I recently received an email from a marketer with the subject line: Download Ten Kindle Courses With PLR For Free, Philip! (Worth $1,379)

This sounded interesting. Even if I didn’t want to use the PLR, I might learn something about creating a Kindle book.

So I opened the letter. This was one of those cases of “What the large print (in this case, the headline) giveth, the fine print taketh away.”

The text of the email said that if you buy a particular product, then you could receive the “Ten Kindle Courses With PLR For Free”.

So they were not actually free; they were just bundled with the other product. It would have been fair for him to say they were available “at no additional cost when you buy product X”. But they were not free; you had to pay to get them.

Marketers have a reputation of being slippery. In fact, Seth Godin wrote a book entitled
All Marketers Are Liars: The Underground Classic That Explains How Marketing Really Works–and Why Authen ticity Is the Best Marketing of All

To be fair, Godin retracts his “all” when you read the whole book. Nevertheless, marketers don’t rank very high on the “trustworthiness scale”.

Smart marketers know that, and they stand apart from the crowd by making sure that whatever they say is entirely truthful, that they are transparent when they are selling something (so there are no hidden agendas) and always perform at or above the level they promised.

Anything less is a ticket to failure. People catch on to deception quickly and, at a minimum, they don’t give you any repeat sales. And, if they are upset enough, they can report your deceptive marketing practices to authorities such as the Federal Trade Commission.

And beyond the practical bad results, there is the ethical side; treating your customers fairly is the right thing to do. Failure to do so is evidence of a character defect.

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