Ethical Marketing in Online Business

The basics of ethical marketing; how to build credibility with your website visitors; and how to choose between a soft vs hard sales page for your online business.

February 16th, 2011 by Becky Turner

Everyone knows that the internet is riddled with online scams and dodgy internet marketers vying for your hard-earned money. It's been this way since the dawn of the net, and the problem isn't just going to go away overnight.

So how do honest online business owners distinguish themselves from these scoundrels? Is there a code of ethical marketing or do we rely on our conscience and personal morals? And how can we avoid being automatically tarred with the same brush?

This article focuses on three aspects of ethical marketing and how you can stay true to your website readers and still make a healthy living online:

How to build credibility with your website visitors
How to stay true to ethical marketing
Writing a soft vs hard sales page

How to Build Credibility Online

Your website visitors are complete strangers, coming from different cultures, generations and corners of the Earth. So how can you realistically expect to gain their trust with a few words on a web page?

When I began making websites I had no idea how to build credibility, but thankfully I have learned a lot since then. I've discovered three broad ways to build a credibility with your audience and help them see that you are an ethical marketer with their interests at heart:

Write like you are talking to a friend - Be open and casual. Write in the first person, drawing on real life references. Your readers will quickly see you are a human being with feelings and not some anonymous droid leading them towards a sales pitch. Make sure you provide them with something of value for free before you ask for anything in return. The risk and commitment is then all yours.
Show your face - Include a clear image of you smiling, either in your About Me page (you do have one of those, don't you?) or right up front on your homepage so your readers can instantly see who they're dealing with. Pete wrote a great article on Building Rapport in Real Life with a side-by-side comparison of good vs bad facial expressions for building rapport with your readers.
Don't hide in anonymity - How can your readers trust you if you never reveal your name or anything about yourself? Ask yourself why you feel the need to hide in anonymity? Be proud of your work! Some people feel paranoid about revealing their name but in the age of Facebook frenzy I really don't think it makes a difference to your privacy. And don't refer to yourself as "we" if you're the only person behind the website, it just makes you harder to identify with.

Ethical Marketing

So now that you've established yourself as a credible author, how do you ensure you never fall into the trap of unethical marketing?

Ethics can be a hotly debated topic because we all have different perceptions of what's acceptable in the world today. The main reason internet marketing can be unethical is because there's money involved.

In particular, the internet offers all kinds of instantly gratifying products which frequently promise to fix all our problems. Using extreme emotional manipulation creates pressure to part with our cash and purchase said wonder product, despite many of the claims not holding true to real life.

For instance, unethical marketing occurs when:

An internet marketer knowingly misrepresents a product - Do expensive colon cleansing pills really help improve the function of the gut? Or was the ancient Egyptian theory of "auto-intoxication" discredited in the early 20th century, when autopsies failed to reveal any kind of clogged fecal matter in the bowl? Any marketer who has done their research will come across this information, and to propagate disproven theories as scientific fact in order to make a sale is simply unethical (at best - and at worst, it is illegal).
A product is dramatically over-priced - There is no doubt that information is a commodity these days, but I can't get over internet marketers who charge $97 for an ebook. These aren't the world's greatest works either - we're talking 100 or so pages of self-published "how to" jobbies. Offline publishers would never sign off the ebook prices we're seeing, particularly from previously unpublished authors. Even the world's bestselling authors don't command such prices for their hardback books. It's just online authors being greedy and seeing what they can get away with.
A blogger writes glorified product reviews for cash - Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn money online. However, this power can be abused when bloggers write glorified product reviews in order to make more commissions. It is completely unethical to write such biased reviews just to fatten your own wallet, not to mention that you will lose credibility with your readers. As a rule of thumb, write your review as if you were recommending the product to your own mom. You wouldn't want to rip her off, now would you?

Other forms of unethical marketing can occur as:

Forum posts - when a forum member adds no value to a thread but simply drops in their website link and leaves.
Email marketing - when a blogger sends profuse amounts of product pitches in-between the real mailout content.
Hard sales pages - which use extreme emotional manipulation to coerce a sale (in varying degrees - see below).

Writing Your Sales Page: Soft vs Hard Selling

The reason I bring up sales pages is because they lie at the heart of the ethical marketing debate. This also applies to email marketing.

A "soft" sales page is one that explains the benefits and features of a product and finishes with a gentle push towards buying it. It's called a soft sales pitch because there are no aggressive selling techniques nor emotional manipulations of the website reader. I use the soft sales technique to recommend my own ebooks and affiliate products, because I find this the most ethical way of selling products online.

In contrast, a "hard" sales page is in-your-face with bold claims, countless "expert" testimonials, emotional manipulation, and finishes with a massive time-pressure discount and supposedly special offers. I find these types of pages to be extremely distasteful, yet unfortunately internet marketers frequently use them because they are so effective. But are they ethical?

It really depends on your definition of ethical marketing, the extremity of the tactics used, and the ultimate recipients. Some hard sales pages are probably ethical, while others cross the line. They become TOO manipulative, using emotionally-charged language, and they force the reader into buying something they otherwise may never have bought.

Since this is such a gray area, I never recommend using a hard sales page because there will always be some people who feel suckered in. In the long term, I feel you can earn just as much from a soft sales page, based on credibility and mutual respect between the author and the reader, than a hard sales page, designed to create urgency and impulsive buying.

What's more, a good quality product will receive more user recommendations and be propagated further around the net organically, than a spivvy product with a hard-hitting internet marketer behind it.

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