A successful website marketer needs impeccable advertising ethics

Having a website business offers plenty of advantages over a brick-and-mortar business. You can essentially automate many business functions, you can choose your hours on a flexible schedule that suits your lifestyle and not have the overhead of property leases and so forth. Hopefully, you enjoy your work, but one of the main reasons you're in business is to make money. When you give good service and stand behind your promises to customers, you naturally meet with greater success. After all, the drawback of a web-based business is that your customers don't typically meet you face to face. You must work a little harder to gain their trust and establish your credibility as an honest, ethical marketer.

Developing good advertising ethics requires that you generally adopt that time honored adage, 'the customer's always right'. Anyone who has worked with the public knows that dissatisfied customers may be unreasonable, but if you treat them with respect and treat them fairly, they'll return.

For example, if you advertise a product with a money back guarantee, you've got to be prepared to stand behind that promise. There are people who will take advantage of such offers, but those are very few. All it takes is one disgruntled customer to put a terrible mark on your reputation.

Let's say you put up a page on your site, making an offer good through a certain date. You mistype the date, and your customer is misled, believing it's good for an additional period of time. It's your mistake. Even if you discover the error after publishing, good advertising ethics requires that you allow the extended time period. Why? If you modify the page to correct the date, what happens when a previous visitor returns to make the purchase? You must honor the offer as published.

In a case like this, you can try to earn yourself a few PR points and turn it to your advantage. You could insert a note, right above the offer, to let your customers know you goofed, but are still going to honor the offer. You may even gain more sales, because your visitors have mentally calculated that your advertising ethics must be pretty trustworthy. You didn't have to honor it, but you did.

Just as with a single disgruntled customer, who believes they've been treated badly, can spread the word about with their friends and online message boards, a happy customer also tells others of your impeccable advertising ethics.

Although we know there are some genuinely unscrupulous marketers out there, it doesn't make much sense for a legitimate business person to not embrace a high standard of advertising ethics. It does a business good!