Don’t Be a Bad Apple in Your Industry!
It doesn’t matter whether you are new to the industry or a seasoned veteran, it is important to understand the difference between cutting corners and actually performing good online marketing efforts. There is a difference between being looked at as a spammer and being looked at as a savvy marketing professional.
Here are ways to become a bad apple in your industry online:
1. Don’t Spam Social Media: It can be quite easy to want to sit there and only conduct self-promotion, but remember that it is important to also conduct content sharing efforts throughout the social space. A little bit of self-promotion is perfectly fine, but too much leaves a sour taste.
2. Be Careful Buying Lists (or don’t do it at all!): If you are going to target people through email marketing make sure that your list is comprised of opt-in email recipients. Buying email lists was something that worked years ago but has much less of an impact in today’s online world.
3. Don’t Think About “Blasts”, But Rather “Lasers”: There are many services that promise to “blast” your company name and information across the web space, but realize that a laser targeted approach will be much more beneficial in the long run. The last thing you want is for your company information hitting non-targeted individuals causing a mental “spam” stamp to be placed on your company name.
4. Offer Value With Blog Commenting: If you are going to leave a comment on a blog make sure to have some value attached to that blog comment, otherwise people will not take you seriously. Not to mention, leaving bogus one line comments that are clearly canned just look very spammy.
5. Keep Forum Interaction Clean: The last thing that you want to do is spam an industry forum because I can guarantee that you will get chewed up and spit out extremely quickly. Spamming a forum with blatant self-promotion could cause a number of negative impacts on your company name.
If you are proactively marketing your business online, really think about what you are doing so that you don’t paint your business image in a negative light online.
3 Responses to “Don’t Be a Bad Apple in Your Industry!”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
It is very interesting article. Bad apple contaminates to. It will spread its rotten cells. Good review. I am sure many of us will find it helpful to decontaminate a bad apple and produce a delicious apple pie out of it. I found more information about this subject on
Boy did you get this right. I just quit a job working for a man who insisted on doing all of those things and it was very frustrating taking the phone calls and emails from people angry with his spamming behavior. How people think that kind of thing will really bring them qualified customers is amazing to me. He got booted from forums almost as soon as he posted, so he wasted a lot of time on this when he could have actually been marketing properly and actually getting customers instead of just feeding his ego. Evenutally he had a bad name throughout his industry and nobody wanted to deal with him.
Agreed.
Like most things in life, a short cut is the longest route.
If you provide useful, interesting and appealing information about your area of expertise you will gain Kudos. However, if its rubbish people will treat it for what it is.
I think the simplest way to build online links is to provide content rather than spamming everyone you happen to get a business card off once. If it’s good content, others will link back to you and you didn’t even need to do anything.
Also, if you get a bad online review. Calmly respond and acknowledge their concerns and indicated what you have changed.
Eg “The service was terrible and the was no air con.”
Response: “We’re sorry you had a bad experience. We have now fixed the air con and put more staff on. Please drop in for a free coffee next time you come by”