Everyone will agree with me that all of us on the Net need traffic, lots of qualified, targeted traffic because we are here to make money and without visitors that our sites convert into customers, we will not make any money.

Nothing against it if it is for the good of the customer too. But what I don't like is traffic at any expense or in my eyes scam that seems to me recently started to occur more and more often - Scam, Spam, Hype in 'honest' coats.

So much talked about, so annoying and spreading and spreading so fast. I expect that everyone reading this can name several cases he comes across every day. Just to mention the poor little word "FREE". Every course on writing sales copies or ads on the Net advises to use it 'whenever possible'. So it happens.

I dare to say that now some 98 out of 100 marketing efforts uses this word on the edge of scam or expressly that way.

A few examples jumping out of the Net ground in hundreds a day, seems to me at least:   

- FREE services are not FREE in my eyes if I am forced to pay membership fees to be allowed to use them.

- FREE ads - promising FREE ads either in an ezine or on a site on subscription, even confirming the ad receipt with the date of publishing and then not bothering to publish it nor apologize. The purpose was achieved. The person got you to sign up and thinks that from now on he can be sending you mail freely.

- FREE E-Book is not a book and not FREE at all if what I download is one or two paras of two or three (the better case) chapters and then the only I can see is a whole page ad - the same all the through the rest of the 'book' on top - trying to persuade me to buy the thing. And this thing is usually more than 650 kB. What about the content of the purchased thing? Similar hype, I'd say.

- FREE fully working demo download. Several times I downloaded a demo that was claimed to be fully working and it was not but very lame. But recently I downloaded several demos to try FREE and they worked three days and one even ONE day only. And I am talking about demos of around 2 Mb, one was even 6.5 Mb.

I consider these practices completely dishonest. I myself would never take even bread on my dying-of-hunger day from a person like this and am so annoyed that on false promises he allured me out to his page or to download something like that.

And I even meet persons daring to write to me to give them testimonials for this, offering to publish it on their pages as a FREE Ad for ME. The persons would be very much surprised at what they received to publish.

I'm not going to talk about the other group of marketers, and it's persons who charge for everything, even a complete rubbish, claiming that others charge more for the same.

I think that there should be two crucial points in business whether offline or online and it is HONESTY and SERVICE of VALUE.

If I decide to provide visitors or clients with something FREE, I give it out FREE. If I don't have anything FREE of value, I say, it is not FREE or I get something of value that I am willing to give out FREE and then I can expect that visitors or clients trust my word afterwards.

People nowadays, and especially on the Net, have all the possibilites of comparing services, products and are informed, experienced, and once, I lie to a person on the first encounter, I cannot expect to convert the person to anything worth something for me, not thinking of a client at all.   

The difference is huge when the author says: "I am going to let you download three chapters of my book. If you like it, buy it." I am ready for the fact that I receive three chapters and if I want the whole book FREE, I have the possibility not to download.

All I wanted to say is that anyone wishing to get visitors to his site should think about the purpose of his efforts and the consequences of his advertising for him in the first place and think about the sort of visitors he will get by the means he uses and in what mood and whether such visitors are of any use and how much his name is worth for him.

In other words, how much he is serious about his business, not mentioning the fact that more and more people leave the Net all disappointed, robbed or feeling robbed, dishonestly and unfairly treated, deceived, cursing all the Internet, seeing the whole thing as a big hype where only rascals, tricksters and impostors can make and make money.

And this definitely is not true. What more:   

These people could be clients, returning customers of mine and yours, anyone's. I think that Internet brings us all so many opportunities to advertise our businesses honestly, giving us so many resources to get lots of traffic, exactly the sort of traffic we need to do business the right way and make money, more money than our wildest dreams can ever fancy and it's not necessary to use the above practices at all.

Have a great and successful day on our Net and wish for fewer occurrences of the above sort with me.

Sincerely,

Irena Whitfield

Note: I apologize for me using he or his/him all through the article. I did so just for the sake of simplicity. I definitely did not want to say that only men advertise the above way. On the contrary, I can see so many women doing exactly the same.

****************************************************** The article may be reprinted or used freely as long as it is in its entirety incl the resource box below 

****************************************************** Irena Whitfield is the webmistress of http://www.thecassiopeia.com/ - Internet Business Consultants for 3rd Millennium helping people to achieve their goals on the Net, trying to provide them with All the Tools they need FREE. Check: 
http://www.thecassiopeia.com/Guide/  

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