SO My Space won $230 million in payout from the two ’spam kings’ Sanford Wallace and business partner Walter Rines…serves them right! Spam sucks, and is one of the worst forms of marketing, its actually amazing that people still think spam works, considering, the open rates and conversion rates for a spam mail, its also terrible for any company that chooses to use a spammer to promote their company as they’ll be associated with spammers. Affiliate marketing can help prevent spammers to so degree, if you consider that an action actually has to be performed on the clients site before the commission is paid, it encourages affiliates to really hone down and target ads relevantly, making spam a very in efficent way of marketing affiliate programs.

Wallace and Rines sent more than 700,000 messages to MySpace users, fooling them into visiting gambling sites or adult-rated pages. Disguised as comments from the user’s friends, the notes in fact contained advertisements that made the pair a small fee every time somebody clicked on them.

So these two Spammers were using CPC (cost per click) model of affiliate marketing…how does that work? Really its stupidity on the part of the companies that were willing to allow such a deal to take place in the first place…CPC is one of the most difficult forms of affiliate program to police and prevent fraud on, and really considering the user action that you pay out on is a click on the link, theres no real tangable result…why would any company worth their salt on the web would know that CPC is not a model that you want to use to deliver tangible results, its branding model not a results based model, and as such you wouldn’t use email for this, and even if you did you’d want to find out if the email list was opt-in (i.e. requested to be contacted with promotions).

companies like the one Wallace is the head of -Philadelphia-based spam giant Cyber Promotions. Are living proof that the online world is still a wild west where companies need to be very selective, do back ground research and be wary of offers that seem too unreal. With the price of affiliate programs, PPC and SEO ever raising it can be tempting for companies to go for cheaper options….the reality is that these cheaper options may not be any good…the old saying, Caveat emptor, Let the buyer beware, rings true.

If a company is even considering affiliate marketing, PPC or SEO, they first need to understand the mechanics of these models first, and research eacn company that they encounter.

For affiliate marketing this is simple. itemization of what they get for their money, who the companies existing client base is and who the members of staff are (are they well known in the industry for example), considering that affiliate marketing is commission based, it should be easy to suss out dodgy networks from legitimate ones, accountability is everything.

For PPC find out the technology, and the marketing process that they use to support a client, look at case studies and verify this with checks on Google.

For SEO this is simple..if an SEO company doesn’t appear on the first page of Google for the term SEO, then its not worth using them…after all thats their purpose…to get to page one of Google.

IF you want to read the news article about this Myspace case see here.