Parasitic Internet Marketing

Are internet marketers parasites?

I was posting something about article marketing on the webmaster talk forums and it made me think about something; something that I’ve thought about before, but it really hit me this time around.

As internet marketers – we’re all about automation. If we can automate every aspect of our business, then we have it made. So we think, anyway. Automation has good points and bad points, and for an example we’ll go back to the days when ’safelists’ were not only somewhat popular, they were very effective.

Safelist marketing

Several years ago, safelists were a “safe” and effective way to dip into email marketing. A safelist is a membership site that allows members to send commercial email to eachother. In exchange for the ability to send mail to other members, you have to receive email from the other members. It can be a bit more complicated than that, but in essence it’s just a group of people sending permission-based offers to eachother; i.e. not spam.

For me, safelist marketing worked. Not only did I use it, I actually wrote a safelist script & had a site that accumulated 200 signups per month for 6 months consecutively; After that I attached a MLM program to one of my safelists and had nearly 500 signups in less than 2 weeks, all the traffic originating with safelists – this is how I marketed my services & products; through safelists.

The great thing about safelists, at the time, was that there was no automation involved, or at least very little. People had to manually login to the safelist to send their emails and then they had to manually login to their email accounts and manually open the emails to click the credit links so that they could have credits to send their emails. It was effective because it was a largely manual process.

Automation ruined everything

So, things were going great, I was making some money (even though I didn’t know how to monetize traffic at all back then), getting lots of traffic – but then things started changing.

At first, it was the “automatic mailers” – where people could send ads through their safelist without manually logging in to their account. Since I ran ads throughout my site, it was an annoyance for me.

Then, came the “automatic credit link clickers” – now there were programs that would scan an email account and automatically “click” on credit links, which would essentially keep people from having to open the safelist emails. . . if they’re not opened, the method of advertising is worthless.

Finally – the self cleaning email boxes! Every x hours, safelist email inboxes would be purged, automatically.

So – if I can paint this image for you, the safelist advertising of yesterday was effective because people had to open the safelist email to click the credit links, and when the credit link was clicked it usually showed the senders website.

The safelist advertising today has automated email sending, automated credit link clicking and automated safelist email removal. . . Safelist advertising literally doesn’t need the human element anymore, which is why it is so ineffective today.

Automation = destruction

Some things are better left as they are. I’m not saying that internet marketers are literally “parasites”, I’m just saying that we tend to destroy things through our “automation” methods. It sure seems like a good idea at first, but in the end we just end up messing up a really good thing.

That’s my take on it.