Channeling Billy Mays…

I couldn’t pass up making this prospective comment a post, particularly when the same pitch was made to me in an e-mail earlier in the week.

Hello,

I browsed your site and it’s a well made informative site. I have a good offer for you from http://www.ovlg.com/affiliate/.

We are a leading law firm in USA with attorneys in almost all the states. We are looking for people interested in debt consolidation / debt settlement and we have an excellent affiliate program for you.

The highlights of this program are:

1. FREE registration.
2. You put up a banner or text link or lead sign up form on your site and send traffic from your site to OVLG.
3. We will pay you $25 for each contactable lead.
4. We try to contact maximum 7 times over phone.
5. Detailed Control Panel to see the visitors, leads, revenue….

Join OVLG Affiliate Program Today and earn!! Our present affiliate partners are earning over $2000 per week.

For more questions please visit https://www.ovlg.com/affiliate/faqs.php or email me.

Thanks,

Brian Jones
Affiliate Executive

After I received the earlier e-mail I looked this up to see if it was legit, and Oak View Law Group is indeed a California-based law office which specializes in bankruptcy. But the most intriguing thing about it was that most of the personnel went by Americanized pseudonyms of foreign (my guess is Indian/Pakistani) names. Thus, I suspect this “Brian Jones” is not really who he says he is – obviously there are hundreds of people actually named Brian Jones out there. (One is a fellow YR from my Toledo days, so the name stuck out at me.)

What sticks in my craw about this, though, is the idea of profiting from other peoples’ misery. Obviously in this day and age there’s a need for this sort of law firm, although in my estimation they rank just barely above the worst ambulance chasers and mesothelioma hustlers which populate the commercial airwaves.

Do I sell advertising? Yes, I do. I even participate in an affiliate program where if you buy from Amazon through my site, I get a small commission. (Trust me, it’s small. But every so often I do get a few bucks in my PayPal account.) I have sold ad space to those people you see in my upper-right hand corner as well.

But my advertising is based on trying to help these people succeed, not take advantage of others’ failures. Obviously Marty Pusey and Julie Brewington will consider their political ad a success if they win their respective primaries, while another advertiser who’s not up yet will find out whether he’s successful on November 2nd. And should you buy your formal wear from Marty’s store? Absolutely! She’s a small business owner and I want her to prosper on that front regardless of whether she’s elected to be my Delegate or not (preferably the former.)

If others (who just may have gotten the same solicitation as I did) want to be OVLG’s affiliate, well, I can’t stop them. But I would rather be part of a win-win situation than a zero-sum (or worse) game.

In case you are interested in advertising on my site, you can go here. Let’s see if we can help each other prosper, even in these trying times.

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer.