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Did You Buy Into The Lie?
By Bill Platt
In my website statistics, I have been watching a trend over the last year or so. That trend has gone from just a few misled individuals a year ago, to hundreds of duped webmasters today.
Did you buy into the lie too?
Webmasters Do Need Traffic In Order to Sell Goods and Services
Every morning when we get out of bed, we webmasters of the world know deep in our hearts that all we need to make our money today is a certain amount of traffic to our websites. We have tested our websites and tracked our results, and we have learned that a certain percentage of our visitors will buy what we are offering.
So, as we begin each day, it is usually our goal to take one more step towards building exposure for our website. We want to build one more channel that our future customers can use to find our websites.
Through tracking we know that one of every ten, twenty of forty people will buy our goods and services. So, we hope to see one hundred, two hundred or four hundred people visiting our website today. Experience has taught us that in order to make the kind of money we want to make each day, then we must present our website to X number of people each day.
The Most Effective Lie Utilizes a Small, Nugget of Truth
Webmasters do need traffic to their websites. That is the one, small nugget of truth that supports the lie.
No one is going to argue that a website does not need traffic, unless they are just a fool at heart.
What the "Seller Of Lies" fails to tell is that the types of traffic differ. The Seller Of Lies does not tell you that targeted traffic is one hundred times more likely to buy what you are selling than untargeted traffic!
The Seller Of Lies has tried to convince you that since you offer a B2B product or service, that the best person for you to target is other webmasters.
What the Seller Of Lies fails to tell you is that "deception does not help you build the trust that you need to sell your products and services." In fact, most webmasters, once they learn that someone has deceived them, they will refuse to buy from the person who has deceived them!
But, the Seller Of Lies does not share that side of the picture. Nope. The Seller Of Lies is only interested in taking your money and giving you a false sense of hope and accomplishment.
So, Who Is The Seller Of Lies?
The Seller Of Lies are those companies who sell the software product that pings websites in such a way as to appear as if the software user's website is sending traffic to the destination website.
You know whom I am talking about. You have seen their websites in your Referral URL tracking. You see their links, and you wonder why they linked to your website. So, you go check out their page to see how they linked to your site, and why their traffic would be interested in visiting your website.
You look and you look, and then you realize that this webmaster has duped you! You realize that this webmaster is using that ping software to hit your website, creating the illusion that they have a link to your website on their web page.
I don't know about you, but every time I realize that I have been tricked into visiting someone's website, I confirm in my own mind that I will never buy what that website is selling! I don't like to be deceived by anyone, and I do hold grudges.
The Twist In The Trend
When these pinging programs first came to the web, I would see a few dozen sites in my logs each month with one or two pings to my site --- never more than six pings in one month.
This week, I have been seeing people pinging me dozens of times with the same URL pretending to be a link referrer to my website.
In the good old days, when people did this on occasion, the few hits would not drastically affect the accuracy of my website statistics and logs. In the good old days, my top 25 referrers would not be changed, and I would only see the false positives when I looked at all of my referrers.
This week, 21 of my top 25 referrers are these people deceptively pinging my website to get me to visit their website! Instead of looking at the top 25 and moving on, I now have to pull up the full list of referrers each time to get an honest appraisal of my position for the month.
Did I mention that I do not buy goods or services from people who try to deceive me?
What is worse about the up tick in this trend is that some of these dishonest webmasters are pinging me with false positives, from every webpage of their website! ARGH!!!
March of 2006 is very literally the first time in history that I have not been able to fully trust in my site logs... I am soooooo very ticked off about that. Very literally, I rely upon my site logs to show me what marketing methods and websites are providing me the best bang for my advertising dollars. And now, I have to dig through more than one hundred false positives to find the true positives.
Did I mention that I do not buy goods from people who waste my time as a result of their deception?
Did I Mention...
Yes, I did mention it... Repeatedly...
In order to sell your goods and services online, you must earn your potential customer's trust. You cannot earn their trust, if you have deceived them to get them to your website.
Just a Nugget of Truth...
Wow! You have been using your ping software for a week or a month now, and you can see for yourself that the software vendor did not completely lie to you. Your logs prove it... You are now getting tons of new traffic to your website...
But, the important question you must ask yourself is this. How much of that new traffic have you been able to convert into sales? In the end, this is what it comes down to. Is this brilliant piece of promotional software increasing your sales at the same time it is increasing your traffic???
If your answer is "yes." Well good for you. It won't last... Not everyone, looking at their logs and seeing your URL, actually realizes that you are deceiving them. But after they have read this article today, they might just be a bit wiser to your deception and stop buying from you.
If your answer is "no." Well, you should of known better.
Wrapping Up...
If you are considering the purchase and use of this pinging software, do yourself a favor and pass it up. There are many systems that you can use to promote your business and build your traffic, without deceiving people. Your future customers need to trust you, so don't give them a reason not to trust you.
And for those of you currently using this software --- count on this. If you are pinging my website, you will never see a single dime of my money, no matter how good your product or service might be.
About the Author
Bill Platt is the owner of http://thePhantomWriters.com Article Distribution Service. He has been engaged in article marketing since 1999, and he has offered his distribution services since 2001. He brings his personal touch and experience to every article distribution, offering advice and suggestions to his clients as needed, to help them to improve their article's results.
Article Source: http://www.simplysearch4it.com/article/24363.html
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