It’s easy to stray in internet marketing. There are so many people offering shortcuts that seem to be foolproof – or at least you do your best to convince yourself that’s the case.

But if you don’t do the right thing, that can come back to bite you and your business.

Fake reviews

For instance, over the years a lot of people have used fake reviews to boost their popularity. It’s been done for Amazon books, Google reviews, TripAdvisor and near enough every other site that has a review option.

These get weeded out from time to time.

Amazon has just publicly said that it’s not happy with Fiverr vendors offering fake reviews and has recently announced that it will be taking out a lawsuit against the vendors.

How easy that will be to pursue is an interesting question as by no means all of the people affected will be in countries where it’s easy to sue them.

But it does fire a warning shot for people who buy fake reviews in the hope of increasing their sales.

My personal view is that it would be a relatively simple task for Amazon to weed out the fake reviews – that’s what computers do quite well.

It remains to be seen how this affects the various authors and whether Amazon will downplay their books in the results.

The problem with this is that whilst Amazon are judge and jury, they also potentially benefit because most of the affected products are Kindle books and Amazon get a percentage of the sale.

So it can’t be said that they don’t have an interest in the result but my guess is that they’d prefer to clean up the fake Kindle reviews rather than have them taint their whole marketplace.

So what’s the right thing to do in this instance?

I think the clear cut thing would be to not buy fake reviews. To me, that’s cut and dried.

But then there’s the options that are often suggested in Kindle courses:

• Swap reviews with other authors on an “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine” basis. That’s probably outside the terms of service of most websites.
• Send gift copies to friends and acquaintances in exchange for a review. That’s very close to what happens with newspapers and magazines – they’ll get review copies or even completely free products (this happens a lot with travel) in the hope that they’ll give a positive review. Which means this is a grey area and it’s your choice as to whether or not it’s the right thing to do.
• Offer bonuses in exchange for reviews. Another grey area but one that’s used quite a lot. Your call

Spamming

In the early days of the web this meant sending unsolicited emails to people.

That still happens and there are laws in a lot of countries that attempt to prevent it.

But if you’ve ever looked in your email junk folder you’ll know that they still happen.

Quite honestly, I’m not sure why as (regardless of the various laws) most email providers filter out the obvious spam and do a reasonably good job. Which must mean that only a relatively small amount of spam gets through and there must be a law diminishing returns.

Which is why spam has expanded into other areas, Most of them have good and bad aspects so make sure you choose the better ones and ignore any temptation to take short cuts that could backfire.

• Forum posting. The better forums do quite a good job of policing this and if a forum is worth posting on then there’s a good chance that the more obvious spam will get filtered out or deleted by moderators. But some people still post relatively useless answers to boost their post count and credibility. Personally I think that the right way to treat forums is the same as if you were having a conversation with someone – you can get some good quality traffic from forums by offering decent help and advice.
• Blog commenting. Most blog comments are made by robots and automated programs. They tend to be poor quality, spun so that they’re next to unreadable and get filtered by most of the spam traps such as Aksimet. Blog comment sections seem to attract spam and it’s almost a sign that your website is starting to get indexed. There are various plugins (Akismet is one of many) that will help you separate the unwanted comments from the handful of good ones. And if you’re going to use blog comments, make sure they contribute to the conversation the blog post started. Do that often enough on reasonable quality blogs and you can start to build up a name for yourself.
• Instant messaging. Skype seems to attract lots of spammers but at least you can flag them as such. That does make it important that if you connect with someone you personalise the message rather than leave it at the default suggested by Skype.

Guest blogging

This might be a suprise inclusion in this list but, as with everything else, there’s a good and a bad way to do guest blogging.

Sites like Fiverr offer guest posts – you write a post (or they can often write one for you) and pay your $5. The quality of the sites varies enormously as does the company you’ll be keeping.

It definitely pays to check the site before buying the gig – all reputable vendors will respond to that kind of enquiry. Be wary of any gig that publicly states the URLs involved – if you can read them, so can Google’s robots. So you’re increasing the chance of Google downplaying the site or the links it contains.

That’s one of the reasons that private blog networks do their best to keep their sites secret otherwise they run the risk of getting dropped like a stone at the next update.

If you create good quality content and get it put it on good quality sites then guest blogging can be very worthwhile. But it takes time and effort unless you go down the Fiverr route (and even then it takes some time and effort).

Anything else that doesn’t quite seem right

Gut reactions are good to go by.

If you find a method but something in you thinks that it may not be a good idea, go with that reaction.

And if you couldn’t justify the method to a close friend, that’s another sign that something isn’t right.

We’re always looking for shortcuts – it seems to be part of human nature – but often they’re a case of one step forward, two steps back.

Google’s computers have very long memories. Disk space is cheap and they can easily go back through the various things you’ve done over the months and years.

Google also have a habit of retrospectively applying rules. So something that was acceptable a while ago but is no longer acceptable can come back to haunt you.

A good rule of thumb is to either avoid fast solutions or treat them with extreme caution. The web is littered with people who made a killing with a site for a few days or weeks or even months but then got downgraded in the search results to the extent that the site didn’t even get visited by the robots employed by the spammers.

If you’ve got the patience and skills involved, that can be a way to work. But you’re constantly on guard and constantly having to plan for the time when your site vanishes along with your income. Plus it can be a case of spending more than you get back in income – there are no guarantees that any method will work as it’s generally thought that Google applies a randomisation factor in its algorithm to counteract people trying to figure out how it works.

In my view, far better to take the longer haul approach, do things that feel right and sleep at night!

If you’d like to fast track your journey in that direction, take a look at my affiliate marketing mastermind approach.