learning curve and you're going to be competing with people who use shady shady tactics and then on top of all of this let's say you're somehow able to establish a very good brand you're able to make a lot of money on Amazon here is the sword that is dangling above all Amazon FBA sellers heads Amazon owns all of your data what does this mean exactly this means that someday down the line when they determine that there's enough data on your listing they can copy your listing make their own similar product and then rank their product above yours you might have seen when you've been browsing Amazon that sometimes they have the Amazon choice or Amazon basics feature and that's their own store Amazon basics is their own store and they are basically just going around replacing other people's products and because they own the website they can place theirs on top and if they want to they can throttle your listing so once you've done all the hard work of collecting all of that data they can just go in there and use the data that you collected to absolutely destroy you and if you think that Amazon won't do that you are dead wrong Amazon loves using tactics like this they are absolutely ruthless to their competitors and according to data released by Amazon out of the 7,908,000 total sellers that are selling on Amazon only about 206,000 of them have 100,000 dollars in sales and only about 23,000 of them have one million dollars in sales per year now here's the thing when you see that 206,000 with 100,000 in sales that might sound impressive but really that's only 2.5% or so of the total amount of sellers and then when you also factor in the fact that sales do not equal profit and usually there's about a 10 to 15% profit margin that means that you're making $15,000 a year at the most if your profit margin is amazing by selling on Amazon so 2.5% of the sellers on Amazon are making $15,000 a year which is about minimum wage and then 0.03% of the sellers on Amazon are making $150,000 a year which is a really good living but these odds are extremely extremely low even from a business standpoint where you know 90% of businesses fail these odds are very very low and then even if you have built a successful Amazon business all of the other things apply your business is not safe and Amazon will likely destroy a bunch of your sales in the future so for these reasons I don't believe the Amazon FBA is a good choice now next on the list is Shopify and I admit I have never actually tried Shopify I've never made a Shopify store however I know a lot of people who have and I don't know a single person who's been successful with Shopify whereas I do know a few people who have been successful or somewhat successful with Amazon I haven't used Shopify myself so I can't speak too much on it but just using common sense and logic if you create a store and it doesn't have to have any personal branding or anything like that it's just your copywriting and your images and your product what's stopping anybody else in the world from swiping your website changing up some words here and there so it's not plagiarism and then selling the same exact product let me give you a hint there's nothing stopping anybody from doing that and there's lots of software out there that's built to actually detect whether a store is selling and what they're selling and what ads they're using on Facebook and all that sort of thing and how about the people who are actually selling on Aliexpress when they see that you're selling a bunch of their products they're going to check out your website and they can just create the same exact website and then just change up some words here and there hire a copywriter on Upwork.com and bam they just took a bunch of your market share there's no barrier to entry in Shopify whereas on Amazon FBA if you are successful at least you do create your own brand a brand that can be used in the future that people can trust and you can use that brand to sell more products whereas on Shopify you don't really have a brand that you can use so for this reason I think Shopify is even worse than Amazon and it definitely is not a good opportunity. Now next on the list is affiliate marketing and I have mixed feelings about this one because I think if you get a following like let's say you grow a large Instagram account or a large YouTube account you can use this following to make a lot of money from affiliate marketing so I do believe that it's legitimate in that sense but the problem is is you have to get traffic to your website your blog your YouTube channel your Instagram you have to have a lot of traffic in order to make a lot of money from affiliate marketing and that's the hard part and that's also the part that these gurus conveniently leave out they say that you can just kind of like spam the internet with your links and that doesn't work so affiliate marketing is a really good opportunity if you build a brand first whether that be on YouTube or your blog or whatever you're using but if you don't have a brand built I just don't see how you can make affiliate marketing work in the long term you might be able to take advantage of an influencer and you know buy a spot on their Instagram and then affiliate market and if you have like a really hot product it could work for a short amount of time but what's stopping that influencer from just finding the affiliate link themselves and then cutting you out completely okay so next on the list is digital marketing and this includes you know running Facebook ads Google ad words both of these I'm very familiar with and this was a amazing opportunity a few years ago when it first came out especially with the Facebook ads it's not as good of an opportunity anymore but I still think it's reasonably decent now it's not going to be easy for you to start an agency and I actually recommend not starting your own agency but starting off as what's known as a middleman and what I mean by that is you would use a white label service which if you don't know what white label is that's basically a service that does the work for you in terms of making the Facebook ads or the you know running the Google ad words all that sort of thing but you have to be the marketer that that connects the businesses to them and the reason for this is because learning how to do Facebook ads and Google ads and then actually doing the campaigns for your clients takes a lot of time it seems like every few months Facebook comes out with some update which means you have to completely relearn the entire system because it's totally different and they put things in different places they suspend people's accounts for no reason whatsoever and it's just a huge mess and it's pain in the butt to deal with so I recommend when you first start just take out a lot of that pain and just focus on the marketing getting people to buy the Facebook ads that you're selling and then also dealing with client relationships so you know they might want you to change something so they submit a picture to you and then you submit the picture to the white label service and then they change it that sort of thing just talking to clients and marketing getting people to want to sign on with you and one thing you have to do here is you do have to find like a good white label service you have to actually get your clients results but I have a friend who did this with SEO for instance where he found a really really good white label SEO provider and then he just acted as a middleman and he made really good money for several years doing that so this is a reasonably decent opportunity but I do believe that it's oversaturated and I think a lot of the people out there don't give good service and business owners are extremely jaded by all of the people who are so unprofessional and they don't give good service so if you get into this I still think it's a great opportunity it's going to continue to be a great opportunity into the future but you have a lot to learn and it's going to be a very very steep learning curve okay so next on the list is becoming an influencer and what do I mean by this I mean Instagram Facebook YouTube growing a following on one of these big platforms now not only do you get paid by the platform itself you know YouTube monetizes your videos and they pay you out every month but there's all kinds of other ways to make money affiliate marketing selling a course selling a product selling a service there's so many different ways that you can make money using YouTube and the same thing applies to Facebook or Instagram and probably some of the other platforms now you do have to realize that this is kind of a long-term play there's no there's really no such thing as a get rich quick scheme this is a long-term play and it will probably take you three years of hard work building your blog your Instagram page or YouTube whatever it is before you can really start monetizing it and making some real money from it but if you decide to sacrifice three years a thousand days kind of like Gary V talks about and just really really focus on one thing like building up a YouTube page and just giving a lot of value to whatever niche you're in then you can seriously make some good money from this and in my opinion it's only going to go up in the future whiteboard finance said a really good video talking about how much YouTube pays their creators per you know view versus how much brands pay TV shows per view and he basically found that the Super Bowl makes 10 times as much per viewer than creators make on YouTube and you might think that this is fair you know the Super Bowl is a big event people are super excited they're super pumped they really like Super Bowl ads but if you really think about it YouTube views are extremely targeted so for instance the Super Bowl if you do a makeup ad maybe only 30 to 40 percent of your viewers even use makeup so you're wasting a ton of your money by doing a makeup ad showing it to people who aren't interested whereas on YouTube you can target the age the demographic you could target 18 year old girls and if you wanted to get even more specific let's say you're selling a type of makeup that won't bleed in really hot humid weather so you could target 18 year old girls that are interested in makeup who live in Florida and only during the summertime you target them and the targeting options get even more specific than that so in my opinion I think that YouTube ads are extremely undervalued right now and creators are going to make probably five to ten times as much as they're making right now in the next few decades so for that reason I think becoming an influencer becoming a YouTuber Instagram you know creating your own blog this is awesome I think this is a great idea it takes a lot of sacrifice hard work and a lot of patience but this one might be the best of all of them on the entire list next on the list that I want to talk about is coaching and consulting and I kind of group these together even though I guess they're technically a little different coaching generally has to do with life stuff like getting in shape being happier all that sort of thing whereas consulting generally has to do with business so you know consulting a digital marketing agency on how they can get more clients or something along those lines and out of all the ones mentioned on this list I think this one has the best success rate I don't know the exact percentage of people who are successful doing this but out of all the ones on the list I think the most average people and by average I mean you know they didn't have a lot of business experience they didn't have a lot of you know money or capital some unfair advantage like their brother was some big businessman that taught them everything they know something like that where they didn't really have a huge advantage they didn't have too much experience they were just very average I've seen a lot of average people have success doing consulting and coaching now is it extremely cringy when you see all these people becoming life coaches when they don't have their life together their life is basically a dumpster fire yes it's extremely cringy seeing that but that's not all there is to it there's basically an infinite amount of possibilities for becoming a coach or a consultant and the best way to go about doing it is find a painful problem figure out how to solve that painful problem using a service and then find a bunch of people that are having that painful problem and are willing to pay to have it solve it's a very simple business model and it's also an extremely effective business model and that is why I think coaching and consulting is so effective because you know you look on Amazon and half the time it's like you're making the same product it's just blue instead of black or something like that so you're really not solving a painful problem you're just making the same product slightly better but not really whereas with coaching and consulting you are truly solving a painful problem for real people who have that problem and want it to be solved this is a very very important distinction and to me it makes all the difference between your chances of having a successful business and having a business that totally bombs now the next one on the list is kind of related to digital marketing they're very similar but it's a little bit different and it's what I like to call the middleman and this is basically where there's something that's extremely trendy happening and a lot of people are looking for a very specific service so the example that I used before was SEO which is search engine optimization it's still really big these days but it was even bigger about five years ago and there were tons of businesses that were looking for somebody to do search engine optimization on their business so that they could rank higher in google and they could get that organic traffic basically forever and what my friend did is he knew that if he started an SEO agency after he got maybe five or ten clients he he'd just be too busy to take care of everything and it would be too hard to scale above five or ten clients so what he did is he dropped his prices and he found a really good white label service and then he was able to manage probably 30 to 40 clients much more easily using the white label service and his product was pretty good you know he the white label service did deliver a good product but he didn't have to spend as much time because he wasn't actually doing the campaigns himself the white label service was doing that and he didn't have to hire a bunch of people or anything like that he just used VAs and instead of making like a thousand dollars per client he was probably only making maybe five hundred dollars a client but he was able to scale to a much larger level and you can see this with all kinds of different services I mean there's an infinite amount of services out there that do this so another example of people doing this is a lot of people want to grow accounts on Instagram in certain niches so there are a lot of services out there that will actually do the work of growing an account for you and then sell you the account once it gets to you know three thousand to five thousand followers and people will buy these accounts for really really good money so this is another example of a middleman type business now the bad thing about this particular business model is if somebody can sell the business with a white label service that means that it's much too easily automated and business owners or whoever is looking for that particular service is going to get pretty smart about it after a little while and so generally these sorts of services only last for a few years and then you either have to do the same thing but on a much better level but I have seen a lot of people have good success with this middleman type service and it's a really good one to start because you don't need to have hardly any skills you just need to find people that are willing to pay you and so you can really hone your skills you know you can practice sales and marketing without having to create some kind of business infrastructure that takes up a lot of your time make sure to check out my other videos right here and if you enjoyed the video go ahead and like subscribe ring the little notification bell and comment down below any other ideas you have or any thoughts you have on the video thank you so much and bye for now