Internet marketing is a huge trend on the internet right now. It is important for small business owners to understand what it is in order to develop effective strategies for marketing themselves. It is equally important for marketing professionals to maintain a code of ethics and not follow this lead of falsehood in order to allow the system to correct itself naturally.
Consider this example:
The owners of MomAndPopStore.com create an e-commerce store that sells hooleywidgets, a special niche device. They design the store well and include rich content to draw in traffic. They submit their URLs to all the major search engines. They have an abundance of traffic. Anyone looking for hooleywidgets on Google sees MomAndPopStore.com as the firs listing, and can easily purchase exactly what they were looking for with a few clicks.
Eventually, someone catches on. The internet marketers go to Google and see that hooleywidgets have a high search volume but very low advertising competition. So they set up multiple single-page sites that are loaded with keywords but don’t actually have anything qualitative about them. These pages are also loaded with Google ads. Then then spend hours a day planting their links around the internet to artificially raise their Google ranking for their useless landing pages.
MomAndPopStore.com’s owners are now confused why they, as the only one selling hooleywidgets in the entire country, are now ranked 100th on Google. Their traffic is falling drastically. So they purchase an AdWords campaign to boost traffic and are now paying for every customer that finds their site. While their traffic is somewhat increasing, it is still not as strong as it was when they first started, and they are paying a lot more to attract it.
What is happening is that the internet marketers, with an endless amount of time to spend on these kinds of projects, are now taking money from MomAndPopStore.com by acting as an unauthorized middleman. Instead of searchers finding MomAndPopStore.com directly (and at no cost to MomAndPopStore.com) when they search for "hooleywidgets", they are finding these landing pages. Confused about how they got there, they see MomAndPopStore.com’s ad on the side of the page, click on it, and arrive at what they were actually looking for. Some searchers hit these landing pages and simply give up, thereby reducing MomAndPopStore.com’s overall traffic, paid or free.
These tools (Adwords campaigns, search engines, internet marketing) always start with great promise and then begin to fail as the system is exploited by those trying to make a living off that which they don’t understand. The point in this example is that, although we can manipulate the system if we work in large enough numbers, we should also consider the ethics of what we are doing and the impact we have on the society as a whole. I see stories like this one more and more every day, where companies with greater marketing budgets buy their way to the top falsely. (The recent Big Digg Rig is an excellent example of that.) Remember the days when the quality of your product and the friendliness of your customer service made you number 1, and not the amount of money you had to toss at advertising?
June 14th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
are you crazy? in today’s world where the current political party in charge has demonstrated that they can get away with almost anything, and promoted a culture of “try-to-get-away-with-anything” mentality, you expect people to play nice and by the rules?
also in the scenario that you mentioned, the hooleywidgets would have to become a pretty big in-demand product to get the attention of pirates to be spending time creating these theft-sites. in that case, as competitors see that there is money to be made, they want to jump on the bandwagon too, so the competition intesifies.
this is just another way that the competition intensifies, and unfortunately it is a pretty nasty game they play, but you can’t expect them to back down.
and some people will react by fighting fire with fire, choosing to do the same things that the bad guys are doing because that is what is working right now.
and as far as the market correcting itself, the general public who are clicking on these sites are clueless and are going to continue to click on these sites. (remember this is how most virus are passed around because people using computers these days are not well educated nor do they care enough to want to be, so they pass around email jokes and video files with viruses attached, and they don’t update their virus programs nor do they do their windows updates)
so as long as there are fools to be fooled, there will always be people to do the fooling.
and as long as there is a system, there will always be people trying to cheat the system, because humans are lazy by nature. that is why we have some many inventions, because we are always looking for something better.
June 14th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
and this is not a problem with internet marketing, this is a problem with people.
internet marketing is great. don’t confuse problems and loopholes in new technology with internet marketing. if regular advertising methods were as easy and cheap as internet marketing, then people would be abusing those too. the reason they don’t abuse those is that it costs lots of money to play in those sandboxes, whereas internet marketing and advertising channels (like DIGG and search engine organics) and relatively cheap.
if you want to write about the problem with internet marketing methods, complain about the copycat advertising being done by the fools that are trying to sell informational products like ebooks, where they make 1 page that is 2 miles long with tons of testimonials on it and a bunch of other crap like (this offer ends tonight at midnight)…
June 14th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
To say that you should play dirty because everyone else does is not right.
You adhere to a code of ethics and stick to professionalism while you wait for the technology to correct itself.
People can continue to practice this money-making scheme, but in the end Google will change it’s programming to alter their abilities to work this way. They already have measures to curb such behaviors and they make changes daily.
And I will continue to speak out against these practices, as I did in this recent forum post on StartupNation:
I am a small business owner, based on our size, as are all of my clients and a whole lot of people here on SUN (including SUN itself).
Advertising is expensive. Purchasing banner ads like the ones you see on SUN – this is expensive. Many small businesses can’t afford this kind of advertising. This is why Google created programs like AdWords. You can buy in advertising at low PPC rates, and it lets smaller businesses compete with larger businesses. These ads then get served on content-rich sites. For example, if you were reading a site that was an article database on dog training – the kind of place with how-to guides, advice articles, etc that were written by a dog trainer – you might also see some ads for associated products like dog collars and puppy wee pads. This kind of thing makes sense. The person writing the site is focusing on the information, not some niche or keywords, and the ads are served based on content and common subject matter. It’s very reasonable to assume that the next step, after reading an article about teaching your dog to heel, would be to go look online for a training collar. And there you go, an ad for a training collar is in the right sidebar. This is the original intention of AdWords – the perfect world in which it was supposed to work. The person reading the article, clicks on the ad, and purchases a collar. The person paying for the ad doesn’t mind paying 11 cents to make a $20 sale.
So you switch over to this “internet marketing” or “niche marketing” thing. These are not articles written by experts – these are vague amount of text written by people who just gathered the data from other sources in a way which lends no credibility or authority. They are merely reporters – and not very good ones. They establish pages not for content’s sake, but just for the ability to serve ads. So now I am looking up dog training on Google, and I see a link for this internet marketer’s “article page”. I go there, not finding the info I want. I see some boxes on the side that might have the info I want, click on one of those – and still don’t really find what I want. I maybe go back, try a few more, or just give up and go back to Google.
So best-case AdWords scenario: AdWords ads provide funding for good, authoritative writers to provide good content, and then users follow up by purchasing from an advertiser. Google takes a cut for providing the service.
Worst case? Niche/internet marketers provide useless content, drive up per-click pricing on keywords, make their cut, business owner gets no sale for the advertising and loses money, and Google still makes their cut.
This is why the system of “article marketing” sucks. It hurts the small business owner by exploiting the system.
I also want to remind you to please keep this site honest by using your real name.