Preamble: In response to some excellent rebuttals as well as countless comments I’ve received on my previous post, “The Real Sinister Side of Forced Continuity,” I believe some people are missing the point of my argument, and I want to clarify a few things.

I’m not a lawyer by any stretch. But as a copywriter and business owner, I do know the rules enough to know that there’s a difference between “optional continuity,” “forced continuity,” and “hidden continuity.”

Optional continuity is self-explanatory. Forced continuity is a very common marketing practice (I’m not a fan of it, but I don’t mind it). In fact, there’s nothing wrong with forced continuity in and of itself.

What’s wrong is when it’s used in a wrong way.

The real problem, I believe, is that good marketers, including marketers using “forced continuity” in an ethical and legitimate way, are getting a bad reputation because some marketers unscrupulously misuse forced continuity.

The lack of transparency is the real culprit — such as hiding it or disguising it. Especially when it’s done on purpose. That annoys me. Because it’s no longer an issue of misuse. It’s out-and-out abuse.

But what bothers me more is how it affects us all. And it affects us all, both customers and marketers alike, in more ways than you think.

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Rant warning: what follows may offend some people. But I wanted to throw in my three cents on the topic of “forced continuity,” which seems to be the subject of a lot of debate these days.

Several well-known marketers have made offers of late with forced continuity. What it means is, the intended product you want to buy can only be purchased when you buy another (often, a continuous subscription) billed to your account every month or so until you cancel.

Forced continuity is nothing new. (In direct marketing, they call these “Til Forbid” offers.) It’s another type of offer, pure and simple. It’s marketing. And there’s nothing wrong with that. What’s wrong is not the way the offer is made.

The real problem is its lack of transparency.

But that’s not what I want to rant about today.

What a lot of people seem to be missing here (and something my brilliant wife brought to my attention, which makes perfect sense to me), is that there is a deeper, much darker side to this whole thing.

Something all marketers need to be aware of…

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So, if you’re following the commandments, you should now have a unique name, possibly a tagline, and established yourself as the first or leader in your unique category. What about the service or product you offer? Do you offer an extraordinary product or service, or do you offer an ordinary one?

Even if the service you provide is customary, traditional, and probably offered by your competition, you should make it appear unique just as well.

Remember that perception is more powerful than truth. You don’t need to emphasize that your product or service is unique, better than the competition, or even the best for that matter. Doing so by declaring that it is can sometimes be worse than not saying anything at all, and the reason for that is that it makes your self-serving claim appear suspect or exaggerated.

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What is it with people lately?

Browbeating, bashing, and bullyragging. Flames, stains, and blames. Put downs, let downs and showdowns. On forums, blogs, and social networking sites.

Sure, I understand people are fed up with scam artists and snake oil salesmen. And sure, I also believe we need firebrands and rebels. Each one helps to keep the other side in line.

I love good debates. They’re not only intellectually stimulating, but also they help instigate change, or give others the impetus on how to deal with it. I always love a good argument, when that argument is based on fact and substance.

But lately, some of them are really getting out of hand.

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My 50-page report last week created quite a stir. Some people who did not read it may have misunderstood my point. However, I’m not going to make another blog post dedicated to the growing popularity of online audio or video. (I probably will, but I’ll save it for another time.)

But to summarize, while salesletters in principle are not dying — I’ve chosen “Death of the Salesletter” as a title to get people to read the report, among other things — and long copy is here to stay, the delivery mechanism is indeed slowly being replaced. (Granted, we still have a way to go, yet.)

By the same token, a certain type of salesletter is indeed dying.

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While some people have chimed in on the salesletter debate about whether long-copy salesletters are scammy, I believe we need to stop and take a closer look at what this whole thing teaches us.

Will this debate ever stop? No. In fact, it’s nothing new. It’s been around for hundreds, even thousands of years. Even as old as right-wing versus left-wing ideologies.

Push versus pull. Direct versus indirect. Advertising versus publicity. Long copy versus short copy. And now, Internet marketers versus bloggers. Nothing’s changed.

The Internet is just a new medium in which it takes place.

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Recently, I made a mistake.

I want to publicly and sincerely apologize to Matt Mullenweg, lead developer at WordPress, for creating any misperception, posting misleading information or making statements that may be perceived as defamatory — the very thing I was objecting to in my post in the first place.

It was far from my intent.

My post seems to not only have pinched a nerve, but also as more and more comments poured in, I reread my post several times and saw that my points were either potentially wrongly communicated. So let me officially clarify. First, the story:

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