I’ve written before about quality. (See: Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width) Quality comes with a budget and inevitably, there will have to be compromises, particulalry if you are a SMB or individual working at home. But there is never a good excuse for sloppy delivery. Whatever you deliver, have a little respect for your customer – especially if they have parted with cash for what you claim to offer.

I am not going to bad mouth either Michael Roberts or Ed Dale, but … Traffic Bug?

(The background: Michael Roberts is behind Traffic Bug. It seemed like a nice idea – not great but OK, for newbies, at first glance. It claims to help get your site indexed quickly and it will create backlinks while you sleep. Ed Dale is behind the Thirty Day Challenge. I like Ed and I like the Thirty Day Challenge. Ed recommended the use of Traffic Bug during the 2009 Thirty Day Challenge. Traffic bug didn’t live up to the claims made. You can read about it on the many forums where its failing have been discussed.)

I gave Traffic Bug a try in 2009. I became suspicious early on. The site was down without adequate explanation for a while – some excuse about software upgrade. The support pages were full of spelling errors and poor grammar – it didn’t even feel like a beta program. Yet they  where asking for money! But I was patient and I gave it a proper trial. Afterall, a recommendation from Ed Dale has some credibility. But eventually I gave up and paid them nothing. It simply wasn’t adding any value.

Today I got an email from Michael. The email begins:

“Well there is no doubt that Traffic-Bug is working better than ever”

This is untrue. There is a great deal of doubt that Traffic Bug is working better than ever? It isn’t working. As Michael explains in his email:

“The bad news is Google visited our site …. and put a warning up on our site”

This warning says that Traffic Bug may harm your computer. It goes on:

“So this morning we have requested another review from Google to scan the site and remove the warning but they are taking their sweet time with it”

Like it’s Google’s fault? Their sweet time? Like they’ve got nothing better to do than try to dig Traffic Bug out of a hole?

Michael says in his email, by way of explanation:

“On Sunday morning a hacker attacked our server trying to shut us down. Well they failed miserably and no damage was done”

Are you kidding? No damage was done? Traffic Bug is Toast! The hackers seem to have achieved their objective perfectly.

The SEO Lesson

The 3 worst internet marketing mistakes you can make.

• Don’t Respect your customers. Issue “software” with support pages that look like an early draft of a pre beta project that doesn’t work.
• Host your software in a vunerable place so that disgruntled customers can piss on it.
• While explaining/apologising for faults, tell lies to your customers.

Seriously, you have to respect your customers. If you are expecting them to part company with their money, do them the service of working for it. And if you are unlucky enough to suffer the ultimate humiliation – admit defeat. Accept you screwed up. You failed. Give up.

But start again – Immediately. This time, do it properly.

Remember – failure is temporary. Giving up is permanent.

Good luck.