Marketing Money Online

It was inevitable that Andy Jenkins would respond to the posts and rumors swirling on the one message board thread were people were free to talk about the Stompernet lawsuit, an anonymous website posting the lawsuit, twitter posts, and even my posts here and clarify what really happened.

Yesterday Jenkins did that on his blog where he wrote the following to explain the circumstances behind the lawsuit:

“In the winter of 2009, Brad took an unscheduled distribution of $110,000. For about six weeks previous, between Brad traveling, the StomperLive Seven event, and the Stomping the Search Engines 2.0 launch, we didn’t speak a word to each other. I was slammed and he was… Brad. Heh. And I mean that in a good way.”

“But at the time, it seemed like corporate theft. It wasn’t.”

“It’s not a secret that Brad had fairly little to do with operations at StomperNet, and we have previously gone similar lengths of time without talking. Nothing unusual there. So naturally, that was held up as further evidence of a conspiracy. Heh.”

“But our operating agreement is specific – Cash Distributions to shareholders of StomperNet are by mutual agreement.”

“That didn’t happen – that was wrong, and Brad has since apologized for it. It wasn’t about the $110,000 – I mean, are you kidding? StomperNet was an EIGHT FIGURE COMPANY according to its 2008 tax returns. This was about being short $110,000 in the specific operating account where payroll is funded from – and not knowing about it.”

“Do you take my meaning? – It was about the sum total of ALL of the bank accounts being exposed with no understanding what was going on. And when you’ve got a lot of people depending on payroll, you don’t mess around.”

“But the company had better things to do, so I wrote a check from my personal bank account to cover the difference and then some, called my attorney, and forgot about it for a little while.”

First I have to confess that I sometimes get confused when I read Andy’s blog posts. They tend to very long and sometimes go off into tangents, even sometimes saying one thing and then saying another in a different paragraph, so my brain can’t always keep track of where he is going so if I am mistaken in my interpretation of what he says I welcome any corrections from him.

For instance in what I quoted above he says that Fallon withdrew $110,000 and – “But at the time, it seemed like corporate theft. It wasn’t.”

The implication I take from this here is that Jenkins thought at one moment Fallon stole money from the company, but he didn’t.

Then he says, “But our operating agreement is specific – Cash Distributions to shareholders of StomperNet are by mutual agreement.”

“That didn’t happen – that was wrong, and Brad has since apologized for it. It wasn’t about the $110,000 – I mean, are you kidding? StomperNet was an EIGHT FIGURE COMPANY according to its 2008 tax returns. This was about being short $110,000 in the specific operating account where payroll is funded from – and not knowing about it.”

“Do you take my meaning? – It was about the sum total of ALL of the bank accounts being exposed with no understanding what was going on. And when you’ve got a lot of people depending on payroll, you don’t mess around.”

Now he says “It wasn’t about the $110,000 – I mean, are you kidding?”

The presupposition here is that he wasn’t mad about $110,000 missing, but being short $110,000 for payroll and being short, because of confusion.

Frankly I find these paragraphs very hard to follow, because just in the earlier paragraph he said he did think the money was stolen at one point.

Maybe I’m just not smart enough to follow them. Maybe they are written in a deliberately confusing manner. At the beginning of his blog post Jenkins wrote, “First, I’m told that I have a tendency to use NLP unfairly when I write (I’ve read exactly One book about NLP, and I still can’t spell it), so instead of (cough) hypnotizing you with my mad writing skillz (whatever), I’m gonna be OVERLY transparent to the point of nausea and foolishness.”

I don’t know if he trying to be confusing or not when he writes about the lawsuit, but what he wrote is not clear crystal to me.

When I try to write I try to be as exact as I can and only write things that I can verify. I don’t try to engage in rumors which some have done over this.

But I also try to write so people can easily follow what I’m saying. It’s not that I think my readers are stupid, but I think you have to write in a more simple manner on the Internet than in print, because it is harder to read off a computer than in a book. And I want to be as precise as possible when I write, because often I write about complicated things.

So anyway, I simply found his explanation for the lawsuit very hard to follow.

My conclusion from it though is that when he first learned about the Fallon withdrawal he thought Fallon stole the money. I say this, because he writes, “But at the time, it seemed like corporate theft. It wasn’t.”

Now he doesn’t think Fallon stole anything, but at first he did. Now if I’m wrong I’ll post any corrections anyone wants to make.

But he filed a lawsuit.

He seems to give another explanation – and very interesting one – for the lawsuit and that was to protect Stompernet from the fallout of the Arbitrage Conspiracy launch Fallon was a part of:

“”But the straw the freaked everyone out, and thus precipitated the formal complaint was The Arbitrage Conspiracy.”

“Brad was a Joint Venture partner of that launch, while StomperNet and I stayed on the sidelines with no material or strategic interest.”

“And while the launch was very successful the public blow back because of (according to public forums) delivery and customer service challenges that STOMPERNET got blamed for (because of it’s association with Brad) was EPIC.”

“WE got threatened with a lawsuit and it wasn’t even a product of ours!”

The Arbitrage Conspiracy was one of the worst launches of last year.

I was a critic on the Warirorforum when it was happening. I thought the promotion for it was misleading and unethical and many of the customers who bought it complained and demanded refunds – more than normally do for an information product.

One of the reasons I thought it was unethical, was because several Internet marketing “gurus” had video testimonials on the sales page and were acting as affiliates for the product. This meant they were in effect making money from their testimonials.

In the financial world you must disclose any interests you have when you talk about stocks or sell an interest in a company. If you own a stock and write about it in a magazine for example you need to disclose that you own it if you do. If you are a broker and you own a stock and tell your client about it you have to tell them. Everything is based on transparency and full disclosure. You violate that and it’s big trouble.

On television when they show testimonials they disclose whether or not the people giving the testimonials are paid and whether they are just actors. It is FTC rules.

The video testimonials clearly violated the spirit of full disclosure. Whether or not they were against the law I don’t know – but they clearly were disgusting. To me the gurus doing that had very low standards and ethics in this instance – at least in comparison with what people I know and myself do on a day to day basis in the stock market world. They appeared to simply be giving their testimonial to do Fallon and favor and expect reciprocation when they do promotions of their own in the future.

They were also promoting a product that had very bad reviews from the people who bought it as you can see here. So caring for their readers was taking a back seat in my opinion.

Apparently some of the customers were so angry they threatened Stompernet with a lawsuit.

If I understand Jenkins correctly one reason he filed a lawsuit was to distance Stompernet from the Arbitrage Conspiracy by distancing the company away from Fallon. So if something serious in a courtroom happened about the Arbitrage Conspiracy then the Jenkins civil suit could be used as a shield for Stompernet by keeping it all on Fallon.

Luckily nothing bad has happened and I would guess any problems the Arbitrage Conspiracy people have had with their customers has been fixed by now.

Anyway – again that is my interpretation of what Jenkins wrote – and if I misunderstand what he wrote I welcome any corrections.

What is clear to me is that what he writes is designed to convey the message that Fallon and him are now on good grounds and there is no fighting between them now. They both have gone their separate ways and wish both the best. In the end I’m not too worried about the real specifics of the lawsuit – the exacts why’s and but’s and who’s – the past is the past and what the current situation is now is pretty clear.

Jenkins to me is someone who has always put out good products and done his best to run Stompernet. He is going to put out more things in the future and I think it is safe to assume that they will be of good quality and will be able to help people reach their dreams on the Internet just as Stompernet has helped those that have taken action with the materials it has provided.

In the end of his post Jenkins also wrote, “P.S. Shout out to a couple of very decent bloggers who are treating this responsibly. Their concern seems to be more focused on their dissatisfaction with the way that third parties are treating this subject – and they’re not insinuating worst-case scenarios or filling in the blanks. That takes restraint and intelligence.”

I assume he was writing about me here, because my main beef about this whole thing wasn’t the lawsuit, but the way people were being treated on the warriorforum and how the moderators were trying to suppress the very existence of the lawsuit from becoming public knowledge.

Other people posting on this he says were basically trying to make a name for themselves as Internet marketing gurus by dragging other people down. Well I can’t speak for these people as I don’t know them, but I think he is right to criticize those that posted anonymously for doing so.

On a side note about all of this – I was once a director of an Internet financial website company. I got disgruntled with the way it was being run and and resigned. The CEO then filed a civil suit against me for my interest in the company. We reached a buy out agreement and the suit was dropped.

So civil suits aren’t wildly uncommon or the end of the world or something.

As for myself I have no interest in making money in the Internet marketing niche. I’m in the stock market niche and discovered the IM niche last year and have found the resources in it to be helpful with existing business – and interesting to look at as an outsider interested in human nature.

I like to write and I have learned a lot from following the IM world. I want to share that with people I know in the stock market field that don’t know anything about the IM niche.

So one goal of my blog is introduce it to them so I can help them in my own business associations.

Some of these people are content owners and creators like myself and others are affiliates of my stock market website. I also hope to attract people interested in Internet marketing into being affiliates for my stock market website.

There are things in the IM niche that aren’t being done much in the stock market niche – so there are things I want to share with my friends there.

The niches are very different.

And there are things that go on in the IM niche that are different from what happens in the stock market world. The markets are different.

One difference – and a big business opportunity someone could make in the IM niche – is that there are no real IM portal websites with good information on them.

In the IM world you have basically pay sites that sell online courses and a a few message boards where people gather – with the warriorforum being the biggest one.

Most of the posters on these boards are small guys trying to build a following of their own or sell something.

In the stock market there are a dozen or so high traffic websites that are free and provide news. There is also real reporting on what is going on in the stock market – with companies, financial websites, everything.

There is no real news or reporting in this IM niche. The niche is simply too small to attract corporate America to create a portal site and no one wants to give away free information for the sake of doing so.

Almost every single review is created to generate affiliate commissions. I don’t know of a site that review products without making money off of affiliate commissions so there is no real flow of information with a money motive behind it. The whole niche is built upon affiliate commissions.

The opportunity is this – if someone made a free portal website that had good content about IM – including free mini courses and real unbiased news and reviews they would dominate the entire niche in a matter of months.

If you don’t believe it consider this. I put up this blog just a few days ago. Spent not a dime to do it, no adwords, no traffic, and my posting about the Stompernet thing got attention throughout the niche and prompted a reply from one of its biggest players.

This shows you what a giant hole there is in the IM niche for a source of real unbiased information and news.

The thing is though – how would such a thing make money? I don’t know, but I’m sure someone could figure out a way. So here I’ve just given you an idea that could make you a million dollars. But one characteristic of the IM niche is that 99.9% of the people in it do nothing, so I don’t really expect to see such a portal appear.

I hope I didn’t just give a bad guy a million dollar idea.

My intention with this blog isn’t to create such as site. I don’t have time to make such a site myself. I make money in the stock market by trading and running my online business and my time goes to that. I don’t have an army of employees to do multiple projects and am not interested in hiring a bunch of people.

But I do like writing. And I’m going to write here with no bias and no attempt to make money off of affiliate commissions or anything like that, because I like communicating my thoughts in a totally independent manner.

Now I don’t think affiliate marketing is wrong. I do it with a few people in the stock market – but I only do it with people I know have good products and services – and I rather not do that on this blog, because I want it to be different from what anyone else is doing in the IM niche.

And I simply don’t even care about making money. That’s kinda funny, because I spend a lot of time making money in the stock market and by growing my online business. But I do it because I think its fun. Not for the sake of the money itself.

I’m also really stubborn and being independent is really important to me. I don’t like the feeling of being bought. In the stock market I get offered bribes every once in awhile to recommend stocks and always turn such deals down and tell the people where to go. I have more fun by being my own person, than selling out to some pump and dump crooks. Likewise, I have no desire to get in with the right people to get into the affiliate circle email list in the IM world, because I don’t want to be dependent on any of them.

I do like to write though and get my voice heard though. So if you want to read more of what I have to say please sign up to my update list:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 8:30 am and is filed under Internet Marketing News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.