You may not like a lot of the way affiliate marketing was conducted in 2009 but there's an awful lot that can be learned from the phenomenon that can be applied to ethical direct marketing.

For example, fake news sites like News3Insider.com have apparently worked incredibly well. But why?

There's not much new to report on there except what is likely obvious to experienced direct marketers:

1) Using advertorials instead of straight sales pitches (although...

I've been playing around with the demo tool at phash.org and finally came across a sales page that it was quite useful on as I was going through some sites after reading a Google Sneaky review from Howie Schwarz in which Howie was offering a bonus.

I was a bit surprised that Howie would be promoting the course considering some of the prior products the creator of Gneaky had put out and some strange activity about those products I'd already posted about in my blog.

But...

Some copywriters know how important it is to prevent leaks in their sales copy. But sometimes that concern can result in the violation of security and trust seals.

Most security and trust seals require that a website visiter be able to clickthrough on the seal on the site to the seal's own site and verify the authenticity of the seal itself. Others also add secondary ways of checking the legitimacy as I showed when discussing InternetRichesGuru.com here.

Of course...

I was recently preparing my statements for my CPA to do my P&Ls and I was a bit embarrassed by all of the software and ebooks I had bought that I didn't really need at the time. But why did I do it? Why did I plunk down the money to make those purchases?

When I first started my home business it might have made sense to explore various opportunities, but tody it makes much less sense. But over time, not only did it not make sense any more, but it actually hurt the scaling of the...

Some of the funniest "As Seen As" claims have been appearing in sales copy recently. I can't decide if the funniest one yet is "As Seen On Clickbank" or "As Seen On Twitter".

Why don't they just claim something else meaningless like "As Seen On the Web"? Since the claims are ridiculous and meaningless, perhaps the power is not in the venues that something has been seen on, but more in the motivational power of the words "As Seen on"....