I often talk about scams and crappy business and promotional tactics in order to both warn people and to illustrate best — and worst — practices.
Like when I wrote about these people trying to use the job market as a slushpile, text job scams, my issues with grammarly (before they started using customer data to train their AI model), misleading ads, idiots wanting to place promotional content, MLMs masquerading as job offers, an Ohio newspaper editor who thinks LGBTQIA+ erasure is his "editorial perogative" (including in obituaries), and even religious medical insurance "alternatives".
And that (along with the several hundred additional words that follow) is how you do a link post, if you absolutely must.
Internal links are recommended for search engine optimization (SEO), but readers can — and do — pick up on it when those links add little actual value to the page, and judge your content accordingly. Sure, you need to consider SEO factors, but at the same time, you have to produce something worth reading on its own.
For example, Becker’s Payer Issues (an outlet covering medical insurers) regularly runs "stories" titled something like "10 key Humana updates from the first half of 2023." The "story" simply links to and lists the summaries of earlier articles they published. Aside from the blatant internal linking, these "news stories" present absolutely no new information.
I almost feel sorry for the "authors" of these stories; I cannot imagine how degrading that is.
Although it probably is not as degrading as when the outlet literally "reported" that another publication had interviewed someone a month earlier. Whenever I question the value and impact of my work and writing, I remember that a real, live human had to spend minutes of their finite time on this planet writing an "article" that can be summed up as "Fortune magazine had a cool article in it last month."
Sometimes the problems occur well before things hit the (virtual) presses. Press releases are, depending on whom you speak to, a useful evil, a necessary evil, or an abomination. There’s something to be said for them; not everyone can (or should) organize a press conference, and letting news organizations know what you or your company are up to can make a reporter’s job easier.
There is a key phrase in there, though: what you or your company are up to.
Just like a link post that does not actually add any value for those reading it, a press release without an event or change is a waste of electrons.
This insurance brokerage wrote a press release that… well, here, I’ll let you read the first sentence.
TY Health Insurance Brokerage, a leading provider of health insurance solutions, is proud to announce its commitment to helping small businesses reduce their health insurance costs while enhancing employee relations and fostering a culture of health and wellness.
There is no event. No new decision. No action. Just that they have a "commitment" to doing literally the job description of an insurance brokerage.
It is the equivalent of "Amazon announces its commitment to selling you stuff."
This kind of nothingburger doesn’t even have the air of ridiculousness about it that makes MBMBaM’s "Munch Squad" segment such a delight.
And, of course, when talking about bad business practices I’ve dealt with recently, I should probably mention Knights of Columbus agent Peter C. Holm’s commitment to funding organizations who work to keep abortions legal.
While it is technically legal to put someone’s email on a list without their knowledge or consent under Ohio’s anti-spam law — as long as you include an "unsubscribe" link — it sure does smell an awful lot like spam, doesn’t it? I know more than a few people who have sworn to never buy a product, review a book, or otherwise take any action asked of them when they were added to a social media group or an email list without their knowledge.
Regardless, I have to admire Peter Holm’s support of abortion rights through the donations in his name to Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. He was sent a copy of my message informing him of the donations that would be made in his name every time that he messaged me… and yet Ohio Knights of Columbus agent Peter Holm left me on his mailing list. I, as well as the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, thank him for the continued donations.
So there you have it, a series of bad promotional decisions — blatant internal linking, press releases about nothing, and bad e-mail marketing — all laid out so that you can avoid making the same mistakes and reassure yourself that at least your efforts aren’t actively working against the causes you endorse.
Unless, of course, you’re Peter Holm.
Featured Image by Pexels from Pixabay