Im Mad As Hell-You Will Be Too When You Read About Vlad Zablotskyy and ePerks
June 15th, 2008 by Ruth Ann MacklinThe saga of real estate blogger, Vlad Zablotskyy, being sued by ePerks got me riled up.
First, let me say that I am a fairly low key person. It
takes a lot to get me riled up. I also don’t get wrapped up in what is going on
in the real estate blogosphere and pretty much just do my own thing.
Reading a blog post today by Mary McKnight of rsspieces.com, telling the saga of real
estate blogger, Vlad Zablotskyy,
being sued by ePerks got me riled up. The
more I read, riled up turned to mad as hell…and I hope it does the same to you!
The first thing that gets your attention in Mary’s post is
her offer to give a free
Blog to anyone writing a blog post in support of Vlad. This is another
whole story, so visit Mary’s blog for details.
Back to this story…Mary’s offer for a free Blog got my
attention, but not enough to actually write in support of Vlad. As I said, I
pretty much do my own thing. But it did get my attention enough to start
reading.
ePerks is a 3rd party lead generation website.
Real estate professionals buy a zip code for a monthly fee, get the leads
generated from that zip code and then pay ePerks a referral fee when a closing
takes place. ePerks rebates a percentage of the referral fee to the
buyer/seller lead and pockets the rest. Nothing new, we have all seen this
scam…I mean scheme (you get the picture) before!
As a startup, ePerks paid real estate bloggers to write
about nice things about them. There are those who think this is an underhanded
tactic. I happen to think it is an interesting marketing tool and this didn’t
bother me at all.


