After I and Inquisitr's Duncan Riley yesterday both expressed a bit of apprehension that the sometimes unscrupulous world of affiliate and MLM marketing might be making its way to the Twittersphere, John Reese (founder of traffic funnelling pyramid scheme BlogRush) decided to "set the record straight" on his personal blog. Unfortunately for John, much like in his marketing verbiage, he was unable to stay very far away from hyperbole and the ridiculous allegation that I didn't research my position before I promoted it.
Most of the rest of his post, in retort, reads like the marketing verbiage you probably remember from BlogRush and from the excerpts of his Twitter letter Duncan and I quoted. "I'm the best," and "I've made high traffic sites," and "I made all this money, and it was only my side project." I'm sure that impresses a lot of folks, otherwise how else would he have have sold all his "not-ebooks." His defenses of his actions seem to amount to "I'm rich, so I'm right." Bank robbers can be rich, too. That doesn't make them right either.
His thrust of his retorts seem to be that I'm some sort of anti-marketing hippie, and that my "lack of research" is a thorough indication that something is rotten in the state of Mashable (or perhaps even blogging entirely?). Anyone that has followed my opinion pieces in general, or who actually knows me, knows this is laughable, as I've many times defended marketing from undue government regulation and attack. What I (and most human beings, for that matter) hate with a passion are hucksters trying to pawn off on me something I don't need or have any use or interest in. This is something in which, unfortunately, the affiliate marketing world excels in. That isn't an indictment of everyone who might be an affiliate marketer, but it is an indictment of a lot of the more visible members of this demographic.
When you're infected by one piece of spyware, it often opens the floodgates for a host of other virus, malware and spyware infections. Similarly, you talk to one affiliate marketer, who may be a decent guy and wants to sell you something you need or sell something for you. Unfortunately, just by talking to that one fellow, it seems you soon have (no exaggeration) have hundreds of marketers beating down your door and flooding your inbox with ridiculous offers, pie-in-the-sky schemes, get-rich-quick scams and often outlandish conspiracy theories.
(Imagine that for a moment, and amplify it through the megaphone of Twitter-mania. Twitter could get really unbearable while affiliate marketers infiltrate, amass hordes of followers, and start trying to sell their ebooks on ways to infiltrate twitter, amass hordes of followers and sell ebooks on .... )
John notes my extreme dissatisfaction with BlogRush in his response to me, and promises me a full refund for my investment (a clever distraction of a promise, since the widget and "service" was free). He then goes on to boast that the BlogRush service garners more traffic than Mashable. His defense is to intimate that there was no harm done by hoodwinking thousands of bloggers into installing a useless widget. It's true that no actual money was lost, but it doesn't make it right, valuable to anyone (other than John and his team), or even honest.