Try this: google “how to make money online“.

Did you do that? When I did it, the top listing was a Forbes article, but everything else – including the ads, were from people claiming that they could tell me how to live the life of my dreams by earning money online. Click on a link, and you’ll very likely be asked to submit your e-mail address. If you do that, you’ll start to get e-mails regularly asking you to click-through and read an article or, nowadays, watch a video…in the end, it all boils down to buying something. The sharks are circling.

The Racket

There is a whole internet industry that revolves around promising you riches beyond your belief for hardly any work, propagated by so called online/ internet marketing gurus. Some of these folks are decent, some aren’t…but all aim to sell you something. The sharks are always hungry.

Imagine that used-car dealer that you try to avoid when checking out the car lots. Yeah, that guy has internet access. He has a video camera. And he ain’t afraid to use it.

I get a few of newsletters from some of these guys and was surprised to see that a prominent fellow on the internet marketing scene, Frank Kerns, had dropped the typical marketing video for something completely different. (you’re going to have to have to click through to see it, since it has no embed code).

Video As Marketing Tool For the Sharks

If you watched the video you can tell that it was kind of amateur, kind of fun, kind of like a lot of the content on Youtube. The whole cliff-hanger at the end is an obvious ploy to get you to send your e-mail to them (building an e-mail list is the holy grail for online marketeers).

The typical internet video used by these folks have been a few minutes of a seminar, a testionial from a “satisfied customer” and the one-on-one guru talks to camera. As such I’ve been ignoring them here…but old Frank Kerns and his wanna-be 70’s cop show video is a paradigm shift for the genre. The sharks are in new waters.

It’s been about a year since the first rumblings in the online marketing community about online video started to reverberate through the internet. Immediately thereafter there was glut of “information products” (usually  a .pdf document ith no spell check and very little actionable content) and software that was supposed to help you do a variety of video related things. This is the first-time, however, that I’ve seen an internet marketer go for straight out enterainment. It’s actually kind of charming NOT to be bombarded with the sales pitch.

A Review?

naah. I’m not gonna review it. It is cute and the obviously had fun doing it, but it really not the kind of stuff that should garner more than a small amount of our attention, as online video enthusiasts. The best and and most sophisticated use of online video that I’ve ever seen is still Joel Comm’s “Next Internet Millionaire” web-series.

I’d love to see an ROI comparison between Frank’s fun little video and Joel’s gargantuan undertaking.