Is purely Internet Marketing Ethical?
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For those of you who have been subscribers to this blog for quite a while you will no that I write a good bit about Internet Marketing. The main reason I started writing about this subject is because at the time I started this blog I was spending a lot of time on the Warrior Forum. There are some posts in that forum that offer some great ideas for marketing on the Internet, but there are also a lot of people on the forum who are just trying to rip people off.
You can go there just about any day and find a post talking about some Internet Marketing Guru and how they made millions of dollars on their last eBook. Most of these Gurus are selling some ebook or software that promises to make you millions if you will just follow the directions and take action. I’ll admit I’ve purchased a few of these products, but I did not make millions. I guess I’m just no smart enough or I did not follow the directions properly. Or it may have been that my morals would not allow me to take advantage of someone else, which is what a lot of these books teach. I’m not saying they all do, but there are some practices which I would deem as unethical. I’m not saying they all are pushing crap, but it does happen a lot more than you would think.
Of course I’ve always wondered a couple of things. If these Gurus are so great at building web communities and they have been building these since the web was an infant, then you would think you could find their name associated with one of the huge online ventures that have made millions or been sold for millions or billions. But outside of John Reese, you can’t really find any of these names associated with any really big popular sites. At least I have not been able to find any association. If I’m incorrect, will someone please correct me.
Now while I don’t doubt that there are probably thousands of websites these people own and operate, I don’t know of any really big popular sites. This tells me that most of these people own small sites that bring in a few visitors per day and they make their money in the form of a few pennies each day multiplied by the thousands of sites. In fact the few sites I have found show this to be the norm. Now while this may be a valid business model for some it seems like a lot of work when you could just build one large authority site, promote it like crazy and come out better in the long run. Of course this is not the main promoted business model promoted. The main idea of most Internet Marketers seems to be build a site with 10 or so rewashed PLR articles, promote it to a few directories to fool the Search engines into indexing it, spam your link through out the web to get a few people visiting the site and then do this 5 to 10 times every day. So you build small site after site registering a domain name for each one. Or you take a domain name, utilize some sort of site generating software or RSS feed and have the software create the site for you. You slap some adsense or Affiliate programs on these sites and hope for a few clicks and maybe a purchase. You can build thousands of these and earn some money from them. These seems really expensive to me. If you register a domain name with Godaddy you can spend $9 dollars per top level domain per year. Now you can get an unlimited domain hosting account fairly cheap, but the domain name registrations are going to cut into your profits.
Now once you have these sites built, you throw together an eBooks and build a sales page promoting the book. Put your book on Clickbank and wait for the sales to come in. Sometimes if the copy is good enough on the sales page, then the sales will come in. Of course then you talk others into promoting your eBook as affiliates then you can sell more. Now you don’t really care if anyone actually learns how to make money, you really don’t want them to become self sufficient. for everyone who actually learns how to make enough money to become self sufficient, the Guru loses a potential customer.
The one main rule of any selling business is to make the customer come back and buy again and again. The trick to be successful is to make the product quality just good enough to impose a level of satisfaction with the customer, but of the quality that the customer never needs to buy another copy or version in the case of eBooks.
All this may be acceptable for some but for me, I’m not sure if my ethics allow me to be associated with this type of business.
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Comments
This is exactly what I thought at first, that the whole thing was slightly dubious. And I agree, some are exactly as you have described but consider…
To be successful you have to either learn a number of different and mostly technical skills or pay someone to do it for you. Most people are cheap so they have to learn. Now pick any profession, for example a teacher (as I am). How did I become one? Did I buy a book or borrow one from the library and become a teacher?
No, I took courses. First I got my ‘O’ levels at school then I went on to college got a degree in Computing then got a qual in teaching. While getting the teaching qual (3yrs) I was “earning & learning” by teaching, put theory into practise. Since qualification, off hand, I can’t remember the number of additional short courses I have taken to improve my skill.
If you have any ethics at all, you will approach IM in the same way. IM is not just geeky stuff to be implemented, there is also psychology, creativity etc. Trying to learn everything all at once is not practicable hence the number of “bit-ebooks” and courses.
There are a lot of good free ebooks, but there are also some better paid for ebooks that would help you quicker or more efficiently. The hard part is ignoring all the latest-must-have-or you-die type products, which seem to becoming out more and more.
Yeah I think that’s the problem. People get sold on the whole get-rich-quick-in-your-underpants thing. Before I was in teaching I was in retail sales. I became the top salesman only because I was teaching the customers about the products instead of trying to sell to them. People appreciated that.
I’d tend to agree with you. I believe in free e-books, and that’s my ambition in 12 months time; but not only one, I’m thinking of a series - most probably free.
Original content is key (I know everyone keeps saying it) but I think it’s true and once I start to read a ‘typical sales page’ I turnoff and click elsewhere. All in all a think alot of people don’t care much about their readers when they do this.