how to develop a gut feeling for profit

We often hear about a businessman having a gut feeling about a particular enterprise. This explains how some people can make money from an opportunity, and the rest of us don't.

A gut feeling is easily developed. All you need to do is read a lot, mix a lot, and constantly experiment with different opportunities. After a while you get a feel for what works and what doesn't. So here's the point of this post...

I figure there are two types of people who make money on the internet... or for that matter in any media. The first is proactive, action related, a fast mover. They tend to jump on opportunities as they first develop, and make big money until the trend quickly drops away.

The second--which is more my type... waits to see how a new trend develops, and if it looks profitable then climbs (cautiously) on the bandwagon. There can be much profit in both setups... just depends how quickly you want to accumulate the experience and financial benefits.

Which works best? Here's an example...

Over the years I've bought a lot of products, and looked at a lot of opportunities. In my business - e-book publishing - the current trend is to write articles with a byline and link, and post them on article directories. As the articles are taken and published by other entrepreneurs who need them, the link acts as a powerful search engine benefit... pushing your web site higher and gaining more traffic.

I've always thought that duplicate content produced this way would ultimately act negatively against the writer. So in the six months to a year that the article trend has been active, I haven't done anything about it.

While I might have lost the short-term opportunity, I'm actually better off.

What I figure will happen is this... the search engines will act to reduce the ranking position of web sites which have duplicate content pointing to them.

This means if you happen to get to number 10 rank in Google because of all the articles you have written and the promotional back links you gained, you will see your position drop as Google downrates your importance.

Multiple articles will actually act as a negative influence.

So now we wait to see whether this will happen. Call it gut feeling, or experience?

If so, it means that the long-term strategies I've been doing for many years are still the best. In the meantime I have a bunch of largely useless short-term products sitting on my hard drive!