Nothing ruins a stage performance more than lip syncing and auto-tuning.  Almost every performance I see on television these days is false!  Whether it is the Grammies, Super Bowl, Saturday Night Live, a parade or some random performance they’re almost exclusively lip synced and auto-tuned.  These performances make me feel gypped, dissed, duped, conned and hoodwinked.  Do you take this Milli Vanilli approach to your inbound marketing by taking shortcuts and being fake?  Below are five ways to lip sync and/or auto-tune your inbound marketing and why you should never do it.

  1. Putting your social media campaign exclusively on autopilot using Twitterfeed.com is a huge mistake.  Success in social media requires engagement, listening, educating and entertaining (E.L.E.E.).  If your social media campaign is on autopilot it is devoid of engagement and listening.
  2. Auto-posting other peoples’ content to your blog via RSS can be a costly mistake.  No matter how well you construct your keyword filter or how much you trust the source you could find yourself posting content that poorly represents your brand and causes more harm than good.  Besides, you may end up feeling the wrath of Google for publishing duplicate content.
  3. Keyword stuffing on your blog posts may get you decent rankings, but you’ll end up convincing people that your content is garbage.  Posting poor content will prevent you from ever becoming a “thought-leader.”
  4. Invasive Internet marketing tactics such as pop-ups and pop-unders are distracting and annoying to visitors and a cheap shortcut to earning a moral bribe.  Don’t use them unless you want to anger your visitors.
  5. Auto-starting audio, video or having a walk-on person on a website is not a good idea.  Studies show that the first thing a visitor does when confronted with audio on a website is search for the off switch.  If by chance your visitor can’t figure it out in a few seconds you can expect them to hit the back button.

The tactics described above will undoubtedly do more damage to your brand and inbound marketing efforts than good.  In inbound marketing there are no shortcuts.  It takes hard work and strategy to be successful.

Image Credit: Meg1