I had a very interesting question from one of our subscribers this morning asking if the trend toward internet marketer’s and entrepreneurs offering distributorships or licenses for consulting programs is a wider trend and if this trend extended beyond just consulting services to all online business models?

What a sharp question – and because he was so astute looking at the trends, I spent a fair amount of time exchanging emails with him today.

My first response was that this move toward offering distributorships, licenses – almost a franchise model for consulting services is just part of a bigger trend of systematization within the Internet Marketing and Business Opportunity market segments.

What I mean by this is that the current group of top gun internet marketing guru’s are looking beyond the guru-led, $1M business goal toward an organizational approach to business building with opportunties to scale their revenues into the tens-of-millions.

To do that, you need to understand how to systematize your processes and product delivery as well as building leverage into your business model.

For anyone with a small business or business background, this organizational perspective is not new, in fact it’s been preached for years by guys like Michael Gerber of “E-Myth” fame and more recently been brought to internet marketing by some of the big names including Rich Schefren and Jay Abraham and Dan Kennedy before that.

Think about these —

Jeff Walker’s Product Launch formula was a systemetization of the entire
launch process, word has it that he is now licensing practitioners that will help with product launches

Stone Evans launched PIP many moons ago that systemetizes the building of simple affiliate websites

Rich Schefren himself is currently turning all of his consulting into packaged modules that he can then license out to practitioners.

These are really small business principles being brought to the biz opp and IM space.

What you find is that the big name IM’ers spend a few years taking massive action, finding out what works (and mostly what doesn’t), then take the “what works” part and figure out how to grow it even bigger which usually means putting it into the hands of others to deliver for them – a requirement of which is to systematize all of their processes and content.

Now, the walk before you run message, first you need to find out what works for you and your market. Once you do, expanding your business model into one that incorporates leverage and systematization is possible, but first, remember the basics of taking massive action, learning what works, getting feedback from your market and improving your core offering so that you have something valuable to transact which you can then turn into a system or franchise.

Jeff