Has it occurred to anyone but me that affiliate marketing is just multi level marketing in the digital age? Back in the olden days before the Internet bubble popped I was involved with two MLM “opportunities”. One, pre-paid phone cards, I jettisoned the effort very quickly. The other, Primerica, I spent a little more effort trying to make something of it. I even got my series 63 license so I could sell mutual funds. The idea with Primerica was to find people to get them out of their whole life insurance policy and into a term life insurance policy with the savings going into a mutual fund. Commissions all around. Given that it was MLM if you could get people working for you, you’d get a cut of their juice as well. People were making money and actually helping dumbasses in whole life insurance. The problem was two-fold: You ran out of friends and relatives to bother to either be an associate or sell the shit to or you had to have the balls to call up complete strangers and sell to them. It sucked all around for me so I bailed. I found the whole enterprise embarrassing.

To me, virtually the same thing goes on with the guberus in Internet marketing. These people would do just as well in MLM as they would in IM. They may not have multiple downlines but they do end up with massive “sidelines”. The affiliate marketers. If they have their own product they can amass huge numbers of other guberus to pimp their product for them. If they choose to pimp another guberus crap they can send out the suggestion to their massive list. Quite the profitable circle jerk.

When I was with Primerica, my “trainer” suggested I tool around grocery stores or other similar places and start talking to folks. Ask them if they are employed and if they like what they are doing. If not, or even if so, would they like to make extra money? Then pitch them this bullshit. The same thing is what these folks are doing in IM but digitally.

The thing that makes IM much better than MLM is that when you have a list you can continually suck out of the well. You don’t have to depend on downlines to sell crap because you have a continual source of suckers willing to buy crap from the email list. Make sense? And your sideline will be more than happy to pimp your crap to their list as well.

It’s like a supercharged MLM-like scheme. I wonder how many of these guberus are refugees from the MLM community. They think like those tools that I knew in MLM. They act like them. They market like them. I’m pretty sure it’s why I don’t participate. It’s too much like the douchebags in MLM. But for successful MLM folks,  affiliate marketing must seem like a selling breeze.

No reason why I bring this up other than I have observed similarities that I found interesting.  There is no real difference in a slimy Internet marketing tool and one in MLM.

Email for Epic Traffic Systems dropped into my spam folder yesterday with a winning sales title so I decided to have a look. I clicked over and watched the marketing video. Your typical high def sales pitch for a new over-priced system/product that promises you traffic and riches. Groovy. You should have a look too because, this and the dozens of programs like them are why you will find failure in this business. It’s why competition will consume you.

I have no beef with ETS. The video for ETS is actually what you should be doing to create micro niche sites. There is no mystery or secret there. But the implementation of systems like ETS is just adding huge amounts of competition to the web sewers. Yes, I know there are millions of niches and there is enough for everyone to compete and blah, blah, blah. And normally if it was just dudes creating a reasonable amount of websites and getting normal amounts of backlinks it wouldn’t really be a big deal. But does anyone remember how hard it was back in ‘03-’04 to get in front of directory generated spam sites? They were one reason guberus  started preaching about niches. You couldn’t compete with the onslaught of big crap so you had to go for the little crap. Well there are tools that are making it potentially difficult to compete for little crap now.

ETS creates blog networks apparently. I only know what I watched in the organic traffic video. They discussed a way to set up what they called “micro site networks” manually with Wordpress-Mu. The following is a screen cap of one of the slides presented:

Sure, this is no secret. This is how folks create massive amounts of blogs quickly.  But apparently they will be automating this process. 30,000 remote blogs created. 30,000. You think running around collecting comment backlinks, bookmark links and writing an article for Ezine Articles will mean anything to an onslaught like this? There are probably dozens of programs like this to do the same thing. I dunno.

So how are you going to compete? Still think building a well-written fancy pants blog is going to matter? Maybe it will. Systems like this will certainly make your work a lot harder. Do I have a problem with using ETS? I don’t. But I lament that competing on the web has come to this mass generation of spam niche domination.

A lot of folks are going to use this system. Couple of thousand maybe? A hundred or so will probably actually do anything with it and few dozen are going to pound the hell out of the web sewers. I personally have no interest in spending a couple of hundred dollars a month not to mention the cost for domains (which they omitted  in the video) for dedicated hosting and building tens of thousands of blogs.

There is no doubt you can make money with this system. You can simply brute force your way to top Google rankings using backlinks from properties you control. It looks expensive. The hosting is not cheap and I don’t know how you square all the domains you have to buy. But this is what is required to keep up.

I guess I am naive enough to think that building a good site that people actually want to naturally link to will matter in the end. Systems like this come and go. They are great for a quick blast of cash. Will this last? I dunno. Do I care? Not really. I am simply going to plod along building a site here and there on things that I care about. Folks using systems like ETS can potentially rape the web sewers for eyeballs and clicks and make a boatload of fat stacks with anxiety built web properties all the while looking over their shoulder to see if Daddy G is watching the proceedings. I’m kind of done with that nonsense. These guberus are going to have to get rich off someone else’s monthly dime.

It makes my head hurt to think about using and maintaining a system like this. I don’t know if I’ll make another dime slinging content into the web sewers. But I simply refuse to use systems like this to further the depths. Not that I care about the quality of the web, I’m just sick of this kind of crap.