835 – Don’t do these things: Tom talks How To Ruin Your Reputation

Episode 835 – How To Ruin Your Reputation
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 835 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, I'm going to tell you exactly how to ruin your online and possibly your offline reputation. How about that? Now who else can you think of that would be so kind and loving and interested in your business, to show you how to ruin it? Well that's me. Anyway, there's certain things you can do that will hurt your reputation, and some of them you could do totally innocently just because nobody taught you. And this episode is going to protect you from the shame of a bad reputation. All right. Hope you didn't miss episode 834. That was demonetization. See, if you want to make money from YouTube by getting ad revenue, you got to play by their rules. And that tells you the things you need to watch for to be able to do that. And when you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. Demonetization was 834. This episode is 835. Check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. And hey, if you really like the training episodes more than you like the interviews. And they're great too, because there's always something to learn from these great entrepreneurs we have on here. But if you just want hardcore training, a million bucks worth of hardcore training, you can go to screwthecommute.com/training and it lists all the episodes that it's just me or me and and my staff members training you on something.

[00:02:00] So screwthecommute.com/training and pick up a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and follow me on TikTok at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire. All right, here are a bunch of ways you can hurt your reputation online. And frequently it can leak over to offline, because online and offline businesses are pretty much joined at the hip right now. Yeah, yeah, you can have a completely online business, no doubt about it, but rarely anymore. Do you have a brick and mortar business that doesn't have a significant online presence. So they're kind of joined at the hip. Like I said, some of the things I'll talk about today are entirely innocent because you just might not know any better, but some are done on purpose, thinking the thing you're doing is okay when it's not. And sometimes the bad actors out there know it's not okay, but they do it anyway, and I'll come after them. And in my I got a TV show in development called Scam Brigade, and you can see the trailer to that show at Scam Brigade. Com because I've been around so many of these scammers and see what they do to people, I don't want you to get hurt. Okay, let me give you an example of something purposely done that will harm your reputation. And then I'll give you an example of something innocent that can also hurt your reputation.

[00:03:27] Then I'll give you a bunch more. After that. Something bad you can do is called click bait. This is where you get someone to click on something, but you know in advance that where the link takes them is not where they expected. When you do this, people won't trust you anymore and maybe you get the first click, but when they see stuff from you in the future, they're not going to click. This means you would have to recruit new suckers all the time. Instead of building a good business that grows because of repeat visitors and customers that trust you, that's called click bait. And a blatant example I actually saw one time is the link said Britney Spears sex tape. And it took you to a teeth whitener affiliate product. Now, how do I know that I clicked on it. Okay. All right. That's blatant. And if you do those kinds of things, you deserve a bad reputation. Misleading subject lines fall into the same category as clickbait. Actually, you'd call it email open bait. Don't do it. As I said, you might get the one click, but people won't ever open your emails again. They won't trust you. Now, here's something usually done innocently just because someone doesn't know any better. Let's say they send out a big group email and the email might be of interest. To someone they know very well, and then they're friends with them. Maybe. I'm not talking about spamming people you don't know here.

[00:05:02] I'm just talking about you may personally know everyone on the group email. The problem is that they don't. The people on the group email don't necessarily know each other, and they may not want to know each other. What happens is, is people copy all the email addresses into the CC or carbon copy line of their email program. When it's sent out. You have just violated the privacy of everyone on the list who may not want everyone else but you to have their email address. See when it's in the CC, everybody that gets it sees everybody else's email address. You just look like a fool and possibly alienated a friend or loads of friends. Even worse, when people start responding, they might hit reply all and it can turn into a crazy madhouse in a hurry of hundreds of emails going all over the place. And everybody's mad, right? So don't place people on the CC line. The proper way to do it would be to paste the names of the in the blind carbon copy, not CC, the BCC line, which would eliminate the problem that I just outlined. See, there's no formal education on this stuff. That's why people hire people like me to teach them the right way to do things, to both make money and build reputation instead of hurting your reputation. Okay, let's get into some other things you can do to ruin your reputation. This one could be innocent or on purpose.

[00:06:40] Let's say you collaborate or promote someone who has a bad reputation. If you know it already. I hope you get burned because you knew that there scumbag and you promoted him anyway, so that makes you a scumbag. If you don't know it well, you haven't done your due diligence to protect your reputation. Some of the biggest names that you've heard of are convicted felons for fraud. They have had their bank accounts frozen by the government for criminal activity. They have terrible or downright fraudulent customer services and policies that they just haven't been caught yet. When you promote them or do joint ventures, all their bad acts rub off on you. The amounts of money you can make are not worth it when it damages your reputation. When they go get arrested or go by the wayside, you're still there and struggling because nobody trusts you anymore. Now, have I fallen prey to this before? Yes I have. Many years ago, I got hit by a professional con man, and that's actually what kicked off my consumer advocate role to help people avoid being scammed. And that scam brigade. Com you can go see the trailer there of that show that we're developing. Now here's another one that most of the time is innocent and I have to talk people out of doing it. Still to this day, I get people asking me to teach them how to get a big list of email addresses in some software so they can send out a message.

[00:08:22] An example of this is someone is in an association, and they have a directory of members that has all their the members contact information, and the person that's calling me wants to get them into, you know, our big shopping cart system and email system kickstart cart. Or they want whatever email system they're using so that they can broadcast a message to these people. And this is even if probably in the fine print of your membership in that association. It specifically says, you can't do this or you'll get kicked out. Well, people don't read those things and nobody taught them. And then when I tell them, if they do such a thing like mail to this, the, you know, either type in all the addresses or import them somehow that they're a spammer. So they argue with me that the way they say, oh, the person can always opt out. Well, oh my God. I mean, for years and years, opting out has been a spammer technique. And I'm pretty sure because of the various canned spam spam acts and variations of it around the world, it's illegal. Don't do it. People have to clearly opt in, not opt out to get your messages. All right, next one is fake testimonials. Here's one that is clearly fraudulent. And I've kicked people out of my mentor program with no fun refund for doing a fake testimonial. In fact, it's in my agreement with new students that if they do so, they will get kicked out at my sole discretion and guarantee they're going to get kicked out if I catch them doing a false testimonial or putting false testimonials on their sales letters and stuff.

[00:10:13] I don't want someone doing fraudulent things and then telling people they went through my program because that rubs off on me. I can't help what people do with what I teach them, but I can make the consequences hurt them, which I will write. I even used to track down people that I would see a sales letter, and I'd see these testimonials. So I would track down the person that gave the testimonial and I'd ask them, do they really like the program? How's it going and everything? I can't tell you how many times when they were asked about the product they were espousing as the testimonial. They said, oh, I tried it, but I don't really use it anymore. It's not that good. I use this other thing or they said, they actually said to me, oh, I just wanted to get a link back to my website for giving them the testimonial. Well, those people were fraudsters and a terrible reputation too. Do you think I'd ever do any business with those scumbags? No. All right, here's another one. That, and this can really do you in faster than ever. And that's ignoring customers who complain. All that customer has to do is go viral on social media.

[00:11:22] And it can cost you millions of dollars into the future. And yeah, I understand there are professional complainers who will do and say anything to get free stuff, but ignoring legitimate complaints means that they're only going to get louder. And in today's social media world, loud is really loud. So this is just a quick primer, and I highly suggest you Google the terms reputation management and you'll get tons and tons of articles and stuff. And they'll go much deeper into this, what you should and should not do to keep a good reputation online. But anyway, I want to get you thinking in these terms so that you do good things that build your business and don't do bad things that hurt your business. And if you do them on purpose, hey, you just might see my camera coming from my TV show shoved up your butt. How about that? So don't do bad things. And if you want help with this and all kinds of stuff to be successful online, check out my mentor program. It's the longest running, most unique, most successful ever in the field of internet and digital marketing. And I triple dog dare anybody to put their program up against mine. And nobody will do it because they'd be embarrassed. All right, we take care of people around here and you can make a fortune doing everything legitimately. That's what I teach you. All right, we'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.