I’ve just finished the first Funnelle Caves journal exercise and I realised that I don’t have an issue with much of the marketing I come across.

I find that many of the people selling various products come across as warm, knowledgeable and fun. I think I’d probably enjoy spending time with most of them. Their webinars are awesome and packed full of great stuff. Their free ebooks are often excellent. Their blog content is comprehensive and useful. I’d love to do their paid offerings.

The issue isn’t them.

It’s that there’s so many of them.

My facebook feed is full of interesting people and wonderful offers. I had to cull my inbox because it was getting stuffed full of goodies I’d never be able to dig into and I was spending my time reading other people’s (free) stuff and not creating my own. Btw – I highly recommend unroll.me for this daunting task.

I wish the internet was full of shouty marketers and nothing else. It would be much easier to stand out in a sea of mediocrity. But a sea of quality is a different thing. The free offers just keep getting better and better.

It reminds me of the beginning of ebook self-publishing.  7 years ago it was possible to sell a poorly edited book with a homemade cover because the technology was new. Then online services popped up and you could access cover designers and editors. Then courses emerged to teach you to do it yourself. Then along came a tsunami of advice on tweaking Amazon. How to build a profile. How to market your books. How to build a community.

You can still make a living as a fiction writer. In many ways, opportunities are better than they ever were because the audience has grown too. So I’m not dooming and glooming here, I wouldn’t change things because I love seeing the explosion of technology and how it facilitates creativity and change.

But as a market matures, the skills needed to stand out shift too. And my sense is that the ecourse market is shifting very quickly, even in the short time I’ve been following it. Old school shouters with ridiculously long sales letters will be frozen out, I reckon.

So I think one of Andy’s comments in another post is becoming more and more true. It will be about connection and trust. And creativity and transparency. Honesty. Sharing mistakes instead of pretending to be infallible experts all of the time.

I’d be interested to know what other people think – it might just be my slanted facebook feed 🙂