Trustworthy Marketers – “Fake it ’til you make it”

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?