Should you apply this principle to your activities as a webmaster or blogger? I’m not totally sure that I can give a positive answer to this question. But I’m going to save my objections for last. Now I’m going to show you a few situations when you might consider doing some make-believing, if you really must.

When could you fake it till you make it?

• Suppose you still don’t have much practical experience in a given subject, but you’re a good researcher and find it easy to compile data about that. So you feel you’re ready to build a great site or blog about the topic and possibly make money from it. The problem: many people hate it when someone without first-hand experience on a field writes about it. What can you do then? Exactly: you’ll fake it till you make it, i. e., you’ll use your research skills as substitutes for experience, at least for the time being.
• Forum owners often inflate member and post counts as a way to encourage more people to join their forums. The reasoning behind this is that no one will join an empty place, so you play a little trick to get the bandwagon effect to work. Several bloggers inflate subscriber and/or comment numbers for similar reasons.
• Bloggers and webmasters may avoid the loss of direct ad sales by temporarily filling their own unsold inventory.
• Some service providers offer their services for free — or for discounted fees — when they are starting out. They ask for testimonials in return. Said testimonials will hopefully generate more business in the future, thus resulting in profit and compensating the initial financial losses.

The biggest disadvantage of faking it till making it

Ethical issues are the number one reason why you should be extremely careful when you pretend to be more successful than you really are.

Do you like to be misled? Of course not. Why should your visitors like it then?

Even if you don’t care much for ethics, keep in mind that you can always be unmasked. I myself have written an article containing basic tips to help people measure a site or blog’s success. Anyone can read that article because it’s available for free. There are certainly other articles like that on the Internet. People are getting smarter and smarter anyway.

Are you willing to risk your reputation just to make some quick money?

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1. After writing my recent article on StumbleUpon traffic, I took the time to review it and compare it to the sources of information it was based on. I thanked myself for doing this: I quickly spotted some inaccuracies in my post. All I had to do afterwards was to correct the wrong bits of info, rebuild some sentences and add a few others. Of course, I took these simples measures before hitting the “publish” button. Then I reread everything again and compared the fixed article to my sources one more time. I only published the post after making sure that there wasn’t a single piece of info in it that I couldn’t claim to be true to the best of my knowledge.

2. Last week I started an article on a linkbuilding technique that looked great in theory. I had read about it on other blogs and decided to write about it too. Luckily, I had also decided to try the trick myself and see if/how it worked before writing the definitive version of my post. Now I’m glad I did it: my test showed me that the technique just didn’t work. Had I simply repeated what I had read on other places, now I’d be hating myself for having published a valueless article (and I’d have to deal with all the negative comments that the smartest readers would certainly leave).

Now can you see what’s the best way to preserve a site’s credibility?

I’m sure that by now you have realised it. But it can never be stressed enough, so I’m going to write it down: never ever publish inaccurate, flawed information on your blogs or sites. Not consciously, at least. We all make mistakes, but try to spot yours before you make your pages publicly available. Review all your material once again after it’s published and be ready to fix everything if need be.

In case you really can’t spot any flaws and still your visitors point out inaccuracies on your pages, edit them. And include your sincere apologies to your audience, emphasasing that you had written all in good faith and never meant to mislead anyone.

In sum: be honest, be humble, don’t be lazy. This is how you will sustain your site’s credibility.

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