Advertising ethics should be the hallmark of all website marketers, especially if they want to be successful over the long haul.

Running a website business offers many advantages over running a brick-and-mortar only business. The first advantage is you don’t have the overhead of property leases and high utilities. Another key advantage is that you can automate many business functions. Furthermore, you can have a flexible schedule that suits your lifestyle. These reasons make it easier to enjoy your work. But nevertheless, one of the main reasons you’re in business is to make money. When you give good service and stand behind your promises to customers, you naturally meet with greater success. After all, the drawback of a web-based business is that your customers don’t typically meet you face-to-face. You must work a little harder to gain their trust and establish your credibility as an honest, ethical marketer.

Developing good advertising ethics requires that you generally adopt that time honored adage, “the customer’s always right.” Anyone who has worked with the public knows that dissatisfied customers can be unreasonable at times, but if you treat them with respect and treat them fairly, they’ll return.

For example, if you advertise a product with a money back guarantee, you’ve got to be prepared to stand behind that promise. There are people who will take advantage of such offers, but luckily, those “chronic returners” are rare. All it takes is one disgruntled customer to put a terrible mark on your reputation, even if they happen to be one of the “few.”

Let’s say you put up a page on your website, making an offer good through a certain date. You mistype the date, and your customer is misled, believing it’s good for an additional period of time. It’s your mistake. Even if you discover the error after publishing, good advertising ethics requires that you allow the extended time period. Why? If you modify the page to correct the date, what happens when a previous visitor returns to make the purchase? You must honor the offer as published.

In a case like this, you can try to earn yourself a few PR points and turn it to your advantage. You could insert a note, right above the offer, to let your customers know you goofed, but are still going to honor the offer. You may even gain more sales, because your visitors have mentally calculated that your advertising ethics must be pretty trustworthy. You didn’t have to honor it, but you did.

Just as with a single disgruntled customer, who believes they’ve been treated badly, can spread the word about with their friends and online message boards, a happy customer also tells others of your impeccable advertising ethics. Good news spreads as well as bad news.

Although we know there are some genuinely unscrupulous marketers out there, it doesn’t make much sense for a legitimate business person to not embrace a high standard of advertising ethics. High ethics will do your business good in the long run.