I came across this article today in a Google search for Internet Marketing. It was a news result blended in the middle of the normal search results, but that’s another story. Anyway, you know that I recently wrote an article about SEO ethics entitled “What happened to ethics? SEOs that hide their methods and mislead clients” so obviously I do feel that there are some clear issues in the Internet Marketing industry. However, my article differed from Mr. Brock’s in that it clearly outlined specific examples of where these issues are to help educate businesses on what to look out for. I didn’t say that the entire industry was corrupt or make equivalent blanket statements. As with any industry, there are good people and bad people out there…

Anyway, Mr. Brock’s article does not give specific examples of ‘bad behavior’ in the industry. He doesn’t tell people specific things to look out for. He basically goes on a rant about the industry and compares Internet Marketers to used car salesman. His only specific critique is that some of the high profile speakers in the industry do not have the same personality they have on stage when approached in person. I’m not sure what this has to do with anything… Doesn’t any speaker create a certain persona when on stage and in the spotlight? Don’t people who are presenting have to overemphasize their speaking, body language, physical movements, etc. in order to command a presence and entertain an audience? Aren’t there even some strange people out there that are more comfortable presenting to a group than presenting one-one-one? (Not me! )

The article perplexed me and I wondered what exactly was the point of this article, and how did something like this even manage to get published. The article lacks focus, doesn’t present a strong argument, and isn’t really informative. It doesn’t explain what Internet Marketing is, what the benefits are, what specific strengths and weaknesses the industry has, and what ways a consumer can become educated on what to look for when comparing service providers.

Then I found a link to the author’s site and the point became very clear – self promotion. Obviously most writers in business publications are writing with the purpose of self promotion. They want to become an authority in their niche, get their name out there, promote their company, etc. That’s fine, but normally publications don’t allow blatant self promotion like this. If you take a trip to his site you will notice that he is a public speaker who speaks to, coaches, and educates people that they shouldn’t focus on e-commerce, they should focus on building relationships. He says “We have to focus on the Relationships of Business, not the Electronics of it. We need to be able to focus always on the human needs, not just the latest and coolest technology that is out there.”. While I agree that building relationships is extremely important and a key element to any Internet Marketing campaign, there is A LOT more to it than that.

Clearly Mr. Brock is attacking the Internet Marketing industry with the goal of promoting his own public speaking and coaching services. It is comical that this attack does not have anything concrete behind it, but it is even funnier that when you go to his site and click around, you will see that him and his approach is straight out of an infomercial – something you would see running on TV in the middle of the night. If any comparison can be made to today’s used car salesman, I would say late night get-rich infomercials are just that…

Here are some examples of where this happens:

Paid Inclusion
This is probably where I have seen the most blatant lies being told by agencies. Many will setup a paid inclusion account for the clients URL and shortly thereafter will brag to the client that they obtained a top ranking in Yahoo in such a short amount of time. What the client doesn’t know is that the agency/consultant used some of the funds the client paid them to ‘buy’ these rankings. Does it take some SEO and Internet Marketing know-how to achieve these rankings? Yes. However, they were not achieved through natural methods and ultimately will be turned off if and when the client decides to end the relationship with the agency or the agency decides it wants to stop paying for this.

Just in case you’re not clear on what paid inclusion is, it’s a method to get into Yahoo and a couple of other engines quickly by paying a fee and ultimately paying on a cost-per-click basis. This allows for a quick indexing, and some argue a preferential treatment for ability to rank highly. This is not like pay-per-click or sponsored search where your listing appears in an area separate from the natural results and is labeled ‘Sponsored Listings’ or some variation. These paid inclusion listings appear directly in the natural results.

Paid Text Links
For some time now, SEOs have been using targeted paid text link ads with keyword rich anchor text as a tool for ranking highly for competitive terms – with great results too. The problem is that Google has publicly expressed displeasure with this and is threatening to remove sites from their index that both buy and sell these ads. Will they really do that? Is it just a threat? I think so, and I’m personally not worried about it but potential risks like these should be explained to clients before implementing such methods.

Many SEO consultants and agencies mislead clients by purchasing these ads and implementing them on their own with the goal of achieving good rankings for the client. While their intentions may be good, the client should be aware of the risk involved, and should also be clear that if these listings are stopped for any reason, it will have a significant impact on the clients rankings for the terms targeted in the text link ads. Many consultants and agencies are vindictive and will be more than happy to see a client’s rankings plummet if and when they decide to terminate the relationship.

Outsourcing
Many if not all of the larger agencies outsource some portion of their work. Sometimes it’s limited to on aspect like link building or reporting which involves a lot of ‘grunt work’, other times they outsource key functions like search engine optimization and pay-per-click management and just keep account managers on staff to maintain the relationship with the client. Is this a terrible thing? Not necessarily. As long as they have strict specifications and standards for their work, and it is approved by experts within the company, an agency can deliver consistent results while having the ability to pass along a cost savings to the client. However, many agencies when questioned will lie and say that all work is handled in house. Some may go a step further and not only deny the use of outsourcing, but also strongly attack the use of sending work outside of the company…

Lies about experience levels of staff
Savvy business people will look at the Internet Marketing industry and see that:

1. It is relatively new
2. It is not taught using traditional education (college, etc.)
3. Agencies providing these services are growing at extraordinary rates
4. The talent pool is very small

What does this add up to? There is not a lot of experience out there! Most of the larger agencies are in a constant cycle of hiring inexperienced people and losing experienced people. If a company has doubled in size in a couple of years, that means half the staff has worked their for a very short amount of time. Sure Internet Marketing methods and strategies can be taught, but I have witnessed environments where people with no experience were handed accounts within a couple of weeks of starting. Obviously this is not the best situation for the clients that this ‘newbie’ is handling.

Do clients know about this lack of experience? Are they told the truth when asked? Often times the answer is no.

Using shady methods to drive traffic
An uneducated client may have their focus on the wrong numbers/metrics. Many choose to focus on rankings, many others focus on traffic. Obviously these factors are important in the overall equation of measuring the success of a site, but standing by themselves, these numbers don’t mean anything.

Take traffic for example. I had one experience with a client who brought in an additional consultant to help work on his campaign. He met him through a friend, said he had a lot of experience and proven methods for driving tons of traffic to a site. The client was so focussed on traffic that he forgot about quality. He paid the consultant and sure enough, the consultant lived up to his word and brought tons of traffic to the site. Good right? Wrong! After checking through the statistics, the massive amount of traffic that was sent to the site turned out to be driven by ads sent out to a farm of the shadiest sites on the internet – porn sites, gambling sites, etc. Almost all of the traffic was from countries outside of the US that not only couldn’t buy the client’s product, but were from countries notorious for hacking and other illegal activity. Most importantly, not one of the hundreds of thousands of visits sent to the site over the course of a month turned into a successful sale.

The client wanted traffic and he got it. The consultant may have given the client what he wanted, but did absolutely nothing to contribute to the success of the web site and probably caused significant long term damage to the site and the company’s reputation because of his methods.

Setting unrealistic expectations/False promises
There are many consultants and agencies out there competing in this space. There is enormous demand for Internet Marketing services as companies are realizing the tremendous success that a solid campaign can bring them. As any industry grows like this, it attracts many shady individuals that are looking to make a quick buck. When researching companies you will often see many claims like ‘top rankings guaranteed’, ‘money back guarantee’, etc. Obviously claims like these should make shoppers weary. How can someone guarantee the ability to rank any company for any term? There are various degrees of competition – some phrases are easy to rank for, some are extremely difficult to rank for. While there are proven methods and techniques to drive traffic and achieve good rankings, it’s not an exact science and specific results cannot be guaranteed. Even solid agencies with good track records can fall into this category. While they may not have claims like this in their literature, often their sales staff can get out of hand (they are salespeople after all…) and make boisterous claims like these when pitching services.

Now obviously this is short sided thinking and setting up unreasonably expectations in the beginning of a relationship will lead to a quick and unhappy end to that relationship. However, in the interim, the salesperson and the agency make some money. There is such a pool of demand that many are not concerned about building long term and lasting relationships. When a client leaves, they can fill that slot with someone else…

Honesty is the best policy
Professionally and personally I am known to be honest to a fault. Does this often make life more difficult than if I told a few white lies here and there? Sure it does. However, I believe clients should be aware of what I am doing and how it can effect them both positively and negatively. They should be made aware of potential risks, and if they don’t understand a particular method or strategy it should be explained to them. If work being done on their behalf involves setting up accounts with various partners, clients should have control over these accounts so that they could smoothly transition elsewhere if the relationship terminates for whatever reason.

Any marketer (through traditional media or the Internet), is ultimately working on the client’s behalf and it’s that company’s image, reputation, and future on the line. If we as marketers are looking to build long term relationships with our clients, we should be honest and forthcoming from start to finish.

After all, honesty is the key to a solid foundation in any relationship.

So, what is Internet Marketing? Just like any other term thrown around the Internet, it has lots of different meanings but here is the basic definition as I see it: “To use multiple online techniques to drive traffic to a user friendly web site where the desired conversion can be obtained”. That’s the bottom line right, to bring people to a site and get them to take action?

Here are some of the topics I plan to talk about over the coming days/months/years:

• Traffic – various techniques to drive traffic to a web site, whether you are looking for relevant traffic or in some cases, eyeballs alone.
• Conversion – how to analyze and optimize a site’s performance to drive the highest rate of conversion possible (sales, leads, etc.)
• Analysis – what are the definitions of the key metrics, how they can be viewed to get a total picture of a site’s performance, various tools out there like Google Analytics on up to more expensive players like Omniture.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) – the basics of proper SEO- it’s really not rocket science but it is ever changing. I will layout the formula for a ’search engine friendly’ web site.
• Pay-per-click (PPC) / Search engine marketing (SEM) – another one of those names that is in a state of transition. I’m old school, I still call it PPC! I will talk about how to build out and optimize campaigns, techniques on driving the lowest cost per conversion (CPC), what the new Google Quality Score really means, etc.
• Link building – various ways to obtain links, both paid and unpaid, the good ‘ole PageRank and how important it is, etc.
• Social networking/Web 2.0 – how can this be integrated into an Internet Marketing campaign, how effective or ineffective can be…
• General site auditing – how to quickly determine the issues with a site that effect it’s ability to get indexed, it’s ability to convert, etc.
• Ethics of SEO – black hat, white hat… How about grey hat? Learn about some of the grey areas in SEO that are currently up for debate (Text link ads, Blog outreach, etc.)
• News – if you know anything about this industry you know it is constantly changing – I’ll try to post newsworthy items on here as well.

Most of all, I look forward to interacting with people and discussing some of the hot issues in the industry.

All the best,

Brian