Q. What’s the most dangerous thing a marketer can do?
A. Grow a Conscience
13 months ago, everything changed. Not in the I no longer rank kind of way either. My whole world, what I believed I believed in regards to work turned itself on it’s head.
Change is a ripple. It begins as a whisper in the back of your mind that will drive you nuts if you start to listen to it. It talks to your conscience; it speaks to your inner core.
My whisper came in the form of an email sent to me from someone I didn’t know who saw an article I wrote. This person had a mother who was suffering from a health condition and the person (it was the daughter) was asking me for advice.
This was despite the fact that I wasn’t in the position to give advice. I ranked for the a few keyword phrases regarding her mother’s condition. The articles were simply rewrites of rewrites. Anybody with a 5th grade education could have done it to be really honest.
In fact, I out ranked medical websites that could legitimately give sound advice. I was just a marketer who had found a product that someone with that disease may want to try. And I happened to know the game of organic search.
So I didn’t respond.
But it got me to thinking about the moral obligations that we, as marketers have to the rest of the world and to ourselves. And the whisper turned into a shouting match with my conscience.
What started off as “doing the right thing”….
It wasn’t always like this. I got into online marketing a little over a decade ago by accident. At the time, I was bending over backwards helping people make the right decisions in a niche that I knew about. Soon, I found out I could make money as an affiliate. And so I did.
I also discovered the power of list building. So I built a large list over time. And I “blogged” (back then there was no such thing as blogging- You simply added new stuff to a page that people followed)
Shortly afterward, I started getting into Sports Gambling, because I was myself a gambler. Once again, I bent over backwards trying to help people. And I made money on the side as an affiliate. Really good money.
When the port act of 2007 was passed, online gambling became illegal. Americans couldn’t affiliate with off shore casinos. Many of the merchants I was affiliated with pulled the plug. I had to start over. And I did.
At this point, niche marketing was the buzz word in the marketing community. I did a bit of keyword research, rewrote articles within that niche and then drove links to the articles. They ranked. I sold products.
I soon learned that the best customers were the desperate. Desperation and fear sells stuff best.
It was at this point that I stopped helping people and started focusing in on what they could do for me…
I wrote about stuff I had no clue about to be perfectly honest. I learned it as I went. I based my decision on what products to sell on epc numbers. If it could potentially convert, I would test it out.
The Problem with Being a Con…
The community of the niches I was in saw me as a con because I was a con.
Let’s be honest here- You can rank for things like plumber widgets or how to install a toilet, but chances are good, you aren’t going to get any love from those who are active within the DIY market unless you know what you are talking about.
Since I couldn’t develop relationships with them, I one-upped them; I developed a relationship with Google Search instead.
Soon, whenever someone did a search like “how to cure genital warts” or “homeopathic remedies for skin tags“, they would find my website up there, click on it and potential buy what product I was selling. Ironically, my competitors weren’t legitimate either. They learned the name of the game as well….
My “real” life as a blog
4 years ago, I started a blog, leodimilo.com in which I talked about how to do these things. I wrote articles on how to shape website infrastructure links to rank better. I wrote articles on how to use parasitic host’s domain authority to rank quickly. I wrote articles on copyrighting and using deception to sell. I developed a following. I started to rank for the keywords within my market.
People would email me asking me for advice on how to do this stuff. I knew how to do it. So, on top of being a generally not-nice person, I was giving advice to people on how to be deceptive as well. And the kicker was the advice, though poison, was good.
That was 13 months ago. And then the email came.
And I re-grew my conscience….
You see, us marketers…those of us who delve deep into keyword phrases and ranking don’t actually think about who we can potentially hurt. To us, it is just about the money. It’s a number’s game. We rationalize things by saying If they are stupid enough to buy it, then they will buy it from someone else…why not us?.
We create junk in the hopes that it will make a few dollars or cents. And then we rank for it because ranking isn’t necessarily precipitated on what others think of us but how we are able to manipulate an algorithm.
The email made me lose the taste of the pleasures that came from ranking well for niches I had no business being in. The money wasn’t worth it anymore.
In the ensuing weeks, I decided that my days as a “con” were over. I would need to do something else. And the only requirement would be that I was helping people get more in some shape or fashion based on things that I knew about.
Why am I admitting this now?
Part of this admission is to just get this off my chest. The problem with carrying secrets is that they tend to fester like open sores. I have been “bad” for too long.
My worldview to marketing has changed. I still do SEO. I still do internet marketing. But I have decided to do it on my own terms and not be man handled by organic search. I have learned over this past year that your network means more to a business than ranking in the search engines. And the only way to build your network is to commit to a niche or market and be a part of the community.
I see marketers that use these buzz words and catch phrases like authority site and diversify your niches and wonder whether they miss the point of it all. For them, it is only about the money. But authority is earned, not made. And when you start to focus only on the money, you start to lose what life is truly about.
That’s what this past year has taught me at least.
And it took an email from a stranger for me to finally see it this way.
No related posts.
Twitter: Strathy
says:
Do you still make money (real money) as an ‘honest’ internet marketer?
Strathy recently posted..Thoughts on Simple Living
Short answer is I do. But “real money” is relative to your situation, ya know?
My main money makers (or my “job”) at this point is from 2 businesses in which I help others market their products. One of them deals with marketing musicians online. The other is a bevy of corporate accounts in which I manage.
Twitter: no twitter
says:
I have been suspending the same thing that network has more perspectives than ranking. Is there any organic search trick you can share?
Alex from webhosting recently posted..Blog Commenting
Alex, Yeah….take your time with link building. Don’t get in a rush to rank. Focus on spending time getting a few good, quality links as opposed to a bevy of spammy ones.
That’s all for long term plans. If you don’t care that you may (or may not) get wiped out by an algorithm update, then do what everyone else suggests.
Twitter: costafong
says:
Good one Leo! All the same reasons I never promote anything that I do not have knowledge and confidence in, especially things that will effect the health of another. And for all the same reason, I have never made much from IM. LOL.
Good for you, my friend.
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Thanks Costa,
The root of the problem isn’t what the niche is but rather who is giving the advice. We tend to forget that the people on the other side doing the searches are real people looking for solutions.
Yeah, health and alternative health can lead someone down the wrong road but so could something as simple as how to get rid of carpenter ants if you are simply copying or rewriting someone else’s work.
So the real issue is deception and most online marketers are taught that deception is the trade. It starts with fooling the search engines and moves into us rationalizing that it is okay with fooling the general public.
It isn’t cool and the best rule that I can think of to go by is if you can’t show it to your mama or give your best friend the same advice, then it probably isn’t worth sharing to the world.
Twitter: lissie45
says:
I do not do, and have never targetted, anything related to health for the reasons you describe Leo. My mother died of cancer, I know that if the Internet had existed then I would have bought that promised to prolong her life. Just couldn’t do it.
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Hey Leo,
I have been following you for 2 years, and I have been much blessed by what you have shared thus far on your Internet Marketing skills.
Thank you so much for sharing your heart out and it has steered me to shape what I want to see in my website – one that gives value and blesses the community as much as possible.
Hope that you will not give up and still provide quality value that helps everyone. Looking forward to see you prosper in your finances as you move into a new direction with your conscience.
Thanks for every help that you have given from your website thus far.
Regards,
Jonathan
Thanks Jonathon. I appreciate it. Just trying to be real here. For a change.
I have been following you for a couple years now and I have noticed the honesty and the desire to do things differently in most posts. Money can make you do things that you repent later and if you are not rescued by your conscience you will be in this vicious cycle forever. I have been exposed to several grey areas in affiliate marketing. Money was there but projects were not motivating me and I decided to move elsewhere and build things that would have a positive impact on others’ lives.
If you put consistent effort on something you will be successful, no matter what. So, you are right, why build countless niche websites, when you can build something more valuable
Thanks Kupresh,
It’s not that I want to do things differently…it’s just that my personal philosophy has always been to shy away from things that everyone else is doing. Link building tactics dilute as more and more people become aware of them. It’s Darwinian economics. You can shoot for volume but after awhile those who are doing things by volume have moved the line higher.
The grey areas….yeah….I know all about them….and that is nothing to be proud of….
Thanks for the feedback.
Leo
Thank you for this post, Leo.
Thanks for an excellent post. couldn’t agree more with your comments on deception beginning with filling google. It can be a slippery slope…
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Twitter: HomeofLesPaul
says:
A very sobering post Leo. Thank you
I too have a couple of sites that result in requests and question from people about things that I am not real privy with. I usually end up spending time (Sometimes hours) researching the topic to provide them with the answer.
If I were in your shoes I would have had to let the person know that you don’t have an answer for her, least she feel more hopeless or simply ignored…
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Inspiring experience about what happened to you from your past. It’s nice to hear that conscience touches your mind. There’s always place for a change to the one who fail from the past.
Thanks Hannah…it is an experience that I for one, wished I hadn’t had. But everyone has 20/20 hindsight. Now to make sure that it isn’t repeated.
Interesting experience Leo
I also believe that a blog is just a way of communicating
but what really matters is the (real) value we bring to the readers
At first i was writing for my readers, then i started to write for google to get more readers
Now i write again for my readers and get backlinks from them…
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