I’m sure that anyone who has spent a fair amount of time online doing any sort of marketing and advertising has been virtually assaulted by emails with almost identical headlines expounding the virtues of Bulk Email.
Obviously the people sending these messages believe in the bulk system since they happily overload our email inboxes on a daily basis. However, I’m very curious as to how successful they really believe they are, or will become, in their chosen business.
After investigating this particular “system” I can’t say I was at all surprised by what I found. The system comprises itself of two basic parts – one, you are supposed to recruit others to join under you and two, you are supposed to apparently make money emailing to millions of strangers.
Some of you may know that a good portion of my online business is providing information to newbies on the internet about things to avoid, and of course resources to take advantage of. After checking out Web Fisher I knew I had to spread the word.
This particular program, Web Fisher, provides some of the most complicated, non-reader friendly information I have seen so far! They even admit that it takes time to figure out but, they assure us, it will all be worth our while.
After figuring out how to navigate this strange web site, the first section they want you to study is why bulk email is legal. They quote laws paragraph and section as to when Congress deemed it acceptable to annoy people with massive numbers of emails, and they insist you add this message to each of your bulk emails going out. Along with this disclaimer, you are also instructed not to use any URL that can be traced back to Web Fisher…gee, I wonder why?
Web Fisher also insists you use some new “blind” sites that you can set up for free – “just in case you are accused of spam” and your site is shut down! They are kind enough to provide all the instructions and HTML for you to accomplish this.
Once you have set up your expendable web site, you are now ready to Fish for your new email addresses across the internet, as well as further spread the word about Bulk Email by copying their pre-written sales letter and sending it to anyone you can find.
Lists are also provided that will bring you to a myriad of classified ad sites where thousands of unsuspecting people have provided their email addresses in order to sell their wares.
To make this thievery even easier for you, software is provided so that you can literally harvest hundreds of addresses with a few mouse clicks.
I actually devoted an entire rainy afternoon to this process a few weeks ago to get the real picture of what they expect people to do. Sure enough, I easily collected over 7,000 email addresses in less than three hours! However, once I really looked at what I had in this collection it was clear that no one in this list was ever going to become a customer of mine!
This is a sampling of what I “harvested” in one sitting: cheappornonline@ —- weonlywantchicks@ jesusiscoming@ dontusethisemail@ tooyoungforsex@
I’m sure you get the picture…
Perhaps the premise of WebFisher is that if you email a million people, you have a decent chance of finding at least a few customers. If you can do this without getting your ISP shut down, or your own web site – which can easily be determined if you are using an autoresponder to send out your emails… you’ll be lucky.
BUT the time involved in putting this bulk list together and maintaining it is outlandish. Forget the fact that this all borders on illegal activity – it’s just foolish to try to enlist thousands of WebFisher followers who daily send out the exact same email messages, all to exactly the same lists of people – and expect anyone to make a penny.
It’s a shame that so many newbies are taken in so quickly by these programs that promise success while making it impossible to accomplish.
Marie Quaglia, CEO, EcommResources marieq@ecommresources.com
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