eSpire Marketing

Recently the Federal Trade Commission has put the clamps down on the use of testimonials for website. This is more than likely to protect the vast majority of people who fall for the get rich quick schemes, pyramid schemes, or any other quick fix schemes that you can think of. My first reaction to this was a pretty disheartened feeling. One of the things that I love about the internet is how the government really seems to stay out of most of the content posted online. While this will protect people from falling for get rich quick schemes, it’s also going to hurt many legitimate online businesses from making top dollar for their goods.

A lot of online businesses have embraced how powerful the blogging community has become and how great a blogger can be at helping sell your products to a target market. One of the tactics that we use is to contact a blogger from one of our niche’s ask them if they’d like to review our product, and then we sponsor a contest in their honor. Well when they are reviewing the product, now they’ll have to make it blatantly obvious that they are receiving the item they are reviewing for free.

We never ask for a good review, we specifically ask them to be honest in their review of the product, and to tell all of their readers exactly how they feel. It’s a risk we take that they may or may not like the product. With this new FTC lock down on testimonials it is going to significantly hurt a portion of our revenue model, in an already down economy. Now we have been doing online commerce for years now, so chances are we’re going to survive, but what about all of the others who are just getting online, also trying to run successful businesses, and are already feeling the crunch of these poor economic times? They are going to be the ones really hurt by all of this. This is just another example of how government regulation in business does a lot more harm than it does good.

This is just my opinion. I feel very strongly about this issue and I’d love to hear what each of you think about it. In a time when sales are very hard to come by for almost EVERY industry, the government wants to make it even harder to sell. It’s just bad for business and bad for capitalism.
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This is a trend we’ve been seeing for awhile now (not just this administration). In my opinion it needs to be brought to a screeching halt.