Careful How You Attract Visitors

I got a phone call today from an associate with a funny story to tell. Turns out she had a run in with a mortgage loan officer from another state that was inadvertnately making a “friend” request to her underage daughter. This was not the loan officer’s intentions, but even the best intentions layed out on ill-advised plans need to be addressed.

The loan officer was looking for ways to attract visitors to his website. He had heard how great “YouTube” was, so he decided to use that to attract people to him. That in itself is not a bad thing, but the way he launched this campaign was the issue.

He had several of his past clients do a 30 second testimonial and posted them to YouTube. Then using some free software, he sent out requests to unknown YouTube users to add him as a friend so he could get as many people as possible to view his new testimonials. The problem is that the email came across asking you to become his friend so you could view personal videos uploaded to YouTube. And this ended up in my associate’s teenage daughter’s inbox.

Her initial reaction was “ewwww!” She never responded, but immediately told her mom. Being a mom, my associate did view the information to see who was soliciting her daughter. She even checked the sexual offender registry just to double check.

My associate is a loan officer as well, and knows a bit better how to market her website. So she did call the guy and although at this point she was not “mad” she played the mad mother role and really let this guy have it. But what would have happened if she wasn’t a loan officer? What if she did not understand what the man’s real intentions were?

Needless to say, he has changed and re-thought his “campaign.” But if he had actually developed a real strategy for his interney presence, this most likely would have never been an issue. It’s not about the number of visitors… its about the quality of the visitors you attract!

If you are considering building a website, or re-vamping the one you have, contact Found By Design today and let us help you design a website that not only gets noticed, but also gets Found!

Stumble it! | Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit | Technorati