How can you tell when the easy money has past?

When you start seeing a lot of books on how to make money in *insert moneymaking venue here*.

Two great examples are just about anything having to do with flipping real estate and starting up an eBay business.

These were very profitable ways to make money not too long ago. Heck, eBay is barely 10 years old!

But the people who were making the big money in 1996-1997 on eBay — were they telling everyone how to do it? Probably not — they were too busy making money on eBay.

Now, there are at least a dozen books on how to start up an eBay business, tips from PowerSellers, etc. Now, for a lot of things on eBay, there are way too many sellers. It just isn't the bonanza that it used to be for the seller.

And now, with all of the books, newsletters, and seminars out there, so many people are trying to flip real estate that the deals are hard to come by. Builders around here are scrambling for any lot they can get their hands on. (This isn't true everywhere, but for a while houses were going up thousands of dollars a month around here.)

What does this all mean?

It's likely that the authors of these books at one point made money doing what they're writing about. Perhaps they still do. But maybe the growth of their moneymaking has slowed. So what's next for what they do? They write a book about it (they're experts at it, after all — or they can at least pretend to be in print if they're not), and sell it to would-be moneymakers, profiting further from their area of expertise.

The ideas in the book catch on. All of the low-hanging fruit gets picked very quickly because the number of pickers increases rapidly. Then it gets tough to make money doing what the books prescribe.

An advertisement from one of the freebie newsletters I get was giving a seminar to explain a method of internet marketing that had generated them tens of millions of dollars a year. They showed surprising candor in why they were revealing their secrets — something that most of the how-to-make-money books don't do. They said, in effect, that their competitors would probably figure out their internet marketing model in X months, so why not sell it to them?

They could see that they were soon going to get a lot more competition for their target audience — a large audience that they once had had mostly to themselves and an audience that they were making a mint off of.

They're still doing quite well as far as I can tell. But, they hit the jackpot with their method, the secret's just about out of the bag, and now they're making more money explaining how they do it.

So, if you see a book, a seminar, an e-book series, a CD set, or a newsletter on how to make money doing whatever, odds are good that it's going to be an uphill battle.