Karim’s posterous

I've been reading the http://zenhabits.net blog for a long time. It's an excellent blog, written by a very talented and successful blogger, Leo Babauta. It's full of great tips on productivity, health, time management and personal philosophy. As I said, great blog. Recently I downloaded a free eBook written by Leo with some great tips for building up a solid blog following.

Ok, so far so good, no problem.

Well shortly after I submitted my email to download the eBook. I started getting email after email pitching a paid blogger education program from Leo and some associates.

Here's an example email:

This is a completely different Leo to the one I got to know through the Zen Habits blog. Don't get me wrong, I assumed I'd be getting some additional emails when I handed over my address for the eBook, but I didn't expect an incessant slew of hard-sales pitches for a blogger education system (something that sounds very sketchy in itself).

To be perfectly honest this has left a bad taste in my mouth, I think my perception of Leo and his work has been altered for the worse. I can certainly understand people monetising their work, that's what I do as a marketer, but I think when you have such a precious permission asset built up you have to be extremely careful how you use that. If anything it's a lesson. Leo is certainly not the first blogger I've seen turn all 'boiler room' when they want you to buy their book or sign up for their conference, and I still highly recommend both the ebook and his Zen Habits blog.

It must work. Why else would it persist, a fraction of Spam victims must be generating a sufficient income for the spammers to keep their dark art going. The thing is, the line between spamming and some high-pressure online sales/marketing approaches isn't very thick.

Think about pop-ups, we all say we hate them, and that they annoy us, but they must work. One study suggests that pop-up ads generate a click-through 13 times that of the standard 468 x 60 pixels banner.

What about promotions and sweepstakes? A lot of people consider this type of marketing crude and 'cheap' but it actually works. An online website-building software provider recently doubled the number of users trialing its software with a macbook give-away on Twitter (where it also increased followers by 10,000% in one week).

Asides technological solutions to the problem and potential alternative solutions to spam, we have to face the fact that as long as we're gullable enough to fall for spam and spammy advertising, they will no doubt persist.