Email Spam Loses Spam Queen Laura Betterly   10/4/2005 - 1,322 views, 3 Comments

Or so she says.

Laura Betterly has been infamous for years in the anti-spam community for her spewing enormous volumes of email spam. She shot to national infamy when she was featured in the Wall Street Journal, giving work-at-home moms a bad name when she claimed that she was a stay-at-home mom who was “just trying to make a living.”

That living was by spamming from her home, earning by some estimates at least $200,000 a year.

Now Betterly and her In Touch Media Group in Florida (oh, why is it always?), have issued this statement:

Clearwater, FL (PRWEB) October 4, 2005 — In a bold move, Laura Betterly, president of In Touch Media Group Inc. www.intouchmediagroup.com (ITOU.OB), denounced sending massive bulk e-mail in an article entitled “It’s 2005 - Email is Dead.�?

She asserts “Now, you might be asking why I, who was dubbed the ‘Spam Queen’ in the Wall Street Journal three years ago, is even bothering to say anything about e-mail?”

“Just to set the record straight, I have never advocated spam or sending spam.�?

“One reporter said to me ‘Some people consider all bulk email as spam, what do you have to say about that?’ to which I replied, ‘Then I guess you’d call me the spam queen’ as a joke.”

“I advocated email at that time as a very effective medium for small business, which because of its low cost lets small businesses level the playing field against big corporations.�?

She continues that legitimate e-mail isn’t getting thru filters and the only “signal�? getting thru is the scams being sent from overseas or using illegal methods.

“The simplicity is this—bulk commercial e-mail has gotten to the point where it isn’t effective. We just don’t do it anymore. What’s the point? It doesn’t get a response, and we found people are overloaded with advertising messages and no longer willing to receive more, especially in their inbox, unless they specifically asked for it.�?

“As a marketing professional, the only thing that should count for you at the end of the day is effectiveness. Bulk commercial e-mail has turned into the above, a bunch of unprofessional, ineffective scams.�?

“In other words, Spam is a four letter word.�?

Her solution to the problem of generating web traffic for businesses is a combination of market research, design, search engine marketing (In Touch Media Group was just awarded the highest expert rating given out by Google), search engine publicity and sites like the recently launched www.pixelbay.org that drive traffic directly to her clients sites.

“I’ve been in the marketing game for many years, and finally we’ve found the tools we need to drive traffic to our client’s sites�?

Still, it’s people like Betterly who have given email marketing a bad name altogether. Which is why more people are going back to the old tried and true methods like direct mail marketing.