This article discusses some ineffective and/or
unethical website promotion tactics. I talk about them here
so that you won't waste your time with them.
Spamming
If you're like me, you're sick and tired of receiving hundreds of
spam messages in your mailbox every morning, and you would not
consider buying anything they had to offer, even if it's something
you really wanted.
Needless to say, spammers are not the most decent people in the
world, and it comes as no surprise that many of them are also scam
artists posing as eBay or PayPal to steal your credit card
information. Everyday inexperienced and unsuspecting internet users
continue to fall prey to unscrupulous characters from the dark
corners of cyberspace.
While spamming is not a completely ineffective promotion tactic, I
don't recommend it as a way to promote your site at all. Not only is
spamming highly intrusive and unethical, but it could also get you
into a lot of trouble. Just imagine how many people you'd have to
anger to make a sale or to get a visitor to your site. The search
engines will ban your site when they find out that you have been
spamming. Various laws are now being made to prosecute spammers.
Pop-up/Pop-under Traffic Schemes
Have you seen ads offering "1,000 visitors for $9.95"?
Consider this: many companies are willing to pay up to $10 or more
for every visitor they get through pay-per-click programs offered by
Google and Overture. Why wouldn't they spend their $10 to get
1,000 visitors through pop-up and pop-under ads, instead?
Perhaps they're smart enough to realize that the 1,000 "visitors"
they would get from having their sites displayed in pop-up and
pop-under windows are worth less than the one targeted (and real)
visitor they get from Google AdWords or Overture.
While not necessarily unethical, pop-up advertising is no longer as
effective as it used to be. Most web surfers find pop-ups annoying
and intrusive, and many now use pop-up blockers to avoid them. Even
those who don't have blockers installed on their browsers have grown
accustomed to instinctively close pop-ups and pop-unders without
taking a glance at them.
