The key aspect of marketing is to aim to fulfill your audience’s needs… do not treat them as morons, do not annoy them, do not promise a lot and then fail to deliver.

Sadly, due to the idiocy of a few, marketers have a bad name amongst those in the industry… marketers are quite often seen as dishonest people that will do anything to make a buck. Below are three examples of people / organizations that have failed at marketing, and three examples you can look at to see what NOT to do.

1. Big Marketing Online

If you’re in a niche where most people are tech-aware, you generally can’t play them for fools.

Introducing Big Marketing Online.

Run by someone named ‘big Jason’, BMO were recently found to be faking their feed count. Of course, lying to your readers is one of the best ways to get off on a good footing with them.

They didn’t even game their Feedburner statistics… but just put up a fake image. In a niche where people know all about feed counts and how to tell if someone is faking it… how stupid does BMO think the rest of us are? They were found out pretty quickly, by a friend of mine – George Pearce.

Here’s proof…

Their actual feed count is around 550. Hardly a number to be ashamed about, so why lie about it?

With credibility now gone to shit, can’t see the blog surviving too long. Unless they become honest, of course.

2. Logo Angel

When the people at Logo Angel came onto the scene, I thought they were pretty smart.

Offering free logos, website designs and mascots in exchange for exposure is a great way to get the word out. Especially if you pick the right people…

However, Logo Angel have been one of the reasons I’ve been pissed off lately online – their moronic staff does not know how to do business professionally (if only they had never invented the ‘nudge’ function on MSN…).

I’ve been emailed, added to instant messenger, private messaged on Blog Premiere numerous time by these morons, each time asking the same question and not taking no for an answer. I’ve put their emails into the spam folder, blocked whoever on MSN, but they keep adding me from different profiles and emailing from different addresses. All with broken English. ARGH!

I’ve heard they’ve annoyed the hell out of quite a few, and doubt too many people will be using them. Shame, because their website is professionally designed and the ideas behind the start of it were good…

3. Cuil.com

Cuil promised lots… a user friendly search interface, more indexed pages than Google, and more relevant results.

They’ve got so many indexed pages, that they forgot to rank for their own name. Oops! Shame, because whatever they did marketing wise, they did right – they’ve gotten thousands of links their way from blog posts and a tough marketing strategy, branding themselves the latest ‘Google Killer’.

Sadly, most searches for yourwebsite.com run up nothing… although I do rank first place for my name (but only around 10th for TUK). Rule number one – fix all possible errors before you have an expensive launch. Next!

So the lessons today are…

1. Don’t lie to your visitors.

2. Don’t piss off potential customers.

3. Tweak and test all problems before a launch.

Simple really, but looking at the money invested in 3. and the ‘experience’ of 1., you’d be forgiven for thinking marketers were full of brown coloured excrement. :razz:

What kind of huge marketing mistakes have YOU seen?

Tomorrow I’ll talk about how you guys can learn about a strategy I’ve used to make $7,500 over the last two months at no financial costs to yourself at all… :razz:

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