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.
