You know what the problem with fads is? They fizzle away almost before they’ve even began which means that unless you hitch a ride at the very beginning you won’t reap the benefits (if any at all) to be had! The short life expectancy and inspired premise of your typical everyday fad kinda reminds me of the famous dotcom boom to bust era of the internet that stretched from the 1990s to 2001.

According to Webmergers, Inc. (a provider of data analysis and advisory services) by 2003 approximately 5,000 internet companies had either gone bust or been acquired and since 2000 “962 substantial internet companies have shut down or declared bankruptcy.” Back then things were just plain crazy! Venture Capitalists were literally tripping over themselves to be the first in line to throw money hand over fist to the next hot startup. It was around that time that the abbreviation IPO (initial public offering) became popular street jargon!

Another popular slang of the time was the so-called Dotcom a word that conjured up images of: crazy-rich internet companies, that spared no expense on well appointed luxurious offices that catered to every possible employee comfort and whim; twenty-something overnight millionaires who barely looked out of high school and a climate of reckless spending unparalleled by any seen before, never mind the fact that they almost none of those startups had turned a single cent in profit!

The Loud Boom Of The Internet Bust!

When the bust happened it was as explosive and loud as the boom that preceded it! Here are some of the more spectacular highlights from those heady days:

1. InfoSpace: Its stock reached an all time high of a staggering $1, 305 per share in March 2000 but by April 2001 had dwindled to $22 per share. Since then Lady Time has been equally unforgiving;

2. eToys: Its shares nosedived from a high of $80 during its IPO in May 1999 to below $1 before the company declared bankruptcy less than 2 years later in 2001.

3. Geocities was purchased by Yahoo! for a whopping $3.57 billion in January 1999 to much fanfare but finally and completely shut its doors in April 2009 on a far quieter and somber note!

4. Boo.com in a wild and unchecked spending spree went through $188 million of venture capital in a scant six months in its bid to create a global online fashion store before admitting defeat and declaring bankruptcy in May of 2000.

5. The Learning Company was bought by long established and well respected business, Mattel in 1999 for 3.5 billion, but was sold in 2000 for $27.3 million amounting to what can only be described as a jaw-dropping loss!

The problem of that time was the misguided and rather prevalent attitude that solid business principles no longer mattered on the internet and that new systems were in play such as eyeballs, clicks and members!

Yup, even having members aplenty could not save you if you lacked a viable business plan. Freeinternet.com, the company that was most famous for its mascot Baby Bob, filed for bankruptcy in October 2000 with losses of $19 million on revenue of $1 million despite being the 5th largest Internet Service Provider in the USA at the time with more than 3.2 million users!

So who were the big winners from those heady times? Why of course those traders (commonly restricted to a select few insiders involved in the IPOs and their family members) who literally made millions overnight and had enough foresight to unload that paper money into tangible, real assets before the value of their stocks invariably plummeted!

Internet Marketing Fad Chasing Is Counter Productive

Do you remember the time when automated blog creation software was all the rage?

No? Well let me explain.

Not too long ago when blogging was still a novelty (except to Geeks and ahead-of-the game marketers) and at a time when black-hat SEO was still rather common, cutting edge black-hat SEO practitioners realized they could acquire a ton of backlinks by creating literally 1000s of Blogger blogs (Google’s blogging platform) with special software that was designed just to do that.

And that’s precisely what they did and it seemed to work for a while. With their software they were able to blast up the Google index and that of the other search engines by suddenly amassing a ton of backlinks. But as always happens, invariably Google and the other search engines caught on, nullified the system, and even punished those who had used the software.

Such practice is called gaming the system. So what did those who created the system do? They did what they always do in such a scenario they decided to sell the software for 3 dollars shy of two hundred dollars (in other words for $197) never mind the fact the software no longer worked!

Anyway with seductive sales copy and credible looking bogus results they were able to convince plenty of people to folk out the $197!

Unfortunately for those folks who bought and used the software it left tale-tell marks (so-called footprints) that the search engines could track and when they located the aspiring website or blog