When I started this blog I said that product reviews would be part of it.
Some of the reviews have included links to participate and/or purchase because the concept was appealing and contributes to one of the other major themes of this blog: discovering ways of establishing independence.
Inspirational and motivational speeches have their place, but so do concrete
actionable strategies.
If your receptors are continually monitoring, and I’m sure they are, you’ll
notice that describing these products/services brings awareness of trends in
marketing on the Internet; relationship marketing. If you are looking for ways
to engage customers or advising businesses on how they may increase sales, you might want to utilize these strategies, or take as inspiration to invent one.
The option of most offers is to promote as an affiliate yourself, if you so choose.
Others are for tools and resources that help further business goals.
Those are the kinds of offers that fit the objectives of this blog. Helping
people and making money don’t have to be polar opposites.
It would be great to get substantive comments on these entries and product
offers. I recently got feedback external to this blog on one of the posts about
a social networking discount coupon model with a tiered commission component.
The moderator of another forum told me that a link to this blog would not be permitted in a post because it’s members had expressed disapproval of “multi-level marketing advertising.”
What I felt had been overlooked was:
a.) the link was to the general DE blog/welcome entry
b.) this particular offer does not follow the “traditional MLM model” of paying
anything for membership, and “incentives” for “recruitment”
c.) there is no marketing of any other add-ons like training materials, seminars, etc.
It was just lumped into the “same old” MLM category. I don’t know how much these most visible posts (at the time) were responsible for this judgment, or whether the conclusion was reached despite the other topics. One written 4/29/11 focused on the advantage for businesses using Social Dish, but I don’t see how a write-off as “just another MLM” can be made from that alone, and the entry directly before that clearly explained “b and c” above.
I would love to hear from readers what you think about this situation and what the approach of DE is in general – do you think marketing is the only intent in some of these reviews?
