How to Identify a Shiny Object

When you're first starting out trying to figure out internet marketing, you'll run into this idea: shiny object syndrome. What people are trying to communicate when they say this is that there is an idea or strategy that sounds really REALLY profitable that someone says they're making tons of money using.
Naturally, you want to know what it is. And you're willing to pay for it.
Usually, if you go ahead and pay for the information, you will get some information. Sometimes it's helpful and sometimes it's confusing -- and what it *usually is* is some part of another marketer's strategy that they at least know enough about to create a video and some pdfs about it.
Sometimes, though, you don't even get information. You get BS. You get page after page of a pdf that looks like this. In order to MURDER GOOGLE I USE THIS ESSENTIAL TOOL -- with an affiliate link to whatever keyword dominating tool they're selling. And then IN ORDER TO BUILD AN ONLINE ATM FOR MY OWN PERSONAL USE I USE THIS OTHER ESSENTIAL TOOL -- with another affiliate link to another product.
And then: If you want to REALLY FIND OUT HOW I MADE THREE BILLION DOLLARS ON THE INTERNET, buy my ADVANCED COURSE HERE!!!!
I'm really not kidding, that's what's inside of some of those things, and if you don't buy them through something like Clickbank you might not get your money back.
But that's really not the essential problem. The problem is that internet marketers use a really specific language and a lot of what they're talking about is either too abstract or totally irrelevant to what you'd be trying to accomplish as a beginner. So what will happen is you will buy the strategy and not really be ready to implement it. For example, say someone is trying to sell a listbuilidng strategy. Having an email list is a great way to stay in touch with customers but it's a whole other piece of the puzzle that you won't implement until you've actually decided on what you're going to be telling your customers about.
It's not your fault -- you just don' t have anything to sell yet. You're not ready for information on how to keep customers you don't already have.
So you'll file it on your hard drive and maybe never look at it again -- and feel like there's just one more thing about IM you don't understand. And there might be one or two concepts you get out of the information packet that make sense but not enough sense yet to implement -- so when you're ready for that strategy you're going to either have to learn it again or buy it again.
Also, at that point, you're distracted. You've gone so far afield of what your original project was that you might not ever get back to it again -- at least not with the enthusiasm you had at first.
So it's not that buying internet marketing products is bad. The fact is that marketers buy this stuff from each other all the time. However, this would be *after* they had already tried a couple things and want to expand, or they're looking for a specific answer to a marketing problem they have -- like best practices for listbuilding.
Mostly though, while all these products promise shortcuts to riches -- if you're just learning, jumping around from product to product is the SLOWEST WAY TO LEARN INTERNET MARKETING. It might also be the most expensive.
So: if it's taking you *farther away* from what you're trying to do, if it's *distracting you from what you need to know or do now*, and if it's slowing things down instead of speeding them up -- it's a shiny object. Stay away from them now and you might not even need them later on.
:). That is all.