Black Hat Tactics Are Guaranteed to Backfire

Like most dishonest business practices, black hat marketing tactics may yield returns in the short term, but they’re guaranteed to blow up in your face.

Your customers are people, even if your customers are businesses. (Businesses are made up of people, after all.) And people always have their guard up when they’re being marketed to by companies they have not learned to trust yet.

Some black hat marketing techniques—bait and switch, for example—have been around for ages, but we have brand-new categories now with the rise of the Internet.

Social media manipulation. If you install a program on your web site that forces your readers to automatically “like” your company page, they’ll find out when they peruse their list of “likes,” and they will feel had. They will feel had by you.

Their fake “like” will turn into genuine dislike. Many will tell their friends, and Facebook may eventually close your account, dropping your number of genuine likes and fake likes alike down to zero.

Cloaking. Google explicitly says, “don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, a practice commonly referred to as ‘cloaking.’”

If you run a cheat eats diner, but deliberately attract web site visitors with an invisible five-star restaurant page set up solely for search engines, you’re cloaking.

Used car salesmen have a bad rep. Some of them surely don’t deserve it, but think about the stereotype. He’s dishonest. He’s pushy. And he charges too much.

Imagine how much more annoying he’d be if, according to his storefront, he sold Mercedes and Jaguars but in reality he only sold Chevys and Fords.

You don’t even want to be in the same time zone as that guy. Your would-be customers won’t appreciate it, and it wouldn’t matter much if they did. Your site will get blacklisted from search engines.

One of the most famous cases involved BMW in Germany. They wanted hits from readers who searched for “used cars.” (Some people actually want to find a used car salesman.) So they created a cloaked “doorway page” that redirected readers to the regular BMW web site.

Google found out and reduced BMW’s search rank to zero.

Hidden Text. You won’t annoy your web site visitors if you can create hidden text crammed with keywords that will only be seen by search engine spiders, but at the end of the day this is just a less annoying version of cloaking.

Search engines may not be sentient, but they are designed by people on the lookout for this sort of behavior, and you’ll pay for it when they catch you.

Cybersquatting. If you register a domain name that’s similar to the name of a well-known company and hoping to pick up their customers, you’ll only hurt yourself as soon as customers get wise. And they will get wise.

Domain name shenanigans aren’t the only form of cybersquatting. A self-published writer decided to put the name “Stephen King” on his books in order to fool the real Stephen King’s fans. The reader reviews on Amazon.com are scathing. Amazon will catch on soon enough and blacklist this author, and his career—such as it is—will implode.

Don the black hat if you want, and it might even work for a while, but your market share will crash after your customers and the gatekeepers at search engines figure out what you’re up to. You’ll be the used car salesman, and unlike some perfectly ethical people who happen to sell used cars for a living, you will have earned that reputation.

What’s the ethical way to sell things?

Marketing-schools.org says that question has never had a satisfactory answer, but we all know the answer.

It’s simple: be honest.

What To Do When You’re Out of Ideas

According to Axonn Research, nine out of ten businesses use some form of content marketing to build trust and connections with customers. And the demand for content never ends.

Company web sites and business blogs can be ruthless taskmasters, treadmills with no off switch that run to infinity. It’s enough to make even the best content marketers feel like Sisyphus, the king in Greek mythology whom the gods punished for chronic deceitfulness by making him push a boulder up a hill over and over again—forever.

No wonder a content marketer’s often idea well often runs dry.

There’s a tried-and-true method, however, to refilling the well.

Carry a notebook with you. Better yet, use the notes app on your smartphone so you’ll always have it wherever you go. Whenever you get an idea, write it down in your notebook or tap it into your phone. If you need to write a blog post each week, you should be able think of something over the next week. Don’t promise yourself you’ll remember the idea, though. Pin in down on paper—or in pixels.

Talk to your co-workers. Other people will always think of things you’d never think of yourself, and if they aren’t on your content marketing team, their idea wells should be full. Most of them will be flattered that you asked them to help you.

Talk to your customers. Ask them what they love about your products and how you help make their lives better. They might surprise you. And don’t forget: your customers have stories of their own. Why not publish some?

Read. Read about your industry. Read what your competitors are publishing. Follow copywriting blogs like Copyblogger and consume everything published by the indispensable Content Marketing Institute. When you get out of your mental rut and into somebody else’s, ideas will naturally come to you.

Brainstorm. It’s intimidating when you’re mental gas tank is empty—what if I can’t come up with anything?—but your subconscious is full of ideas even when your conscious mind is running on fumes. All you have to do it engage it.

If you come up with idea that seem dumb, write them down anyway. If you combine two “dumb” ideas, you might come up with a smart one.

If you need to write a blog post per week and can manage to come up with twelve ideas during a brainstorming session, that will be keep you busy for three months. You’re bound to think of something else to write during that three month period if you follow the advice above, and if you add those ideas to your note file as you go, you should be in good shape indefinitely.

Talk to a 6 yr old–K.I.S.S

No matter your industry, you’ve heard the phrase, “Keep it simple, stupid.” It’s the transparent motto written within every office building. But have we truly internalized this message? Does it resonate with our current work?

Albert Einstein believed, “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

Einstein may have been a bit playful when he said that, but in all his brilliance, he recognized the importance of simplicity.

So here are five ways to keep things simple before you share your next greatest idea:

1. Define one purpose. Your purpose is the overarching vision that encompasses your specified goals. When you identify a purpose, you’ll more easily follow the rules of K.I.S.S.

2. Understand your audience. You may not be speaking to six year olds, but your desired audience may be unfamiliar with certain expressions you use to explain your idea/product/message. Once you’ve defined and observed your audience, choose the correct language and format your presentation to meet their needs.

3. Spout out your pitch in front of a mirror. Trust us, this works. This rehearsal will help you refine and rework your words and expressions more concisely.

4. Practice your message using words and pictures. Explain your idea with the help of 10 visual aids. Then try to condense your pitch into 10 key points or less.

5. Finally, find someone who isn’t aware of your new idea, and share the concept with him/her in five minutes or less. Then ask questions about his/her understanding.

How to Edit Your Own Work

“I hate to write, but I love having written.” Dorothy Parker

Writing is hard work, even for seasoned professionals. From the blank page at the beginning, to the clumsy and uneven middle, and all the way through to the sloppy end, first drafts never seem to get easier.

Don’t despair, though. First drafts aren’t supposed to be easy. As Harry Shaw wrote in Errors in English and Ways to Correct Them, “There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting.”

Editors can help, but you don’t want to turn that mess of a draft in to an editor. And what if you don’t have an editor?

It’s all on you.

Here are five tips to make the process much easier.

1. Take a break

Before rewriting even a sentence, you must clear your head and get some space between you and your words. Take a walk. Read a magazine. Cook a meal. Let your mind rest so you can look at what you have so far with fresh eyes.

2. Watch your eyes

As you cycle through second and third drafts, watch your eyes. If you keep looking at the same sentences over and over and you aren’t sure why, something is probably wrong with them. You might not know what the problem is, but your subconscious mind knows something is off. Keep working those sentences until they no longer stand out.

3. Read your work out loud

Awkwardly written sentences sound twice as awkward when you read them out loud as they appear when you look at them silently. If your words are clunky, you’ll hear the clunk. Keep banging away until the words flow from you mouth when you read them aloud as easily as they do when you’re talking.

4. Print it

Print a hard copy and mark it up with a red pen. Seeing your work in a different format initiates a slightly different thought process. Part of your brain thinks it’s reading your words for the first time, giving you a glimpse of how your work looks to readers.

Problems such as typos, clumsy wording, and botched information flow that were previously invisible are suddenly obvious.

Don’t be afraid to make your page bleed with red ink. Remember: all that red is making it better. Go over your work again and again, marking, slashing, crossing out and revising. You’ll know you’re done when you read through an entire draft and hardly make any changes.

5. Sleep on it

Your subconscious mind never stops chewing on problems, so until you file or publish your work, your brain is still in writing mode even when it’s asleep. You’ll rarely wake up with an epiphany, but better phrasing, a better organization, or a better beginning or ending will be worked out somewhere in your head, and it will reveal itself to you on your final pass through.

How to Write Headlines That Don’t Suck

On the Internet you have about three seconds to grab a reader’s attention or they’re outta there—especially if they find your site through a search engine and have no idea where they are.

The first thing they’ll read is your headline.

Eighty percent won’t read anything else.

Think about how you read a newspaper. Doesn’t matter if you’re browsing online in your pajamas or reading a dead-tree edition over breakfast in a cafe. If you’re like most people, you’ll scan at least a half-dozen headlines before you read one of the articles.

Copywriters and content marketers face the same problem, so your headlines better not suck.

1. Be clear. Headline writing is an art, not a science, but the headline itself should not be artistic. Be clear. Don’t use metaphors or cute turns of phrase. If a twelve-year old can’t understand it, start over.

2. Be direct. Tell the reader exactly what your sales copy or content marketing is about. If it’s about a new smartphone with a week-long battery life, say that in the headline.

3. Emphasize the benefits. You can’t always let the reader know what the benefits are in a headline, but when you can, you should. Like this:

How to Double Your Sales Without Hiring Any More Sales People

It’s clear. It’s direct. And the benefits are right there.

4. Don’t be click-baity. The headline’s job is to convince the reader to read the first sentence. (The first sentence’s job is to get the reader to move on to the second sentence, etc.) But be wary of manipulative click-bait. If you promise amazing results, you need to deliver.

Manipulative click-bait has become a genre unto itself, and Click Hole brilliantly lampooned it last summer with this:

This Stick Of Butter Is Left Out At Room Temperature; You Won’t Believe What Happens Next

Below that headline is a three-hour long video that shows a stick of butter s-l-o-w-l-y melting on the kitchen counter. Not a single human being will ever watch the whole thing.

5. Be outrageous if possible. Click-bait will almost certainly backfire, but if you can deliver on an outrageous headline, go for it.

Jon Morrow over at Problogger wrote one of the best outrageous headlines ever:

How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise, and Get Paid to Change the World.

Look at what he did there. It’s clear. It’s direct. He emphasizes the benefits. Hardly anyone can resist clicking it. And, believe it or not, he delivers.