What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

I’m extremely happy to welcome you to the first Monday Reading Roundup after our big move that kept me quiet for longer than I wanted . So without any other service interruption, here’s my list for today.

Have you always wanted to know what the secret formula to a successful business is? Your search has ended: Cath Lawson’s just made it public knowledge.

While so many out there have proclaimed print newspapers dead and burried, Shel Holtz has identified 10 changes that could save them.

If you have a site or a blog or both, you monitor your traffic. And admit it, higher numbers make you happier. But are you also mislead by traffic and driven to monitor the wrong metric? Dawud Miracle warns us against being tricked by the wrong numbers.

Ian Lurie is at it again and brings you a fresh and funny lesson on internet marketing. It’s about big crowds and how they don’t always have the smart solution.

We’ve all made mistakes. In business, these mistakes cost us our customers’/clients’ trust. Liz Strauss described the kind of apologies that help rebuild this lost trust.

In the end, I’ll spice up this weeks edition with Karen Swim’s reading recommendations. It’s a list of 5 wonderful blogs that I’m currently exploring (except the first one, that’s already in my reader).

Don’t forget to add your own suggestions to the comment box! See you all next week!

Popularity: 10% [?]

Company X Romania is a well respected company on the domestic market. It’s been around for a while and would not for the life of me yield the “beginner marketer” idea in my head. Yet I got this spammy comment (yes, I always double-check Akismet) promoting one of their not so recent announcements. The comment was made by a guy linking to an internet marketing site of exactly one page. No link to company X whatsoever, just the info on them…

Now, there are a few issues to consider:

• Is X paying these guys or testing what they can do? Well, then, they are doing a pretty bad job, they don’t even use spammy links to X. And why would the company’s Romanian branch benefit from traffic from foreign sites when it clearly targets Romania?
• Are they trying to impress X Romania on their own, trying to get a contract signed? Really bad strategy then.
• Is this company trying to show off their web exposure skills and traffic increasing strategy to other bloggers? Even worse strategy…
• Are they harvesting links to their site with randomly picked news excerpts based on a blogger’s country of origin? Possible. Again, poor strategy! They promote their internet marketing services, I am sure there are quite a few posts here they could have chosen for a legitimate comment and a link (do follow one even)

If X Romania is actually paying these guys to generate traffic to their site, worse choice ever!

If X Romania is in no way affiliated with these spammers, how can they protect their image? Hope this is a one-time offense? Read this post and contact the guys? They have a one page site and two email addresses as contacts, is there any real chance to get them to stop? Hope everyone will understand it’s the last issue I pointed to and no one will think X=SPAM?

What can you really do when a bogus “internet marketing guru” is using your brand to spam others? Disclose it and hope for some good online coverage? Warn said company and hope they’ll stop. Ignore them and pray this goes away without an image crisis? What do you think?

Popularity: 7% [?]