For those of you who think that Internet marketing is black and white, think again. It isn’t. In this article, I’m going to show an example of how gray some of the areas can be, especially when it comes to the difference between spam and valuable content. When is it one and not the other? Think you know the answer? Don’t bet on it.

Let’s begin with a very simple example. You sign up with Twitter, which is a social networking site. You go to some big name in the niche you’re in and follow him. As a result, a lot of the people who follow him start to follow you. You begin to build a nice list of followers. Okay, now comes the content…or is it spam?

You have a blog that has a lot of articles on it. You want to share all this wonderful information with your followers, so you send out a tweet about the latest article on your blog with a link to it. Harmless enough, right? Certainly this isn’t spam. You’re sharing valuable content with people who have chosen to follow you.

But…you then decide that, because you have so MANY articles on your blog (thousands of them in fact) you’re going to share ALL of them with your followers. So you start sending out tweets by the bucketful. Suddenly, instead of maybe sending out one or two tweets a day with links to your blog, you’re sending out dozens of tweets. Your followers may suddenly start to get quite annoyed with you. Suddenly, this isn’t looking like valuable content anymore but…dare I say the word?

Let’s take another example. You build an email list of people who actually want to hear from you. They double opted in so there is no way you can spam them, right? You start out by sending them a message a week in a weekly newsletter. They’re all very happy to get this valuable info. After a while, you find that you have more to share, so you send maybe two or three emails a week. Okay, this is still tolerable to most of your list.

But then one day you decide that you’re going to start sending five or six emails a day because you have all this wonderful info to share. Do you think that maybe at this point your subscribers might start to get a little annoyed with you?

As I said, there is a fine line between spam and valuable content.

Know where to draw it.
To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

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