Need to stay away from pushy marketers if you are a consumer and try not to sell wrong products to buyers if you are a marketer.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. I really take a good look at products and often do analysis & research on the ‘results’ said products claim.

In all honestly, most IM products pitched involve ‘spammy’ or questionably unproductive practices that do nothing (or detrimental things) for SEO or promotion.

What really irks me is when someone has a clean reputation and their products are very good, but then they go and ruin it by pitching crap IM products.

It’s obvious what they’re doing… not actually checking into the products they are promoting. They simply accept a JV and then batch out a big pitch email without knowing what it is they are promoting.

They often use a claim ‘a friend of mine’ launching X product. Everything thing my ‘friend’ launches is quality and blah blah blah…

Seems like everyone is a ‘friend’ in the world of IM relationships.

Seriously, i’ve looked at a LOT of products, and the ones that make my individual ‘cut’ are rare. Often, they are NOT well known and a bit more expensive then their competitors (but not always!)

At the end of the day, ANY TECHNIQUE or PRODUCT, that becomes popular & utilized by logic becomes ineffective. Most products are spammy and the search engines pick them up once they become wide spread enough and nail whatever ‘tactics’ they use.

Rick

I wound up cancelling my subscription a few months later because I found I wasn’t getting anything out of it. To be fair, that’s mostly because I was *very* busy during that period and simply didn’t have the time to plow through all the stuff in the “back office” and do all the things he said to do on a week-to-week basis.

In fact, I have found this to be true of “membership” sites generally. For me, anyway. They’re great for the guru because he gets “residual income” from them. But they don’t “work” for me. Not unless it’s something like FreeTrafficSystem where I pay so much a month to use a software platform that makes me more money than it costs me.

Anyway, after I stopped paying him for the privilege of not getting anything out of my subscription, I kept getting emails at such a relentless pace that I, like you, finally unsubscribed from those, too … something I don’t ordinarily do. Normally, as I said above, what I would have done is make a rule in OutLook to automatically route them to my “Possibly Maybe Look At Someday” sub-folder under my Junk Mail folder. After all, if nothing else, they’re excellent examples of what *not* to send to your list!

The thing that bears keeping in mind, though, is that these marketers are probably sending all these emails because, like pop-up subscription boxes, “they work.” At least, to a degree, they do. Or these marketers wouldn’t keep sending them out.
Stands to reason, right? Their game plan is obviously to bring newbies into their list through various types of advertising, milk them for all they’re worth, and replace every one that unsubscribes with ten more … the “revolving-door” method of marketing.

But there are a few marketers out there who do it differently, who only send out emails once or twice a month. And who do their level best to make their content worthwhile. Their emails are a treat to receive and a delight to read. In fact, I’m subscribed to one where I actually pay every month to receive communications of this calibre, and I count myself lucky to be privileged to do so. It’s a whole different thing, when information you’re looking forward to receiving comes right straight into your inbox, without you having to click on some link to go to some blog to receive it, or remember to go visit your membership site to get it.

So I would say, I guess, that when our turn comes to put on the “guru” hat, the best thing we can do is remember The Golden Rule — “Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You” — and treat the subscribers of our futures lists as we are learning here in this post how subscribers want to be treated.

Warmest Regards …

Elizabeth

P.S.

One last thing I might mention:

Guru-class marketers go to “summit” meetings where they learn a whole bunch of stuff that they take home and try out on their unsuspecting site/blog visitors and email subscribers. I remember a time a couple of years back that is sometimes referred to now as “Black October” where people unsubscribed en masse from marketers’ lists. One of the speakers at the internet-marketing summit conference they had attended had obviously talked about how much money could be made from joint ventures — “you contact your list about my product and I’ll contact my list about your product” — and they all came home and put it into practice … with disastrous results in the form of a mass unsubscribe.

What they forgot to take into consideration, you see, is the fact that many of the people who are subscribed to *their* lists are *also* subscribed to *other* marketers’ lists, and that getting multiple pitches for the same product was just simply unsupportable. We all unsubscribed! To everything! With a vengeance! “Take that … click! And take this … click!”

And then what happened next was those of us who were left started getting emails about how important it is to be *very* selective as to your joint-venture partners!

Get a life! Some marketers must think we are just plain stupid and selling his list to other marketers just isn’t acceptable.

Couldn’t agree more. It was while I was clearing out my inbox and unsubscribing to all and sundry that I came across your email which linked to this post. As a relative newbie my most difficult problem is trying to decide which marketing system to use. I have been collecting ‘free info’ for a while and I find there are so many ways with everyone and his dog promoting the whole world with guaranteed success if I just pay $49 – $79 – $97 etc

I really like the idea of ‘set and forget’ so that I can build up several income generating sites with out losing track of what I’m doing.

Today lots of people have lost a subscriber but those providing me with good info and comming across as ethical are welcome in my inbox, and who knows one day I might even make some money.

Keep up the good work Josh.

This is one of the reasons I’m a regular around here. You tell it like it is.

I make no apologies for providing valuable products to people who need or want them but at the same time I’m aware that being an offer harlot is not the way to go.

Your blog provides valuable content and IMHO that is your giving part. Having said that, this is a business. You and I are in business to not just earn a living, but to do it with integrity.

By the way, you didn’t have to give away your $5/day e-book but you did. That speaks volumes.

All the best,
“The Mad Guy”