Earlier this year, NY Times reporter Aaron Krolik went on a site called cheaterboard.com. And he wrote this nasty post about himself:
“Aaron Krolik is a complete loser. Will do ANYTHING for attention. ANYTHING.”
The post included an ugly selfie of Krolik and a caption that read BUSTED.
Cheaterboard is a site that allows burned men and women to out their cheating exes. Except… is there more to it than that?
Within a few days, Krolik’s post had spread to a bunch of other sites, like bustedcheaters.com and worsthomewrecker.com. Similar concept to Cheaterboard.
Soon, these posts made it to the top of Google Images when you searched for Krolik’s name. Bing helpfully suggested “loser” when you started typing “Aaron Krolik.”
In a nutshell, Krolik had successfully ruined his own “cool guy” reputation.
Now was time to fix it. So Krolik contacted 247removal.com, a company specializing in cleaning up online slander.
It was easy to find them because they ran ads on sites like Cheaterbaord.
For a paltry fee of $750 per individual post (typically adding up to thousands of dollars to cover a bunch of sites), 247removal offered to scrub “Aaron Krolik is a complete loser” from the world.
Let me pause here and ask you…
Do you suspect any foul play here?
Krolik did. In fact, that’s why he went through the experiment of slandering himself.
It turned out that hundreds of online slander sites, and dozens of reputation management firms, all boiled down to a few people. Specifically, a programmer in India and a man and woman in Dayton, Ohio.
They would encourage and spread the slander (or who knows, maybe you really did cheat on your wife)… and then for fees up to $20,000, they would take it down.
Unlike my usual posts, this is not a business idea I’m recommending.
Although there is a kernel here that can be useful and even not so unethical.
And that’s the practice of serving a specific customer, rather than selling a specific product. So put Cheaterboard out of your mind for a second, and consider these examples instead:
Example 1: Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s manager. He secretly sold buttons that said something like, “Elvis sux!”
Why slander his own star? Because some people didn’t want to buy any Elvis… but they sure needed to buy something.
Example 2: Copywriter Abbey Woodcock has a clever page that you hit once you unsubscribe from her email list.
”Sorry it didn’t work out,” it says, “but here are a few resources that might be a better fit you.” And then, Abbey puts in a bunch of affiliate links to other copywriting programs.
Example 3 is apparently standard practice in the newsletter industry:
If you have a company with a bunch of different gurus and newsletters inside it… what do you do when a subscriber fails to renew? Of course.
You offer them any of the other newsletters to subscribe to. Maybe they didn’t like that first guy. But they’re clearly interested in the promise of getting rich with financial advice… so maybe they will like guy #2.
So that’s my advice to you. Once you identify demand, think beyond the product or products you offer.
And if there is no demand… then sometimes you can create it, ethically. But this post is getting long already, so I’ll leave that topic for another day. If you want to read that when it comes out, you can sign up for my email newsletter.