There are 3 colors of hats in this game; white, grey, and black.
White Hat Strategies
These are the strategies that us, real, honest marketers use. These strategies include any marketing efforts focused on content and bringing value to the audience. Proper SEO, amazing content, user focused, organic growth/management, while running paid ads.
Grey Hat Strategies
These strategies fall in between ethical practice(white) and unethical practice(black), a grey area if you will(hence the name). Sometimes a mixture of components from black hat and white hat marketing. Some may call it being less then honest. Purchasing emails from a third party, trying to lower competitions ranking, duplicating/spinning content, and many more would fall under this category.
Black Hat Strategies
These are the unethical strategies that horrible marketers and posers use to pump out quick results for clients to turn a quick profit, half the time the results are fake the other half the time those results are in danger of disappearing any second from being penalized by google. Black hat strategies include anything that you do specifically for the sole purpose of ranking higher in search engines.
So many things fall into this category, Private Blog Networks, Buying Engagement/followers, buying backlinks, buying data from third parties, scraping data, and many, many other things that if you try or try to provide for a client you will eventually be penalized and your site will essentially be dead.
Why You Shouldn’t Use Black Hat Marketing Strategies!
Reputation is everything in this game. Once you get outed as a Black Hat, its over. You Lose. Not only should you not want to do black hat strategies because it could kill yours or your clients site. But you shouldn’t want to implement these types of strategies because you shouldn’t want to be remembered as a piece of shit scumbag that scams people out of proper marketing so they can make a quick buck.
I see it everyday, people falling for all these scams, their buying fake engagement from a shady dood on facebook, then 20 min later posting how this guy ripped them off. BIG SURPRISE!
Please do not waste your money on fake engagement, there is literally NO VALUE for anyone doing that. Instead run your page the right way and use that money for good by running paid ads on facebook, you will be surprised what happens.
Funny and True Story If You Can Believe It!
Someone tried debating me on this issue. Citing a study that some one in Britain did claiming that if you run promotions on your page to get more likes you will find that you get fake/bots/ghost followers. So he said why would we waste money and time doing that when its the same thing.
First of all I am not talking about boosting your page for likes, I am talking about detailed-data oriented targeting implemented into specialized ad campaigns that drive conversions, thus leading to a increase in following and engagement.
Yes, sometimes even on ads you will get a FEW fake follows or likes, but the only reason that is, is because of black hat services like these in the first place. Second, would you rather spend some money and see high ROI, valuable growth, with maybe a FEW fake likes and follows, or would you rather buy fake engagement and have it ALL be worthless, no ROI, or any other black hat service your throwing your money away and potentially killing your site and wasting all your hard work and progress.
I told those same words to the guy, and he still went with fake engagement, I DO NOT UNDERSTAND HIS WAY OF THINKING. He wont last long at all!
How To Make Sure You’re Only Using White Hat!
Want to make sure you are always deploying white hat strategies? Its quite simple, stop posting for the search engines. Stop optimizing for the search engines. Post and Optimize for you audience. They come first, the rest will follow, I promise you. Focus on bringing others value, real honest value. Great things will happen. I’ve seen it time and time again.
-Evan
@ Digital Clinic
–>Check My FB Page for Daily Posts
–>My Youtube Channel
–>Digital Clinic FB Group
