If you’ve blogging long enough, and you make any kind of significant money, you most likely know two people… John Chow and Shoemoney. Each of them make very, very good incomes essentially telling people how they make incomes. One of my friends would call it a lot of chest-thumping because often the tips aren’t the most practical. One example is a recent article Building a Million Dollar Product in 4 Months without Google where ShoeMoney explains how much he made (queue chest-thump) with his Internet product.)

For the average blogger that is an amazing statement. Google has become almost synonymous with searching and advertising on the web. If people can’t find your product and you don’t advertise (and make limited money from advertising because you avoid Google channels), it can be extremely tough to make $100 a month, but less a million in 4 months. Since I’m very interested on how one would make a million in four months (even with Google that is some feat), I read the article with great interest.

It was a complete let-down. It turns out that the product made the money for a couple of reasons. One is that it already had an established brand that Google did play a part in. If Home Depot created a product and put it in its stores, it would make a million dollars without Google as well. The other part of this to remember is that this million is measured in gross revenue. If you wanted to, you could make a million gross revenue fairy easily by selling authentic $100 bills for $50. However, the profits of such a venture would not earn you accolades.

I don’t want to be all negative today. I would like to finish on a note of a great marketing plan that I’ve heard of recently. One of my friends at The Casual Observer, is a huge of fan the Colorado Rockies. My favorite team, the Boston Red Sox had a great series with them this week which lead to us doing some fun chatting. My MLB Extra Innings package gave me the Colorado feed, meaning that I got commercials about the Rockies. Turns out that Troy Tulowitzki is growing a mullet for charity. I thought I had a universal anti-mullet stance, but it turn out that for charity… well I can get behind that.