When I read must we piss in every public fountain by Dan Thies, I thought it was a great post. But at the same time, as an internet marketer you have to be pragmatic. Which is why I was unsurprised when 6 months later StomperNet sent out an email suggesting that readers could

visit propeller.com and open up 10 unique accounts using different usernames, email addresses, etc.

Use free email accounts from Yahoo, Gmail, etc. to open up the accounts.

Repeat the process for each of the 29 Social Bookmarking sites listed at SocialMarker.com

and then the next email claimed

Are they borderline? Yeah! We said they were. We pointed out in the email that you need to be careful when walking the line with social marketing. Do spammers use similar techniques to the ones Jeff outlined? I'm sure they do - Spammers are always on the lookout for new exploits... but they usually don't need to learn from legitimate marketing teachers to uncover them.

The difference between an ethical marketer and a spammer is a matter of intent. The ethical marketer seeks to profit by providing real value to real individuals. The spammer seeks only pure profit based on the laws of statistics - throw enough people at any offer, and someone will bite.

So you don't think you are telling people to be spammers when you tell them to set up 10 Propeller accounts? What exactly separates those "10 legitimate accounts" people from spammers? I would love to see an explanation about where that line in the sand is drawn.

If you are sending out an email offer for everything under the sun just because you need to trade publicity to be profitable, are you building a real business or actually providing any real value?

primarily what I got was sales pitch after sales pitch, and “new program” after “new program”, and far too many different forums that offered practically no participation by the original faculty members that were the catalyst to my joining.

Almost every internet marketer explains how other people are spammy, but what they do is somehow legitimate. When I was new and naive I may have bought that crap, but how can people claiming thought leader status still be dishing out such blatant lies in 2008?

I see that as silly. Techniques are either effective or they are not. And they carry an associated risk level. I chose to be technique agnostic because it is the only way you keep learning and keep growing faster than the market. Sometimes you only learn to appreciate the opportunity cost of risk after you get a site burned. But then it factors into future decisions.

At least once a month there is a story about how someone got caught spamming. The Guardian ran a story about how Matt Inman got over 100,000 links to a payday loan site by adding links in viral widgets.

That story did not appear because somebody spammed, it appeared because the marketing was so aggressive and overt. Anytime you have thousands of people embedding something someone is going to notice it. If it was done on a smaller scale it could have lasted for years. A few years ago, for about a 2 year period, one of the top ranked mesothelioma sites was there based on links syndicated with web counters.

Forbes sometimes writes stories about how SEOs are spammers and stories about how Google is clamping down on spam. And then they publish a bunch of cheesy lead generation pages on their site that are linked to nearly sitewide via a dropdown box that hides the links.

Do publishers need to keep content and ads separate to be legitimate, as demanded by this random commenter on a story about Ron Jackson working in a domain start up? No they don't. That is just the lie the media needs to push to be viewed as credible. Almost every popular website does reciprocal promotion and has editorial guided by their business interests. But when people can't follow their own advice and create profit, or they need to lie to just to make a buck, they have headed down the wrong path.

I enjoy helping people. But how I was doing it via endless emails was not working. I was worried that I might get some blowback when I changed my business model, so I could offer higher customer value. But largely the reaction was positive. I got numerous emails like this:

I have admired you and your work for a very long time, and not just that, but also your honest no-hype, no-crap approach to doing business online.

it's been my observance that some aspects of SEO and also 'net marketing' are so sleazy that it's not to be believed. even some people who started out 'legit' and made a bit of a name for themselves now have seemed to let themselves get sucked into the hype and associated with some less than ethical behaviours all to make money.

you know what is kind of funny? i keep encountering all these so-called experts, some in person, but most online, and i always ask them: "hey, did you get that book from Aaron Wall? you know, the SEO Book. what do you think of it?" and you know what? almost none of them have bought it. some of them even ask me, 'Aaron who?'. for me, you set the standard, so i find it really odd.

One member instant messaged me telling me "the community is like heaven for SEOs." I have learned a good bit from the forums too. I am surprised how well it has been working out so far. Are some of the suggestions considered spammy? Of course. Use the right tool for the right job.

Back to that topic of identifying spam. If you replaced the word spam with the word profit you would better understand how and why it is policed. Matt Inman's spam simply consisted of using push marketing, viral marketing, aiming it at a large audience, and embedding promotional value for other company assets in it.

When Google partners with large political parties are they actually looking out for your best interests? Google is using push marketing, viral marketing, aiming it at a large audience, and embedding promotional value for other company assets in it. Hmm. Sounds familiar.

Do you have a health records problem? Or is Google solving a marketing problem, helping pharmaceutical corporations push drugs at you based on your genetic flaws? If they are doing push marketing for large established bodies how can they expect anyone else to compete with them without using push marketing?

Build it and they will come...to someone else's site. Be aggressive and use push marketing, or earn 25% of your real market value. Almost everyone who tells you not to spam does not listen to their own advice, or changed their outlook AFTER they got a market leading position. But they didn't get where they are by following their own advice.

Brian Clark recently launched a great 5 part series on keyword research.

I get hundreds of emails a day, and am always behind on email. Recently I sent out emails to affiliates letting them know that I was changing my model, and let high volume affiliates know that I wanted to give them a free limited trial so they could see what they are selling. It only makes sense to have your best affiliates know what changed.

In response to my email to 3,000+ affiliates, my email load sharply increased. The people who were top affiliates typically sent an unassuming email "not sure if I am a top affiliate but I would love to take a look." At the same time hundreds of affiliates who had 0 or 1 sale ever (some even with 0 clickthroughs and 0 ad impressions) considered themselves high volume sellers and demanded a free trial. Friction. Uggg.

So then I had to tell those people no, and that the launch was going better than expected, and I wanted to ensure I was able to keep up with current community members. One of them told me that they were going to use something that sounded to me like "creative spammy marketing" to sell my ebook and I said that I preferred they did not. They responded saying that I am an elitist. In a short email exchange that person went from "a long time fan" to a person who "would never listen to anything I said again."

The problem is that it is easy to be misunderstood via email. And as soon as people pay you anything or establish any type of relationship with you, some feel they own you. Email is great for sending personalized messages to a few people to help get feedback and spread important ideas. Email is also good for mass-emailing people via autoresponders that do not get responded to. But email is not good for establishing lasting relationships with many people.

To be fair, I owe a lot to email. The first version of my sales letter was reformatted by a customer who liked the ebook so much he wanted to help me sell more of them. And the ebook itself was formatted nicely by another customer who I did a bit of consulting for in a work trade. And I met my wife via email before our first phone call. So I owe a lot to email. But not too many deep and meaningful relationships can not stem from emails when you have hundreds of people emailing you every day.

Any time your business model contains recurring access to you for a one time price, if you are a decent marketer, you will create more demand than supply, and eventually you get burned out by people asking 15 or 30 questions at a time. When there is no opportunity cost to keep asking people do.

A guy who was profiled in an "internet marketing success stories with multi-millionaires" book asked me about 100 questions via before I told him enough was enough. The same guy sold information as the main piece of his business model. I asked him if he valued his own time at $1 an hour, because if he did I could use some of it. I got no response. A year later he wanted to buy "affordable and reasonable" SEO services from me and I told him no thanks. I would not ever refer him to anyone because he was so selfish in our prior relationship.

It eventually got to the point where people were asking me so many questions to where I was getting emails like "where is adwords" and I would just send them a link to the associated search result. And some people who bought the book would never subscribe to updates but email me 5 times a year asking for the latest version. 5 emails a year adds up when you have to verify each account and 1,000+ people are doing it.

As more and more information gets commoditized the value of weak, quick, and fast relationships loses value. And if you have 20,000 customers who have no opportunity cost in asking you lots of questions, many of them will treat you like a search box. But since the seller is not an algorithm that does not work out to well for sanity. And if you send out too many emails it starts to feel like you are a high volume email deployer

The good news is that as the web ages and the market suffers further information pollution, the value of reliable trustworthy advice and quality service goes up. But to provide lasting quality service you have to charge recurring.

Here are some email hacks I have come up with to lessen email load...

• Automatically have your newsletter subscriptions archived and tagged...read them when you have time to.
• Unsubscribe from anything you do not read in 3 months.
• Do not provide email support for free stuff. Make them post feedback to your site.
• If people are really nasty and are not yet your customers do not respond to those emails. At best they waste your time. At worst, they waste your time, do a reverse charge, AND may put you in a bad mood.
• Do a quick pass through and wipe out anything that looks like spam.
• If you have common answers then prewrite templates for them and use cut and paste, modifying each slightly.
• Answer emails that are closely aligned at the same time.

I still need to work on making the sales letter better, but it is hard to have an optimal sales letter until you get a good bit of consumer feedback. Here is the sales letter for anyone wanting to join our private community and training program.

If you prefer to skip the sales letter and go right to the buy now you can find the ordering instructions here.

Our pricepoint is $100 per month, but the first 100 people to subscribe from this point on get in at $50 per month. We already have a few hundred members in the forum from people I invited to help get it started.

So I am beta testing setting up the SEO Book community and training program. A couple issues have come up so far, but generally stuff is looking pretty good. I am still working on fixing a couple details, but to get a preview of the training part you can go here. I am hoping to do an official launch in the coming week unless something major comes up.

As time passes I intend to make the training program richer and deeper and add lots of videos and other content to it. But you can kinda think of the online training program as being a high quality editorially controlled Wikipedia of SEO information, complete with an interactive community forum. :)