Well, Mike pointed out that the three "rapid fire" posts I did earlier (see below and read the comments on each one) may be because of pent up rage. I agree with him. However, that rage is not because of something that happened to me personally, but what I see happening to others.
Anyone who strives to be a leader or a public figure at the top of their niche, has to realize that there's a certain responsibility that comes with the position. When you become recognized and 'looked up to' by dozens or hundreds of customers, or thousands of eager beginners, that's not just an opportunity to make money. It's an opportunity to steer those people in the right direction, by leading.
All too often, we see new products emerging that are nothing more than the latest fad, or a reasonable facsimile. If people just read the salesletters for these products then went and read the terms of service for the sites they claim to abuse they'd understand.
For example, there's been a flood of "Blog and Ping" software and services offered lately. These things spider your autogenerated sites, or take snippets of your sitemaps and automatically post the links to Blogger.com blogs. The idea is that since blogger pings weblogs.com, plus you subscribe to that blog's feed with your My Yahoo! acct, your links and pages will get spidered almost instantly by the major search engines.
Here's an example of a few of those blogs:
http://scotch-tape.blogspot.com/
http://piano-square.blogspot.com/
http://air-bed4u.blogspot.com/
http://roof007.blogspot.com/
If you'd like to see more examples of this blog spam, which has prompted Blogger.com to add steps to combat automatic posting, jusg go to my friend Lynn Terry's 'legitimate' blog at http://clicknewz.blogspot.com and start clicking the "Next Blog" button in the upper right corner of your browser. I gusrantee you'll run across at least 2 or more of these blogs for every 10 clicks you make.
Is this any way to teach people to promote their sites... by spamming?
When I hit the "Publish" button for this post I'm writing now, I'll be Blogging and Pinging 41 sites - for free. I didn't need to open my wallet to a guru, I didn't abuse a free service and I didn't risk getting any of my sites shut down or blacklisted.
Next on my list are the site generators. Yes, I fully agree with Mike that the creators and marketers of the first one or two of these software packages may not have intended for their products to be used to flood the internet and search engine results with repetitive nonsense pages.
But what about some of the other marketers who jumped on the bandwagon and had software created or cloned to take advantage of the people addicted to this sort of thing? Is this ethical? Is it right to openly tell people in a salesletter that your software allows you to remain anonymous by masking your IP via open proxies, or that if your sites got banned with the latest software, yours fools the SE's in some mysterious way?
Then there's the RSS and content rotation software that freshens your pages to encourage more frequent and deeper spidering. Excellent idea by the way. Problem is, the creators of that $149 software or $70 a month service don't tell people the same or better results can be achieved with free or GPL scripts available at sites like http://www.hotscripts.com. Want your pages updated with RSS feeds? go to http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/docs/download.php and download and install CaRP. There's a learning curve but you can master it all in a weekend.
Want a script that updates your site by rotating content or article snippits and links? Try "Simple Random Frase includer" available free from http://hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/Randomizing/Random_Text/index.html.
You see, my previous rants were about (some) high profile marketers tricking people to make money from them. By doing so, these people are teaching people either directly or indirectly that it's ok to take advantage of, abuse, pillage and plunder other people and services online for their own gain - without providing anything of value in return.
lets see. In this post, I pointed you to 1. A way to legitimately blog and ping - min. $69 savings. 2. $1000+ savings if you stick to one site generator and not buy the next new thing. 3. An RSS feed script $97 savings. 4. A content rotator script $149 savings.
Hmmm. I just saved you $1300++
Invest it in hosting, domain names, nice looking site templates from http://www.basictemplates.com and if you don't want to write a bunch of articles or content yourself, go to your local university or community college and see about hiring some students to write for you.
They'll appreciate your money a lot more than most of the guru's.
more...Internet Marketing Explained Click Here Now To Learn How To Have An Online Business of your Own!Originally Posted on 8/9/2005 9:32:17 PM
Content source: http://www.ebizreporter.com/arc/2005/04/im_not_mad_at_a.html
