By “recent”, I mean maybe up to the last couple of years or so. Let me start a little earlier than that.

When blogging became hip, there were programs (read: paid products) that teach you how to blog, how to write effectively, how to get your blog to be read.

And on the last note, website traffic became important. So there were programs (read: paid products) that teach you how to get traffic to your website. More importantly, how to get targeted traffic, because casual passers-by were next to useless for business purposes. Just look at all the traffic from Digg and StumbleUpon and Reddit and other social media sites. People come, look at your post, then leaves. That’s pretty much useless.

So creating an email list became imperative. You want to capture people’s email addresses so you can talk to them. If they sign up, then they want to hear from you. This is what Seth Godin would call permission marketing. But beware! There were some WordPress plugins that set annoying pop-ups that has a sign up box for people to put their email addresses. This pop-up happens either on finishing reading a post, or worse, on leaving a page. That would be “annoyance marketing”.

Then came teaching programs (read: pai… ok, you get the idea), that teach you how to teach a topic. The main one is Teaching Sells. The idea is that people will want to pay to learn something useful (and probably turn it into something profitable).

And on that note, videos were becoming popular, what with the increased bandwidth that most people have. And that some people like to see a person talking to them, instead of reading text or hearing audio files. So there was this product called Video Boss (I think). It teaches you (see previous paragraph) how to shoot, edit and upload a video. There were all sorts of information in that product, going so far as the minute details such as making your video visually interesting and lighting setups and so on.

Then there was the app craze, popularised by the iPhone. “Create apps. Become millionaire.” says some paid products (or to that effect anyway). If you’re a developer (which you probably are if you’re reading this blog), then be aware of what you’re creating. Create and sell apps if that’s your thing and that it’s working for you, not because someone says it’s the in thing.

Then there was the Kindle revolution, changing how people read. You can now self-publish on Amazon and push your ebooks out to millions of Kindles in the world. And make a bit of money from every ebook you sell.

The app thing and the Kindle thing have two things in common. They both relieve you of payment processing, and they both let you leverage an existing platform. Apple’s App Store for iPhone/iPad, Windows Store for Windows apps, Google Marketplace for Android devices, BlackBerry App World for Blackberry devices. And Kindle for well, Kindle devices.

Somewhere in those times, there was a need to know how to launch your product. I’m not talking about hype (or just hype anyway). I’m talking how to get sales from your product launch, how to get maximum impact. There’s this product called Product Launch Formula (by Jeff Walker) that teaches you how to do this.

I subscribe to many of these people’s email lists, so I get emails whenever whatever. Some are useful, some are interesting, some I just delete because it’s an obvious sales email (after you receive as many emails of such nature as I do, you can tell from the subject line or within a couple of sentences in).

There’s a point to all this. And I’ll tell you in the next post.