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The sad part of
situation is that those types of marketers are either just misguided or greedy. There’s so much information out there on marketing, and a great deal of it seems to focus on making sales at all costs. What happened to maintaining integrity to ensure your business future for long haul? The days of firm handshake to seal a deal are long since gone, but has integrity died along wayside too? What happens when shady marketing tactics continue to dry up once abundant marketing pockets and it continues to become tougher and tougher to make sales? Are we that greedy to squander pockets so there is none left for future marketing generations? Is it really worth costs when your business integrity suffers in end?
Better Marketing Principles – Honesty and Integrity and Ways they Promote Visitor Trust.
It’s all about honesty, integrity, and trust. If you can instill those emotions for your business within consumer’s mind, and do so in an honest manner, then you are going to be successful for a long time to come. Like that old adage goes “You’ll catch more flies with honey than you will with vinegar”. Time will always bring out a lack of integrity if one exists, just as true colors also tend to show over time. No matter what you do, if you are not sincere then in end, it will be revealed and your business will suffer. The bait and switch is an overused marketing tactic that is loosing it’s effectiveness. Any marketing practice that is questionable or similar to that tactic is like vinegar mentioned earlier. The “honey” is things like researching your links to make sure your visitor is going to be happy with products you suggest. It’s letting them know that link might require an investment, or letting them know some personal, honest experience with link product or service that you have experienced. Sincerity and honesty will build trust, and building trust is not something that happens overnight. Far too many people have been burned on internet. It is a time investment to overcome those bad experiences and turn a visitor around. Prevention is better than scrambling to fix a problem once it’s happened.
Meta Tag Scams and Other Shady Web Page Design Tricks.
Another marketing tactic gone south is keyword meta tag and other various meta tags used in a web site page design. Shady marketers have abused even those tags. I remember back when Britney Spears was craze and their were all kinds of searches being done at search engines for Britney Spears. A few dubious marketers decided to add “Britney Spears” to meta tags and wound up getting top page rankings in search engine reports for search term “Britney Spears”. The problem, most of those pages had nothing to do with Britney Spears or her music to begin with. That didn’t last long as Google and all other search engines scrambled quickly to change their algorithms to keep shady marketers from manipulating their results. We all paid for it in end. Web sites that were once ranked highly either found themselves out of rankings or dropped drastically in rank. Another old adage comes to mind “It’s one that spoils it for rest of us”.
Speaking of search engine ranking stuff, another craze was long paragraphs of repeating keyword phrases and text using page color to hide it, used as a means to manipulate search engine ranking. The results are same as Britney Spears meta tag scam. Marketing is definitely an area where actions of others will come back to bite you in backside in end. If you don’t watch whom you link to, then you can be “guilty by association”. That brings to mind link farms that used to enjoy high ranking in search engines. These worthless sites composed of nothing but a bunch of links to other sites and created specifically to boost listed sites ranking are another shady marketing practice that has fallen by wayside. And list continues to go on and on. Some just look at these ideas as valid marketing tactics that worked, and to a degree, I’d have to agree with them, but they worked at what price? How many visitors were forever turned off by questionable marketing tactics? How many visitors lost substantial amounts of money in process? How much money will future marketers need to spend to undo negative results past marketers have caused for marketing industry? The damage remains to be seen, but little by little, once tried and true marketing ideas are becoming less and less effective. Do I want to make a buck? Sure I do, but NOT at expense of my company’s integrity nor at expense of my visitors, nor at expense of future marketing generations to come.
Better Marketing Practices – How They’ll pay off and who they Benefit.
All this brings me to predominant point of this article. There are a few actually. The first and foremost is learning to think about your marketing tactics before you just implement things that could be labeled as shady. The best relationship you can build with your potential visitors is trust. This is a long and involved process but offers long-term payoffs that are well worth work investment. Taking quick or easy route will always cause you to miss something that will prevent you from forming that bond with your visitors. With mass of circuits, tubes, and chips sitting before you, it’s sometimes hard to remember that your actions are affecting other human beings with some of same hopes and desires that you have. Remember that you are interacting with them and helping them to meet those hopes and dreams. If you had same hope or dream you are offering them, would you want to be treated way that you are treating them? It’s golden rule personified. Learn to practice ethical marketing concepts that protect your visitors while building trust and integrity. Once you accomplish that, there is nothing on earth that can prevent your self-employment dreams. Until next article, be good to one another. Give your visitors safety and protection they need, and you will benefit in end.
James R. Sanders is the owner of Sanders Consultation Group Plus. He has been a webmaster and web site designer since 1997, and involved in self-employment ventures since 1992. He is presently a contributing author of NewbieHangout, and has been published through WebProNews. You can email him at webmaster@sanders-consultation-group-plus.com.
