The Snake Eating Itself

Have you ever heard of the term “ouroboros”?  It’s an ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail and is meant to represent the “circle of life” and the eternality of all things.

It’s quite a profound idea.

If however, you’ve been around online or internet marketing circles for any length of time you’ve no doubt encountered a version of this that I refer to as “the snake eating itself”.

My favourite example of this are the people who coach coaches.  In fact, I know a coach whose clients are coaches and he has a coach.  So effectively you have a coach coaching a coach who coaches other coaches.

Are you confused yet?

I need to be careful or Google is going to think I’m keyword stuffing this email and blog post.

You see it a fair bit in the Warrior Forum and low cost info product world.  You have people creating products or programs that show other people how to create products and programs teaching other people how to create products and program.

Oh dear, here we go again… It all gets meta very quickly.

I’m being a bit overt pointing out these examples because I’m trying to get the idea clear in your mind before I move on.

When you run a program like this, you have two outcomes in mind: one, get as many paying customers as you can.  That’s pretty obvious.  And two, broaden your future potential customer base by making it easy for your current students to refer their customers to you.

This is often done through affiliate programs and commission kickbacks.

I’ve seen entire training programs designed to teach students how to sell the very program that the student is going through, for commission.  Effectively, those people have paid to become commission based salespeople for the first person.

These kind of schemes are just another dirty form of multi level marketing (MLM).

Let’s not kid ourselves, these things work… For awhile.  Then they always collapse under their own weight because the people on the bottom of the pyramid can’t keep adding levels below them and the whole thing dries up.

Eventually, the snake just eats itself.

These things aren’t real businesses and the people running them aren’t really looking to help anyone other than themselves.  They’re trying to sucker people into working for them and building their own bank account.

One of the reasons that I set up Casual Marketer was to serve people who were looking to build a real business or learn new skills that they can apply.  The internet is a massive enabler for people who want to grow and scale their business.  Your ability to reach a wider audience and share your message is unparalleled.

The key is understanding how to build an audience that is looking forward to hearing from you.  Once you have those people interested in hearing what you have to say, you need to get them consuming your content.  And those are the two topics covered in the January and February issues of the Casual Marketer Newsletter.

I’ve had an overwhelming response to the newsletter and I’ve extended the offer for new subscribers to get the January issue as well as the February issue if you join before February 14th, 2016.

If you’re looking for tricks, hacks or schemes to help you rope people into your funnel then what I offer isn’t for you.  But if you’re looking at learning from someone with a wide range of experiences and skills who actually does what he talks about, then I think you’ll enjoy the newsletter.

Leave a Comment