Cracking the Whip on Good Deeds

byrhodesnet

108 followers

7 years ago

“No good deed goes unpunished” – Clare Boothe Luce

If you offer quality products and services that help your market solve their problems, you are doing a good thing, whether you do it for profit or for charity. But, no good deed goes unpunished, if your offer is to the wrong market.

I came across an interesting comment on a blog post that teaches how to use social media to promote WA. The article recommended posting links to WA pages on social media.

One of the commentators related how she followed the instructions by posting links to her social media pages and got slapped by Google+ because similar links had been reported as spam. She had apparently broken Google’s “rules.”

There are a couple of lessons here.

One is, we have to be thoughtful as we apply what we are learning about internet marketing here at WA or anywhere else. And even then, we will make mistakes and have to overcome obstacles.

Why?

Because the internet moves at the speed of light. It changes all the time and we need to, not only get used to it but expect it.

I sympathize with the commentator's grief at being slapped by Google. Google (a for profit company) surely knows that affiliate marketers want to promote their products.

They also know that Google-ites don’t want to be inundated with irrelevant messages. So they are very protective of their market by constantly honing their algorithms to ferret out exploits used to spam people or manipulate rankings.

Like a dragnet, these algorithm changes sometimes catch legit marketers, like our friend here, who is just trying to help her market overcome a problem (how to make money online) by making them aware of her helpful product or service (WA).

Google wants to be viewed as the absolute authority for obtaining relevant information. So, they slapped her for offering what looked like low-quality spam content. When people hit the spam button it means the message wasn’t relevant. It wasn’t in front of the right market.

We also want to establish our authority in our niches. If we can’t boost our authority by posting certain links in social media. We find a different way.

Another lesson is that, since the internet moves at the speed of light, we have to expect changes and account for them. For example, when I read the above-mentioned training about how to post affiliate links on social media, I noticed that the embedded video was at least 2 years old, even though the article was updated this year.

That’s a lot of time in internet years.

I knew that the social media sites would likely look different. Buttons might be changed or gone. The whole interface could be different.

I recently re-listened to a training by the great email marketing educator, Ben Settle. He was talking about getting traffic. And one of the things he said was that when we post to forums, blogs, social media platforms...whatever, find out what the rules are and follow them. Don’t try to game them. Don’t be an unwelcome guest.

I’m sure none of us are trying to do that.

The point is, the responsibility is on us. We have to make sure we don’t break the rules. Yes, the unethical spammers make it hard on us (creating a skeptical market).

Yes, Google may be ham-fisted in their efforts to protect their list from “irrelevant” messages.

And, yes, WA won’t be able to keep every post on this massive site up-to-the-minute.

Classic marketing challenges.

The solution is a mindset shift. Don’t spend time being disappointed. Instead, learn how to improve or fix the problem and post a training on it to help the community and establish your own expertise.

It will help you advance, in true pay-it-forward fashion.