Hi! Long time no write. Sorry to all my millions of readers for the lack of posts. But as I have said before on here somewhere, i aint no writer.

Just something that has popped up again lately after i started to promote a new product. This product is in the gaming niche and if you are a bit of a nerd then you can find all that it tells you for $0 on the net (like pretty much all ebook packages but anyway). Being in the gaming niche there is a good chance that some hardcore gamers might find your review or whatever and proceed to try to tell you how much of an arsehole (I’m an aussie that’s how it’s spelt) you are for selling something that is freely available with about 10 seconds of pretty elementary Google…ing. (Googling?).

This happened again (has happened on many a youtube video) yesterday and continues today, when my review site was posted on a pretty high traffic gaming forum. When i checked this morning i had 7 comments waiting to be moderated and each and every one of them had some very colourfull language and a thoughtful link to a website where you can download everything for free.

I was kind of expecting this so in my review of the product i actually stated that you can indeed find all this info for nothing if you are prepared to look. This package actually is quite a nifty little bundle which offers quite a bit more which hardly anyone noticed it seems, but i think this is what saved me from more defamatory comments.

So i guess the point of this post is to remember, if you are promoting questionable products, don’t just copy the copy that the publisher offers you in their affiliate tools section, paste into an email or blog post and hope for the best. Have a think about what kind of people are likely to read it and how they might react. Not everyone is a stupid internet newbie and when they find you they will let you know which in turn can harm your sales if every one reads those comments.

Keep comments on but keep them moderated. Comments are an important part of blogs as they can offer testimonials on the products that you promote. I do sometimes let a few negative ones through but i like to respond to those and reassure anyone else that its not all a load of bullshit.

Today i tried something new, something you might say was a teeny bit blackhat, greyhat if you will, and i have discovered something that i never really had to think about before; I think i am a teeny bit ethically conflicted.

Without going into too many details, basically what I’m doing is posting classified ads that leads people to a link to sign up to an adult personals site to see my (make believe) profile (which they wont cos it doesn’t exist!). Every time someone signs up i get a buck. The idea isn’t new to me, and I’m sure plenty of you already know what I’m talking about, i just haven’t really given it a shot before.

I am just testing with one ad and so far have made $1.35. in like 6 hours. huhu. You can see how this might be profitable if you do it on a large enough scale. However, since coming home and checking the gmail account i discovered emails from real and genuinely lonely men wanting to show me the delights of a certain major city. That’s when it hit me: these are real people and i have just scammed them.

OK well i haven’t actually scammed them, I’ve not stolen money from them and I won’t me spamming them or selling their details for cash money (honestly), i have more kind of just tricked them but nonetheless i can’t help but think that they would be thinking they have been scammed by a scammy scam artist and now I’m going to Hell.

What do you think?  Maybe i shouldn’t check the email account and just watch the signups? My girlfriend actually helped me get over this a bit by saying that other people are scamming people way harder than this, which I agree cos I have actually been scammed out of considerable sums of cash in the past. Not just had my hopes of meeting a nice new girl on the internet dashed by some bastard on the other side of the planet .

So i’m working on a different approach. All i need to do is convince an 18yo bird to do a borderline soft core porn striptease that i can upload to youtube (possible put a donk on it dance video) with my affiliate link in and watch the $$$ roll in.  Who doesn’t have plenty of them just waiting for you to ask them that question?!

Anyway, the world of internet marketing is much more than just posting classified ads but this is the first thing that has actually made me think of the people on the other side of the transaction. I will be attempting to write more about the ethical practices of Internet Marketers as i think it is quite an important topic and there is not much written about it already. It seems to make it you might actually have to leave your conscience somewhere safe and forget about it for a while.

Until next time!