I wasn’t actively researching this topic today, yet after randomly spotting snippets from 2 different sources I was reminded to re-examine my own behavior online. Specifically – is it (still) ethical?
It’s a timely topic for me too – I’ve just quietly celebrated my first 12 months online! How do I know? Because the domain name used to open my hosting account got renewed a couple of days ago.
So here’s the first red alert that appeared in an online software developer’s blog: “…to do well in the affiliate game a lot of the time you have to bend your principles a bit.”
You have to do WHAT? That’s an outstanding admission of having very poor ethics, in my opinion.
The second reminder of the importance of practicing good internet marketing ethics showed up today in an email from a product owner who was reading the riot act to his affiliates in order to stamp out behavior that was negatively impacting his business. While praising the good efforts of 99% of those promoting his very successful product (available through Clickbank), he berated the sorts of unethical things the bad 1% were up to.
Here’s his essential message: “We can no longer tolerate getting letters from attorneys every month because some uninformed affiliate out there violated some sort of trademark, copyright, or has spammed a social network or email list.”
OK, that real-world reminder got me taking a closer look at one of my totally unrelated sites, which by the way happens to be #5 on page 1 of the planet’s most popular search engine.
Problem #1: It contains 2 lifted images that I had tweaked slightly in Photoshop to make them look “unique.” Eek. Just removed them. But that’s not going far enough, I realized.
Problem #2: The domain name and some of the posts contain a company name (brand) that I do not have permission to use. Right, I thought – it’s gotta go. Luckily doing that is easy when you host on your own reseller account. Just 3 or 4 clicks, and all its content is no longer live on the Internet. Done, gone.
Was doing that some sort of stunt? Trying to impress you? To show you why it wasn’t, I quickly dredged through stuff I have put out there over the past year and found these 2 quotes of mine:
Written on August 14: “So what do I stand for? OK, my principles are hereby stated in black and white: I want to be ethically sound in all my online business. To be renowned for dealing fairly with those who have entrusted their hard-earned funds in any of my yet-to-be-announced programs.
To base an online business on such principles is the least I can do for my fellow human beings wherever you may be. After all, deep down we pretty much all wish to live by the Golden Rule don’t we?”
Written on November 12: “First, I want you to know that whatever I publish here will be based on a set of rules and principles – mine for sure. But I don’t think my business ethics are too far off the mark of what we could generally define as stemming from applying fairness and honesty.”
So today was an instructive day at the office for me! I’ve put myself back on the course I set out on 1 year ago.
Without a doubt, Internet marketing’s one very tough gig. Competition is extremely fierce. Discussing this matter, I recently posted to a private forum that scores of 1000s of new domains get registered daily – for example yesterday alone 83,872 new dot coms were registered.
Given the resulting online dog-eat-dog mentality among Internet Marketers, we should ask: Does the end justify the means? In other words: Is questionable ethical behavior ever acceptable online?
I answer with a resounding NO.
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