The internet marketing world has been all abuzz with “forced continuity” programs for most of the last year. These are either membership sites, physical newsletters, or simply thin air that marketers make you agree to pay for every month in order to get some once-in-a-lifetime price on a primary offer.

We are free to cancel the continuity membership at any time, but every marketer knows even people that hate the program will take three months to get off their duff and really cancel. In short, it confirms my worst suspicions: Even some really “big name” internet marketers don’t really care whether they are providing value or not.

In the late 80’s and early 90’s I ran my own software and technical publishing company and learned marketing to survive. I think one problem with the whole “internet marketing” field now is that the cart is before the horse: A lot of people want to get into marketing as their business as opposed to getting into marketing to market their business.

I fell into that trap for a while.

But that is bass-ackwards, if you’ll forgive the expression. It works for a few shmoes because there are so many easy marks looking to get-rich-quick or get-rich-easily. And of course it works for the consumate professionals like John Reese and Marlon Sanders because they truly are professional marketers.

I posted this question on Twitter the other day, “Which is better, 100,000 clients that pay you $10 each or a single client that pays you $1,000,000?”

I got the usual responses about the lifetime value of a customer, but what I was really driving at is that it depends in large measure on your personality and lifestyle. I have a demanding–but very rewarding–career that I’m not willing to leave yet (if ever).  Because of my career demands, I cannot handle even a few hundred clients that need technical support. I know I could outsource support, but the software I’ve written in the past was low-priced. One tech support call and I’m losing money on that customer.

Long-time Midnight Marketer News subscribers as well as those who’ve followed my activities online for a while are probably aware that I’ve re-released Sales Copy Confidential as a commercial product. It is no longer freely available anywhere on this web site.

Those of you who got it for free earlier may be wondering if it is worth $9 to upgrade. As strange as it sounds, I don’t really know. I tightened up the copy and made minor changes to chapters 1-5, and completely rewrote chapter 6, Passing the Test. The new sixth chapter is all about Google’s Web Site Optimizer, a truly magnificent bit of multivariate testing software.