With all the “make money online” courses flying around out there, it’s a miracle that we’re not all super rich yet… or is it?

Well, a few months back, I stumbled upon a website where people share and jointly purchase all these high priced “guru” training programs. Now you’d think, “surely people who can access even the top $1000+ programs would be able to make some money online using this knowledge”, but after lurking about the IRC channel this site sponsored, I quickly discovered that almost no one was making any money at all.

At this point I got discouraged with the site and started trying to figure out how this could happen. After downloading every course I could get my hands on, I quickly found out something rather shocking: most programs were simply rehashing the same content or ideas, and then packaging them as something new or presenting it in audio format.

Some gurus are more blatant about it than others, but once you can read everyone’s content, it begins to become painfully obvious how repetitive it becomes - although this really shouldn’t be surprising. After all, there are only so many ways to fry an egg or build a website.

Since then it occurred to me: these so-called gurus are really no different than an “old boys” club. You have the powerful list owners at the top who make most of their money promoting the “next big thing”, and for the most part they get rich by doing each other favors - like “you promote my product and Ill promote yours” sort of exchanges.

At the end of the day, we’re left with gurus who really don’t sell anything besides “how to make money” courses. They’re not out there in the trenches selling e-books or creating websites like they tell us to in their programs.

I don’t know about you guys (and girls), but when I watch an episode of ‘The Next Internet Millionaire’, I come away feeling like I’ve just witnessed something criminal, like sitting in on a meeting at some sort of call center talking about how to fleece senior citizens out of their savings.

It’s sad, scary and pathetic all at the same time! For instance, in the last episode, we see Joel of Adsense Secrets fame coaching one of the final contestants on how to create a product on making money with viral videos, and at one point he asks the contestant “do you have any proof of making money doing this?” and the contestant responds “no, but I can show people how to do it.”

That being said, there are a few gurus who come dangerously close to breaking this mold. Ryan Deiss, for example, is probably the only “guru” who has kept my respect despite this revelation, but that’s another post for another day…

/rant off

Taken from : http://www.davesaraiva.com/2007/11/14/why-the-gurus-suck/