Traffic Thursdays | Increase Your Web Traffic with Trustbait

I haven’t been around lately because I’ve been looking around at what people are charging hundreds or thousands of dollars for these days that are basically a rip-off of sites like CopyBlogger, Andy Beard, ProBlogger, Pearsonified, even Ewen Chia‘s blog.

(And yes, ours too, but this isn’t about me, it’s about you.)

And maybe those who are ripping these kind folks off aren’t aware of it yet, but the age where the unscrupulous marketer could get away with charging someone for an ebook that never gets delivered, a home study course that is basically just printed-out Wikipedia, or a live seminar that essentially is charging people to be sold to the entire four hours is O V E R.

I’m not saying there aren’t great ebooks out there. There are. And I still would write an ebook though I haven’t lately. I favor multi-media packages right now – that way you get triple the value for the same price of the crap that’s on the market now.

I’m not saying some home study courses aren’t fantastic. There are some that are amazing, jam-packed full of informative reading you can use for years to come. And even if there weren’t really good live seminars in existence, some of them would be worth the price of admission just to be around those people you are rubbing shoulders with.

What I’m saying is that I am witnessing people being SCAMMED out of their hard earned money – and it doesn’t have to be this way.

Not anymore, not with a hundred ways to make your concerns heard at your fingertips.

There ARE good marketers, consultants, and service providers out there, yes, even in scary SEO land. (Though I don’t do SEO anymore, basic help is included in my traffic plan packages. For straight SEO I have a list of people I can refer you to if you like, just comment.)

Here, I’m feeling guilty if my Free videos are down for a day. I still see a shrink over the fact that I got sick during my last big webinar class. Most of my friends in this business for years still bear a day full of heartache if one out of one thousand people refunds a product. They obsess over details like whether the free information they gave out last year is still 100% accurate. That’s most people in the info-products, e-consulting or e-services businesses that get anywhere. We succeed and are able to get ahead because we care. We’re hardly getting squeezed out of the market due to scam artists, but honey, why throw away $200 – $2000 a month away on people who’ll treat you unfairly when you can probably get really good service from someone who cares?

So, just to be clear, no, I’m not talking about people who met tough circumstances, faced them, and are moving forward with every intention and action taken to make good on promises made. (I know the people you may have in mind personally, and yes, they really did get into an accident, I saw them with my own eyes. )

Rather, I’m talking about people who plan from the very beginning to cheat you. And I’m here to tell you three things, though I’ll probably have to save most of this for Friday. Those three things are:

• What Trustbait is, how to establish it, and how to tell the difference between that and what is in the air now.
• How you can measure another site or individual’s Trustbait
• How you can speak out against those who are not trust worthy

First, what is Trustbait?

I know you’ve heard of linkbait. It describes the subset of things you do to (successfully!) attract links, used quite frequently in reference to blog posts. Links are fabulous, but remember that getting targeted traffic is just one part of the picture. If you increase your web traffic, but don’t maintain or increase the amount of that traffic that buys, subscribes or clicks, you are wasting your time.

This is where Trustbait comes in. Trustbait is your ability to get the people who have followed those links to:

• buy
• subscribe
• join
• click (in the case where the advertising is actually your “product”)
• comment
• suggest to other people that they ought to buy, subscribe, join, click or comment, etc.

Traffic that doesn’t stick might as well be a spambot visiting your site. Will every single person who comes to your site be a client, subscriber, member, affiliate or JV partner? No, and believe me, you don’t want them to be.

But are you reaching the targeted audience, within your targeted audience? You are if you’re creating the right type of Trustbait. How do you create Trustbait? We’ll talk about that in a post on Friday or this weekend, but first know this….

The dawn of the social web has been here for eons in Internet time. Those of you just catching on are still fine because most people are just getting hooked into it. Without at least a bit of Trustbait, the day will soon come where you can’t get links for linkbait. It doesn’t matter if you could because walk in traffic won’t buy or click if they don’t trust you.

This is also how we all need to learn to deal with those people out there who are cheating us. While it’s true that almost every piece of information on the internet being sold is out there for free, somewhere, that doesn’t mean that you can sell LIES to people online and keep getting away with it.

I said it then, and I’ll say it now, Trust is the real currency on the Internet. To the scammers out there, your days are numbered. These people are fed up, and they’re calling me, and we’re not gonna take it anymore.