Have you come across any interesting and/or useful iPhone apps lately?

A friend was showing me something called FourSquare the other day and I may well download it myself. It combines a social networking platform with a means of getting consumer reviews about all kinds of places that may be near to where you are.

I’m not convinced by the social part personally, but the rest sounds interesting.

Let me know if you are using it and what you think.

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Is Stealth Profit Machines, and the wave of similar big launches that have pushed the boundaries of what constitutes ‘legal, decent and honest’ in advertising the beginning of the end of Internet marketing as we know it?

You, like me, may be sick and tired of hearing about Chris Freville’s Stealth Profit Machines by now. I’m getting dozens of cloned emails a day from all the big-time affiliates – multiple copies from many of them.

The result is that Stealth Profit Machines has gone from nowhere to being very close to the the biggest selling product on ClickBank. It may even be at #1 by the time you read this.

Now, I have my differences with Chris about some aspects of the sales letter. I’ve expressed them here in Kickstart, and privately by email to Chris. I don’t approve of the ultra-hype and downright falsehoods that are so commonly used these days. It seems to me that copywriters are taking the easy way out, which is sad.

I’m also uncomfortable with the exit price offers, the endless upsells, downsells and cross sells, and the general feeling that all you want to do is buy a decent product but the owner has set a small dog to biting your ankles.

Tip: Don’t buy ANYTHING connected to Internet marketing without first trying to exit the sales page. More often than not you’ll be offered a cheaper price – sometimes for the same product, sometimes for a lesser offering, and if not, you can always go straight back.

Chris’ launch hasn’t been unusual in any of the marketing tactics it has used. Lot’s of big name affiliates motivated by the desire to out-sell each other, scarcity tactics, outright deceits justified in the name of ‘selling’, lots of controversy, crashed servers – you name it.

But what sets this one apart in one specific way is that behind it all there is a very good product being sold at a very decent price (whether you get the $10 discount or not).

That’s why I’m being a hypocrite and still promoting it. You can read my full review at http://imkickstart.com/course/reviews/stealth-profit-machines-warts-and-all-review/
If you want to create self-populating blogs with an absolute minimum of effort, for an incredibly low price, then SPM is just what you’ve been looking for. But take the sales letter with a big pinch of salt and don’t forget to try to leave before buying.

As to all the upsells, downsells and cross sells, none of them are necessary to make SPM work. They are icing on the cake that you can pick up if you want to.

One thing that has been pointed out to me and which I must pass on is that the content SPM pulls into your blog comes from EzineArticles. According the the very strict wording of their ToS, what SPM does with the articles breaks EA’s rules. I’ll have to leave it to you whether you are comfortable with that or not.

Maybe I’m naive, but I’m sure that a more ethical sales letter and upsell/downsell process would not have damaged its success. In fact, going by the number of people I’ve heard say wouldn’t buy because of the sales letter or the cloned emails, maybe it would have been MORE successful.

I’m sure that Chris and his top affiliates are a lot better off after this week. And good for them. I have no problem with people making money. And I have no problem with the launch marketing process, provided it is ethical.

But I suspect that Internet marketing itself is becoming poorer as a result of people getting tired of the ‘art of persuasion’ being overshadowed by the trend towards ‘market stall tactics’.

At what point did hypnotic marketing become hypenotic? And can we begin to remove the e before the FTC in the US and the ASA in the UK take notice and regulate all of us out of existence?

Not long, I suspect. And when they do, as always happens with government bodies trying to clean things up, they will probably be draconian in their approach and unreasonable in their regulations.

When that happens, a lot of people will be up in arms about the loss of their earning potential, but really, we all will have only ourselves to blame.

18 Comments »

No Internet marketing today, no trivia and no chit-chat.

This is way too important.

Long time readers of Kickstart will remember that a few years ago
I held an appeal to raise money for my Rotary Club to buy
Lifestraws.

Lifestraws, if you haven’t heard of them, are high-tech filter
tubes that allow a person to suck up water from any dirty,
contaminated source and make it 100% safe to drink.

Each Lifestraw lasts a person for up to a year and for those
stuck in disaster areas, where water is anything but safe to
drink, they save lives.

Each straw cost just a couple of bucks. The price of a cup of
coffee.

Right now there are 6 million people at significant risk in
Pakistan and the Rotary Club coordinating the buying in and
sending out of Lifestraws (over 100,000 have been sent worldwide
since the project began) has completely run out of stocks.

The last 11,000 in the warehouse have already been sent to
Pakistan and now the cupboard is bare.

My Rotary Club – and many others – is now organizing a fast
program of fundraisers and bucket collections to raise money to
quickly buy more container loads of Lifestraws.

The need is desperate – you know that I’m sure as the news in the
papers and on TV has shown the sheer unimaginable scale of the
problem.

We can’t help everyone, but every Lifestraw we can get to
Pakistan will help save a life. That’s all we can hope to do –
save one life at a time.

And you can help.

Please help.

I have reopened the Kickstart Lifestraw Appeal – you can find the
page at http://kickstartdaily.com/lifestraw

It tells you about Lifestraws – what they are, what they can do
and why we need your money so urgently. Both to help the
situation right now and to prepare for the inevitable needs the
next time nature strikes.

But more importantly, there is a PayPal donation button there so
you can send us as much as you can afford.

As this is a Rotary Club initiative, the money will go directly
to my club’s account – not to me – and as Rotarians never make
any admin charges 100% of your donation (after PayPal’s fees)
will go straight towards buying and distributing Lifestraws.

Please visit http://kickstartdaily.com/lifestraw right now.

And please give as generously as you can.

Many thanks,

Martin Avis

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