The Importance Of Not Being Anonymous

Gordon — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:39:52 +0000

The Internet has evolved a lot from those times when it was, among other things, a tool for chatting up girls and presenting your ethical or racial dissatisfaction. It was a clear results of being anonymous and wanting to express your opinion online. That certainly doesn’t mean that people don’t still use it for those things today (unfortunately) but if you are running a blog or a website business, you obviously want a different kind of approach. You want credibility!

A laughing matter

I have always been a fan of humor and promoting stuff through it. It has proven to be very motivating and refreshing for me and people tell me I’m good at it. Next to teaching people, making them laugh is something I enjoy.

It is another great way to reach out to people and show them that you are also human like them. That you do not have any super powers that helped you succeed online or in any activity you are blogging or teaching about.

Humor is like fire, if you control it well, you won’t get burned and everything will be nice and warm. Letting yourself run out of control will make people frown upon your jokes and generally think “Who the heck does this guy thing he is?”. You do not want to turn yourself or your blog into a joke!

“Selling is a deadly serious business. So is buying. Always remember that your reader is on your site to do business. Not to be entertained.”

Make Your Words Sell! – Joe Robinson and Ken Evoy

Anonymous or not

There are tones of blogs out there and some of the authors might not be comfortable revealing their real photo or their name. I think it all depends on the subject and if you have a good reason to stay anonymous, you should, but it is a lot more beneficial if you don’t.

During the summer I have read good posts about anonymous blogging and there are two posts I’d like to share with you right now. Some of you may already know the author of the blog because she is a great inspiration to a lot. The first blog post is Being Anonymous Can Hurt You where Lisa talks about a woman with a blog about depression and how she didn’t want to reveal her real identity so that her family doesn’t find out about her problems from the Internet. The other one is more of a discussion about Should This Woman Blogger Be Anonymous?.

Both posts are a great read, especially the first one that shows the difference of before and after being anonymous. What’s your story?

Forum and blog-comment avatars

What kind of image should you use when commenting on a blog or participating in discussions on a forum? If it is a highly controlled, moderated or paid community, you should definitely provide an image of yourself.

It doesn’t have to be the one that you took on the beach with your belly sticking out or the one where you can make out your license plate number or home address from – there are nice ways you can make your photo secure but still be able to show yourself. Things like blur filters, black and white filters, gray scale filters and other monochromatic techniques.

If you are not yet using the fantastic service called Gravatar you should! What is Gravatar? It is short for Globally Recognized Avatar and it is basically an avatar (which you assign) that you can bind with your email address and every time you use that email address when commenting on a WordPress blog, your assigned avatar will appear next to your comment. There is a possibility to assign more avatars and bind them to different email addresses.

Those are just the few steps you can take to start being a member of your community and engaging with your readers.

We don’t need to know that about you, okay?

Now we address the issue of people being too informative about their personal lives. Some bloggers like to take a sharp turn away from their niche now and again and talk about their life, parents, family, travels … Ok it’s nice to know that your daughter just got her first tooth. But is your Internet marketing blog the right place for that information?

Having a 5-page “About Me” link will also make you look quite egocentric in my opinion.

The best approach for this would be just making another blog about yourself. Give people a chance to choose if they want to read about you or not. As much as being anonymous can hurt you, so can providing too much information about yourself. Learn how to balance it out and you will be one step closer to success.

Conclusion and question

I would like to finish this up with a question directed to the readers. The question is:

How do you deal with providing people information about yourself?

Having spent some time surfing and commenting on blogs in the last few months I have noticed that people usually pick one image of themselves and use that image EVERYWHERE. Is that good or is variety better?

No related posts.

Questionable (Twitter) marketing tactics

Gordon — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 01:03:52 +0000

For my first blog post, I wanted to share a piece of personal experience with all of the Twitter fans out there and generally people who come across “Buy this!” websites every day and struggle to determine if it is worth their hard-earned money.

The anonymous beneficiary

A month ago, after being “followed” by an individual on Twitter, he contacted me promoting his website that was about a Twitter marketing e-book. The e-book was completely free, as the website said on numerous banners and flashy-text and the person suggested that it would really help me.

At that point I was quite amazed because it was the first time someone personally approached me via Twitter PM and offered a friendly suggestion, for free even.

So I went for it and clicked on his website link. Got to the website, scrolled down a couple of miles and found the 300 x 500 pixel download button and as it usually works, entered my name and e-mail after clicking the download button.

The download started and finished in a few seconds and after seeing the PDF file size I asked myself – “How could anyone fit anything useful into a 15KB PDF file?”. Boy was I surprised when I opened that PDF file. There where only a few pages, most of them blank and one with a short introductory text and a Pay-Pal “BUY” button.

The realization

After realizing that I have just almost been tricked into buying something that was firstly presented to me as being free – I closed up the website, deleted the PDF file and blocked the person who so nicely offered to help me out for free.

There is one thing I want to make clear here: It was not a problem for me spending those $5 or $10 on that book that might have good content in it but the fact that the website was just a big lie really insulted me.

I guess the owner thought people would get to the “BUY” part and think to themselves “Ah well, if I came along this far in the process of getting the e-book, I might as well pay the money.”

Conclusion

If you are doing Internet marketing, affiliate marketing or just selling your own product on the street next to a hot-dog stand somewhere, the most important thing is credibility (would like to give props to Lisa Irby of “2 Create A Website” for all her texts and videos about credibility in affiliate marketing, it has taught me a great deal). How highly do your potential customers think of you and your opinions (or of your company if you present one)? Always try to play fair and don’t mislead your customers because a few failed sales can hurt you a lot less than one disgruntled or insulted customer.

Thank you for reading and I would like to know what YOU think about my experience and other similar situations. If you have personally had a similar experience I would love if you would share it in the comments.

Knowledge Reactor's Blog » credibility