Have you ever heard of William E. Bailey? I have. Never met the man. But I knew people, when I was younger, who had been involved with the direct sales company Bestline Products, which Bailey founded in 1966. Mr. Bailey — who sold the company to Jerry Brassfield in the mid-1970s — was as close to a cult hero as anyone who has ever influenced my life in any way.
I was given the opportunity to listen to some of his motivational tapes by one of my first mentors, a man whom I will discuss only as much as necessary in this article. Bestline Products and other companies were taken to task in the 1970s by the U.S. government and one or more states, as well as a number of private parties who filed one or more class action lawsuits against Bailey, Bestline (or similar companies with which he was not — so far as I am aware — not affiliated), various officers, and regional directors, etc.
In the 1960s multi-level marketing companies sprang up around the United States. They offered cleaning products for homes and businesses, nutritional products, and maybe personal accoutrements. At some point, for example, Bestline (or its successor, Better Living Products) was associated with Diamite Corp., which sold jewelry (some darned nice jewelry, from what people told me). Their big item when I heard about Diamite was an industrial-grown diamond that had a hardness around 8.0 (natural diamond is measured at a 10). I think only industriall-grown Moissanite is now harder but don’t hold me to that. I’m not an expert on man-made gemstones.
If you dig deep enough, you’ll find a few references on the Web to various lawsuits, settlements, criminal charges, and massive numbers of people who paid money for distributorships, products they could not sell, and other related topics. The direct connection to me is that I learned about sales and motivation from a former Bestline Regional Director. He was one of Brassfield and Bailey’s top guys in the field. The man made a lot of money.
I knew I would never equal his retail success when he told me how he acquired his 2,000 customers. Every time someone left the sales organization he had built up, he swooped in and took their customer cards and started calling people. After several years of motivating “salespeople”, selling distributorships, and learning how to become a great motivational speaker (he could work a crowd and wow lots of folks in one swell foop), he had enough retail customers in his portfolio that he could honestly tell people he was earning thousands of dollars each month from those retail customers.
He also spent about 17 months working his way through a government nuclear energy complex, starting out by selling a 5-gallon can of soap to one department and asking for referrals. He eventually reached a point where he was selling — about every 2 months — a 30,000 gallon railroad car to that facility. “What does a nuclear energy complex do with 30,000 gallons of soap?” I asked. The answer astounded me.
I’m sorry to say that many years later I read a news story which said the nuclear complex had been found in long-term continuous violation of regulations concerning how it should clean up radioactive facilities. I inferred a connection to the old soap sales but I don’t know enough about what happened to feel comfortable providing details.
In any event, I spent more than a year learning how to read crowds, how to take control over rooms filled with people, how to do public speaking — how to pitch a multi-level marketing plan to strangers who were just looking for work. I also sold soap, although I did not become rich doing it. My parents let me do it because it kept me out of trouble.
So what does all this have to do with SEO? Well, let’s just say that I had a very powerful deja vu experience today when I was browsing YouTube. I was looking for “SEO videos” to see if anyone had published anything interesting (not really — it looks like only Matt Cutts and Chris Zaharias have anything useful to say, though there is an East Coast SEO firm that has some of the cutest girls in the business on its payroll).
I did come across one promotional video that piqued my interest. Some spammer has apparently been selling his secrets at seminars. He tells people how to create a million pages of “white hat” content from data feeds for affiliate programs. His presentational style is energetic, motivated, engaging. Late-night informercials have nothing on these guys. You have to have gone through the classic multi-level marketing experience to understand where they get their well-practiced pizzazz from.
Men like William Bailey and Jerry Brassfield (who was the very first Bestline distributor) really did sell soap to people. Bailey sold it to distributors and Brassfield sold it to — well, I don’t know what his retail sales were like before he bought the company but everyone said he was simply amazing to watch.
Still, every time I see someone selling a video or book that reveals their long-kept wealth-producing secrets, I wonder why they feel compelled to sell their wealth-generating formulas rather than continue to rake in the bucks for themselves. Maybe it’s an ego thing. They’ve made millions selling soap, jewelry, 800-calls to porn lines, real estate — whatever. Now maybe they just want the challenge of helping millions of people become wealthy.
You should, by the way, read every one of those links I provided at the top of this article, including the one on Diamite. See how many of its sales organization members really make thousands of dollars per month. The largest sector make about $100 a month. I read somewhere recently that the average AdSense publisher also makes about $100 a month. Hey, I’m a little better than average. Guess I learned something after all.
Still, this “white hat affiliate SEO” video really piqued my interest. This guy is telling his seminar attendees that he makes millions on the Internet — that his software (which he didn’t write but got from someone else) generates 1,000,000 “white hat” content pages based on affiliate program data feeds.
Now, with 30 years’ programming experience where I’ve done some pretty intensive data recovery, text parsing, database merging, record-generating application development that moves hundreds of thousands and millions of data things around on disk drives, I feel pretty comfortable doing the old “generate a Web page collection from templates” thing. I’ve been doing it for years with my forum archives.
I’ve never yet met an affiliate program data feed that wasn’t hosed. But maybe that’s just my bad luck. Maybe that’s just my inability to understand how to write really good, bullet-proof code. Years spent developing fuzzy logic applications and pattern analysis tools haven’t done me any good.
So Mr. Millions-on-the-Internet says anyone can go out, grab some third-party software, and generate 1,000,000 rich-content pages from merchant program data feeds. And it’s all “white hat” — nothing sneaky. The pages he shows in his presentation look good. Wish I could code that well. Lots of pictures. Lots of links. You know the drill.
So, I was sitting there, looking at this video, reliving the wild days of my youth, wondering, “If I erase all but ten percent of the circles on the white board, does it become believable?” (You have to understand that one of the secrets to multi-level marketing is painting a grandiose picture with huge promises and then taking away 90% of the promises so that what’s left seems both realistic and achievable).
“Circles on the white board” refers to your sales organization. You start out by recruiting one friend this week. Next week you recruit another friend, and your first friend recruits a friend. At the end of 16 weeks you’ve got a heck of a sales organization, you’re a General Distributor earning overrides, and everyone is well on their way to doing $1.2 million a month in sales. Soap sales. Household soap sales. Sound ridiculous? Of course it does. But would you believe just 10% of that? That works out to 1.6 friends per person. So all you really need is two friends.
Now do the math: this week I recruit two friends. Next week they recruit two friends each. The third week those four friends recruit two friends each. After 30 weeks, 1 million people have joined your sales organization.
Maybe Mary Kay had 100,000 people (10%) in her sales organization, but how many of her sales leaders had that kind of group? How many of those sales leaders’ protoges had that kind of group?
Motivational speakers don’t sell products. They sell excitement, good feelings, hope, and the promise of a better tomorrow. The best motivational speakers (guys like Bailey, Brassfield, and Jim Rohn) all have one thing in common: they are indeed successful. Many of them are millionaires.
Most of them make their money by selling motivation, not by selling soap. I’ve always hated going to sales rallies and seminars because they often turn into what I call “rah-rah sessions”. Inevitably, the year’s best-performing rookie is brought up on stage, given some award, and paraded around as an illustration of the success that can be accomplished through long hours, hard work, etc. (Maybe it’s just more of my bad luck but through the years every time I’ve had the chance to see one of these WunderRookies I’ve asked how they had such good first years — every one of them knew the right people, had the right connections — they were not just average guys off the street.)
Mr. Bailey was given a Horatio Alger Award in 1972 (before the feces hit the whirling blades) for teaching and motivating young people. Hard work drove him out of the soap business in 1974. The Federal Government drove him out of sales altogether in 1995.
So, I have to ask myself: do I want to buy an eBook, or a print book, or some DvDs, or video tapes, or video files, or whatever from someone who is going to tell me how to create 1,000,000 “white hat” content pages from merchant data feeds? If this guy is so successful with this stuff, why is he selling his secret? Why does he need the money? Is this somehow supposed to separate the real marketers from the cheap, scuzzy bottom-feeders who don’t want to pay up for real value?
There is something to be said for motivational speakers.
I’m not sure what it is, but I’m convinced they’ll offer to tell you for a fee.
In any event, you have to ask yourself, “Can 1,000,000 auto-generated pages of Web content really be ‘white hat’?”
Could I generate 1,000,000 pages of content today? Easily. I actually have the software to do it. It works well because I wrote it. But I don’t have 1,000,000 pages of content. Maybe I should. Problem is, I hate fixing broken merchant data feed files. And the sleazy merchants won’t leave the data alone. They’re constantly discontinuing products, changing prices, renaming things, altering descriptions, etc.
You have to download fresh data feeds every month and rebuild all those files. Trust me, I’ve been there. I got sick of that. And I wasn’t building 1,000,000 pages, I was just building a few dozen. Maybe I just picked the wrong topics. After all, I don’t know everything. I make mistakes.
But I do earn more than $100 a month from AdSense and other revenue streams. That’s without creating any content, really, that is intended for monetization.
It seems to me there are three kinds of Web sites that need 1,000,000 pages of autogenerated content:
- Merchant sites that maintain their own inventories
- Affiliate sites that are driven by datafeeds from merchants
- Made-for-Ad sites (MFAs) that just grab content for the sake of feeding the context spiders
Mr. Millions-on-the-Internet says he relies mostly on Blogger and Wordpress to set up his blogs (this is another strategy he sells). You know, I’ve watched Blogger blogs get indexed in Google Blog Search and then go into suspension (reported as spam, apparently) within minutes. Saw another one go belly up today.
So, yeah, I’m sure there are spammers who get past the radar all the time. I occasionally come across their scraper blogs and see all the pretty ads I’m supposed to click on. With a Google or Yahoo! Alert and auto-posting from email, you too can become a Mushblog spammer.
And I didn’t charge you a dime for that technique, did I?
I could work with our merchant friend and show him how to get his 1,000,000 products indexed and findable in the search engines. I suppose I could do it with our affiliate farm friend. But affiliate farms are a dime-a-million. I run into them all over the place. So are MFA sites.
You have to ask yourself: if 1,000,000 people create 1,000,000 “white hat” pages each, how much money are those people making? With just 1,000,000,000,000 pages on the Web (which is, what, 25 times more than there are supposed to be?), how many paying click-throughs do you think you’ll get?
Yes, there are people who make money with Web spam. Some of them brag about how much they make. But assuming you can pick the right 1,000,000 queries to optimize for (and just to give you some perspective, Google said last year that they have never seen 20-25% of each month’s queries — that works out to about 800 million previously unused queries for May 2007), each query only has 10 listings on the front page. If there are 1,000,000 people out there creating 1,000,000 “white hat” pages each, they’re competing with you.
They’re looking for those right queries, too.
They’re buying the same software you’re being told to buy.
They’re using Blogger and Wordpress.
They’re working with the same merchant datafeeds you are.
Now, maybe it isn’t as gloomy as all that. Maybe there really are fewer than 1,000,000 people trying to become millionaires on the Web.
Would you believe 10%? Would you accept there are probably no more than just 100,000 people out there creating 1,000,000 “white hat” pages from those blogs and data feeds?
Does that sound like so much competition to you?
How does the “white hat” content look now? Think about it.
Better yet, ask yourself one final question: How much money did those estimated 100,000 savvy Internet marketers pay for the secret to success?
Now do you understand why there are guys out there selling their formulas for fortune?
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