Pedro Sttau

I couldn’t agree more with this statement. If we think about it, truly successful companies are driven by something with far greater significance then profit. Google for example is driven by the the belief that information should be freely accessible to everyone, while Apple is all about designing beautiful accessible pieces of technology that happen to be computers. This is how modern companies operate, this is how every entrepreneur should approach an idea, making profit a natural consequence of a fantastic and powerful idea!

The answer is quite straight forward, because he simply tells you NOT too, over and over again. And yes, in case you are wondering it’s the disclosure issue again.

Let me just give provide some of the background so that everyone knows what I am talking about.

First and foremost, I have nothing against Shoemoney, I am using him as an example simply because he is one of the most straight forward people I have ever seen in this industry, making it very easy to user him as an example.

Jeremy believes that there is nothing wrong with “subliminal advertising”; that ethically there is no wrong doing in delivering a shinny review of a product/service with the sole objective of selling the product through a hidden affiliate link. To put it more blatantly, the idea is pretty much “believe in me if you want, but take note that I might just be trying to sell you something”.

I must admit that my first draft for this post was a complete an absolute bash of the way Jeremy conducts his business. I won’t be getting too much into it, mainly because I was rushing myself to conclusions, but the apparent moral aspect of the issue is quite obvious… or is it?

While I wrote the post something in the back of my mind kept bugging me, and its all goes down to the concept of freedom, Freedom of choice to be specific.
It’s just too easy to criticize someone that has clearly always been so opened with his business practices, especially when one of these practices seems at a first glance unethical and wrong.

So if Jeremy is the first person to publicly admit to his user base that many of his posts are sales driven, is he actually deceiving anyone? Is it really “subliminal” when people have been given a prior notice?

I don’t have a solid answer for any of these questions, but they really raised a lot of questions in my mind and in my personal work ethics.

Lets say you have taken a significant time from my life and invested it in a Blog, you work hard to build the a brand around it, and work even harder to keep the content fresh and valuable, but most importantly, you provide all of this free of charge. So the question is, is it really unethical that you profit from any method you chose to deploy, provided you are not actively deceiving anyone?

There is no doubt that Jeremy’s blog is a fantastic resource of information for both beginners and for mature Marketers, and the amount of free information that he puts out there is fantastic, but there is definitely something edgy in delivering content with the purpose of selling something that isn’t being sold in a blatant and flagrant way.

Would you do it?

My friend Nikesh talks about the Internet as a Global Economical revolution at the Institute of Directors 2007 annual convention.

One of the things he said that I really found curious is that all of the new successful Internet start ups always come about with two founders, Google, Youtube, Myspace, Skype, Facebook, etc…

Being in an Internet start-up myself with a partner with whom I identify myself a great deal, I can totally related to that and understand how this collaboration could be beneficial to a business concept and growth.

Just today I was speaking with a friend of mine who I ran a PPC campaign for that quite simply didn’t take off at all.

The campaign was very well planned out, the landing page was very carefully designed, the sales pitch was and very attractive, and we had plenty of ad variations that used different techniques to attract relevant clicks that eventually would convert better.

Along side this we ran a pretty aggressive market trends research to try and find out
What sort of Search Volume we were dealing with and how competitions we would be facing.

We picked some of the most generic terms and went along with a couple tasty niches that were found.

Everything seemed ready, so we launched the campaign.

I have to say, that quite possibly it was one of the worse case scenarios I have ever come across of something that quite simply didn’t stick to its market. Or in other words, the Market didn’t respond to any of our efforts to sell the service.

The Drop out rate from the landing page was staggering. And I’m not talking about a bad conversion rate; I’m talking about z e r o conversions.

We made readjustments in a rush to try and invert the state of things, but nothing, the High CTR 0 Conversions.

I felt that we could be at it all week and nothing we would so would make a difference.

Now, without wanting to sound too pretentious, I like to think that I know what I’m doing when it comes to setting up a good profitable PPC campaign completely focused on conversions rather then traffic.

The product/service that we were dealing with was a Work hygiene and Security course for students that had a 50% discount on On-line subscriptions.

So it seems that I have learned the hard way that I have to do a better job evaluating the type of product/service that is on his table. There are products/services that simply don’t sell on-line, and others…that don’t sell at all, no matter how hard you try.