Sneaky vBulletin Affiliate Idea

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trigatch4

trigatch4

BuildAndEarn
Aug 23, 2006
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www.eurekadiary.com
If you have vBulletin and you've sent an e-mail to all users... you'll note two things...
  • You can choose to send e-mails to people who have requested they NOT recieve mail from administrators. So it lets you spam away.
  • You can identify an e-mail address from which this e-mail will come.
Knowing that... say you have a forum about music... what's preventing you from sending a mass e-mail to EVERYONE in the vbulletin database from Apple.com with your affiliate links to ipods, accessorries and new albums?

I won't utilize this simple because it's more fraud and spam than anything else... but I'm surprised I have not seen this idea mentioned on WF before. This could be applied to ANY market or industry.

Your thoughts?
 


trigatch4 said:
If you have vBulletin and you've sent an e-mail to all users... you'll note two things...
  • You can choose to send e-mails to people who have requested they NOT recieve mail from administrators. So it lets you spam away.
  • You can identify an e-mail address from which this e-mail will come.
Knowing that... say you have a forum about music... what's preventing you from sending a mass e-mail to EVERYONE in the vbulletin database from Apple.com with your affiliate links to ipods, accessorries and new albums?

I won't utilize this simple because it's more fraud and spam than anything else... but I'm surprised I have not seen this idea mentioned on WF before. This could be applied to ANY market or industry.

Your thoughts?
Click to expand...

I thought about this, but my list really isn't big enough yet (about 1000) and the subject is hard to target for affiliates.

With vbulletin you can generate email lists from everyone who has ever signed up.
 
it IS considering "opting out" and that's why I labeled it as mainly "spam". I was surprised that vBulletin even ALLOWED this option seeing as how once you opt out, any e-mail would probably not comply with the Spam regulations. I'm not sure what scenario tempted vBulletin to allow for this feature of sending e-mails to people who specifically stated they don't want them!

Can't you just see affiliates using PPC to drive targeted campaigns that get users to sign up for something "special"... and it's really vBulletin sign up that you then use to spam them with affiliate offers that appear to be coming from their "favorite companies" from whatever niche the site targets?

Eeks... like I said... not something I would be interested in venturing into for moral AND legal reasons... but thought some of the edgier folks might be able to use this "concept" to fuel a related (and legal) revenue model.

Perhaps driving the PPC to a vBulletin signup for a "niche" lifestyle industry and then redirecting them to more of a wordpress based content site and using these e-mail address to fuel affiliate e-mail campaigns. You'd still have to make an "opt-out" and sending e-mails from a false domain would still probably be "fraud" but what if it was from another one of YOUR domains?

I don't know... I really don't... most of my ideas stemming from this are probably illegal or shady to say the least. But, knowing that vBulletin has these list building and e-mailing functions BUILT IN... why aren't more people using it as a complete solution to fuel e-mail marketing campaigns?

I thought perhaps we could think "outside of the box" and use the general approach to help brainstorm methods of utilizing the power of vBulletin beyond the forums... it seems possible...
 
vbulletin is not set up to send CAN-SPAM compliant e-mail. Why? Why should they? Its message board software. A simple opt-in or opt-out is not CAN-SPAM compliant.
 
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