A Successful Internet Marketer Must Have Very Clean Ethics on Advertising



Having a website business offers plenty of advantages over a brick-and-mortar business. You can essentially automate many business functions, you can choose your hours on a flexible schedule that suits your lifestyle and not have the overhead of property leases and so forth.

Hopefully, you enjoy your work, but one of the main reasons you’re in business is to make money. When you give good service and stand behind your promises to customers, you naturally meet with greater success. After all, the drawback of a web-based business is that your customers don’t typically meet you face to face. You must work a little harder to gain their trust and establish your credibility as an honest, ethical marketer.

Developing good advertising ethics requires that you generally adopt that time honored adage, ‘the customer’s always right’. Anyone who has worked with the public knows that dissatisfied customers may be unreasonable, but if you treat them with respect and treat them fairly, they’ll return.

For instance, if you advertise your product with a money back guarantee, you have to be prepared to keep that promise. There are a few people who might take advantage of that offer.

Let’s say you put up a page on your site, making an offer good through a certain date. You mistype the date, and your customer is misled, believing it’s good for an additional period of time. It’s your mistake. Even if you discover the error after publishing, good advertising ethics requires that you allow the extended time period. Why? If you modify the page to correct the date, what happens when a previous visitor returns to make the purchase? You must honor the offer as published.

In this case, you can turn this into an advantage and try to earn a few PR points. You can let your customers know that you made a mistake but is still going to honor the offer. You didn’t have to honor it, but you did. Your visitors can say that your advertising ethics must be trustworthy and you may even gain more sales.

Visitors can spread the word about your good advertising ethics making them walking advertisements, an unhappy and a happy customer alike.

It’s always good to embrace a high standard of advertising ethics even if there are some genuinely unscrupulous marketers out there. It’s good for your business!

Article by Chris B, you can find more about him on his profile.