(Originally posted: April 6, 2009)

Ever heard of John Chow? He has a blog with more than 15k subscribers to his RSS feed and which allegedly nets him over U$ 40k a month. And yet, you’d never find John Chow dot Com if you googled it.

You see, the ways through which mr. Chow gets his money are not exactly kosher. In fact, most of the people who follow his blog do so to read about his “evil tricks of the day” on how to bend the rules to make a couple bucks more with your website. Tricks such as selling links, which is a definite no-no for search companies such as Google, since it messes with their pageranking algorithms.

It was almost two years ago that Google stopped ranking his blog. As you’d expect, he got kicked off quite a few other places, as well. But to this day, he’s still blogging and making money.

Social media is less mature now than blogging was when Chow began to write in 2005. There are no determined best practices. You probably know a few tricks to get massive exposure when things get ugly – using fake profiles on social networks, commenting on communities and blogs, mass adding people on Twitter. And you also know they’re wrong.

So next time a client or your boss comes asking you to add 20k people on Twitter and things like that, think about John Chow. Remember how you can still be wrong even if you’re getting positive results.

You’re the expert, you’re the one they’re relying on doing the right thing. And you’re the one who has to tell them you won’t fool people, you won’t game the system and you won’t poison the well.

P.S.: Of course, it should go without saying that this also means that just because what you’re doing is working, it doesn’t mean you’re doing it right. Or even that what you did right yesterday is right today. In a field with such an ever-changing landscape, you should be constantly re-evaluating your work.