Tonight Alejandro Reyes, creator of SuccessFool TV, presented a topic that was quite truthful…no pun intended. If I’m not mistaken he first started off talking about faking RSS feeds. Unknown to me bloggers have been found to mislead their readers by manually changing the code in their blog which displays the number of RSS feed subscribers. You may be asking why that matters and the reason is because it’s a dishonest approach to getting more subscribers.

There seems to be some phenomenon that people believe website/blog visitors are ignorant or stupid. Manipulating the number of people that appear to be following your blog posts so that you look “Cool” and popular is disgusting. In this Internet marketing industry we’ve had trouble with new people in the industry getting ripped off. The notion that making yourself more popular is unethical and should not be condoned. Do you think it’s OK because you haven’t got caught? Here’s some news for you, it’s really not hard to figure out if you’re “cheating” the numbers. Have you ever been on a website, “viewed the source” of the page and checked out the code? That’s all it really takes to expose those faking their popularity and “coolness” as Alejandro put it.

That lead to Alejandro discussing the “Fake it ’til you make it” strategy which I brought up to him during his video cast tonight. You see, there are “fakers” and there are those who act the part – a big difference! Donald Trump probably didn’t lie, cheat, make-up stories, or just tell people want they wanted to hear when he was starting his business. Did he act like he was a professional? Probably. Was he making the right steps to appear to have lots of experience? Most likely. Did he learn, read and study other business professionals to understand what to do? Chances are, yes!

When you’re starting out a business the last thing to do is lie, be dishonest, cheat, and make-up stories. It is one thing to sell yourself but it’s another thing to tell people what they want to hear so they’ll listen to you. Imagine if you lied to get 1000 subscribers to your newsletter and then all of a sudden 500 of them figured out you made up a story about your success. What do you think would happen? I’d bet money that news would spread faster than a flash flood…and on the Internet it would be nearly impossible to reverse.

Case in point, be careful what tactics you take to appear as a “big wig” in this industry, especially on the Internet. When you tell people things that aren’t true which is purely to gain their trust and belief, you’re making a big mistake. Nobody likes a liar, at least anyone with decency.

What baffles me is the lack of guilt. If I were to fake something for popularity sake (and especially get caught) I’d feel extremely guilt, broken, torn, and I know it would hurt my integrity…even if nobody explicitly said it. Is it just me or is this truly a sign of lack of respect?

I’ve said it in various ways before that blogging or writing blogs is a valuable way to help get your name out there in cyberspace. If you’re serious about internet marketing or network marketing then you’re probably already blogging, at least that’s what I’m going to assume. If you’re not, that’s a big mistake.

Blogging is a way for you to engage with an audience, to share thoughts and ideas. It’s a way to think and express opinions as well as get feedback from readers. More importantly, blogging is a way for you to connect with other people around the world. As a marketer you know (or should know) that connecting with more people as often as possible is a very important task. Through a blog you can express leadership and professionalism that can catch the interest of dozens or even thousands of visitors.

The other side to blogging is that what you write can quickly and easily be picked up by search engines. This means that the more you write the more likely your articles will be found by people on the internet. Search engines love blogs because content remains fresh, each article can be indexed individually and each article is usually targeted to one topic. As well, you can link to other sites and blogs as well as allow visitors to write comments and link back to their own sites/blogs. (Can be helpful in search engine rank)

Oh yeah, the other thing is that blogging is a fast way to publish articles. There’s no need to upload files or wait for a webmaster to update your website. You can simply login to your blog via web access (like a CMS) and write the article directly yourself.

Now of course there are multiple blogging systems available but I’m partial to WordPress. It has worked flawlessly for me and many of those people I know. Completely customizable and as functional as I need.

If you need help with setting up and/or customizing your WordPress, I can offer that service to you. Questions? Ask away!

~Matt

This post is brief and for a good reason. Darren Olander and I invested our time and money into an advertising site called ListDomino. The idea is simple, your email list can grow even if you do nothing…and it’s true.

As a member of ListDomino.com, you can have the ability to email thousands of people who join after you without the requirement of referring members. We had a pre-launch to get the ball rolling and the site has been a success so far. Now we’ve opened it to everyone so I strongly suggest taking a look for yourself.

Heck, you can hear my Voice Recording on the home page too- I thought that was pretty cool.

www.listdomino.com

~Matt