I received yet another email this morning, from someone who’s lost a lot of money, after taking bad advice from a marketing blog. This seems to be a growing problem, as more and more small businesses look for free advice online, in a bid to help grow their business.
So, to help you (or your clients / friends) avoid making the same kind of costly mistakes, here are a few tips to help you spot the fakes.
Please share this post on your favourite social networks, as it’s really important that as many people as possible know about this.
Marketing blogs: What to watch for
If someone claims to be an expert at marketing and he or she can’t even market their own blog – stay well away. Because it’s so easy to fool traffic sites like Alexa.com into showing you get thousands of visitors a day, you need to look for more obvious signs that a marketing blog is valued by a large reader community.
A great place to start is by looking at the number of comments it gets. Marketing people, even very average ones, know how to build a blog that attracts comments on every post. If you spot a marketing related blog with no comments or very few, it shows the person behind the blog does not know how to market the blog correctly.
It’s also worth checking to see if their blog is listed or ranked by a respected, neutral, third party. This blog, for example, is ranked on what many consider to be the most influential in our industry, the Adage Power 150 – that’s their badge you see on the lower right hand side of the blog.
Testimonials are easy to fake: What to watch for
Look for proof that the marketing expert actually works with REAL people and companies! Testimonials are easy to fake. So, look to see if the marketing expert is talking about the companies or people they work with or the projects they are working on.
For example, if people want to check me out, they can see me write about clients I am currently working with AND they can see me openly tweeting with clients and former clients too.
Does the marketing expert exist in the real world?
Fake marketing ‘experts’ exist only online and in their imagination. The genuine marketing professionals you encounter online, are like any other REAL business. They will happily provide you with their FULL contact details; that’s their physical address and a land line phone number. We WANT people to call us and write to us. Always be extra cautious if a marketing ‘business’ only operates behind a website, a ‘box number’ and a Skype or mobile / cell phone number.
This is where YOU come in!
Those are just a few, very basic steps you can take to avoid bad marketing advice. I would really value YOUR suggestions. What are your tips for spotting the fakes in your industry?
Please share them here and make this post as valuable as possible for your fellow readers.
UPDATE:
This post from my ideas blog, covers another tool you can use, to identify how many people link to a particular website / blog.
IMPORTANT: If you want to make more sales, boost your profits and grow an amazing business, this will help you!