Argh.

This morning I received yet another e-mail from some “marketer” or another, promising me the secrets of the guru’s for an unbelievably low price.

Uh-huh.

Amazing how such a large majority of marketers – even some of the most successful ones apparently – can’t seem to spell. Yep, they can dominate the search engines, suck ooodles of cash out of the pockets of hapless surfers, and effortlessly deliver truckloads of back-links to their web sites, without having mastered the basics of grammar.

Guru’s.

With an “apostrophe.”

The apostrophe in this case, denotes possession. As in… “this is the guru’s pen.” The apostrophe “shows” us that “this is the pen belonging to the guru.”

The thing is, these are the people who are supposed to know better. It’s a well-established fact that online, spelling and grammar mistakes severely undermine your credibility. After all, a new visitor does not have a whole heck of a lot upon which to judge whether or not you are a credible authority in your field.

How many really successful business people or companies are you aware of that have blatant spelling mistakes in their promotional copy?

I know that as soon as I see something like “guru’s”, my respect level immediately drops a notch or two. Rightly or wrongly my first thought is…

“How much can you REALLY know about marketing if you can’t master basic English?”

Now I have to be honest here; I’m famous for my thoughts getting ahead of my typing. This will occasionally result in some interesting “word stew.” And everyone makes honest mistakes. But if you’re doing business online in any capacity, you cannot afford to do so. That’s why in addition to using a spell-checker, I have someone review ALL my material (even this is not foolproof, but it does eliminate 99% of errors).

You need to do the same.

If you run a large business, you can delegate the appropriate person to the task. If not, get your spouse / friend / daughter / son to do it. The bottom line is this – get another pair of eyeballs on your material.

You can’t afford to make credibility-demolishing mistakes and expect to become successful with your online business.

Like “guru’s.”