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There Must Be a Pony
We’ve all heard the story. “With all this manure, there must be a pony in here somewhere!”
I think that a lot of people blog or write articles with the same mentality. Not particularly caring about quality, but believing that if they produce enough manure, that somehow it will materialize into a pony.
Good writers try to write good quality every time. They understand that you write four or five articles, or maybe a dozen or two, for every one that someone else proclaims as “good”. Good article marketers and bloggers also realize that the really popular articles can’t always be predicted. So you write the best that is in you, try to make it good quality every time, and know that if you do that, you greatly enhance the odds that one of them will pay you back.
There are many “SEO” companies, a good many that are located in countries where English is not the native language, that produce “marketing articles” in something akin to an article mill. What boggles my mind is that anyone will actually PAY for these articles, but they do. And the writers are a plague on every article directory out there, the reason why you have a harder time submitting GOOD stuff.
The average article produced by them ranges from downright awful, to technically accurate and correct, but entirely colorless. Either one is purely a waste of time, money, and effort – and in some instances, we’ve even seen such companies create legal liability issues for their clients, because they wrote things that the FTC would consider to be misleading or dangerous statements. These articles do no good at all, search engines don’t really bother to COUNT most articles that are not linked outside the article directory itself.
A large number of business owners also crank out article after article, little caring about the quality, on the belief that if they wrote it, it MUST be good. They never check to see if their articles are linked, or even indexed in the search engines.
Article marketing works when it does, because people LIKE what is written. So the primary goal of a good article marketer is to create stuff that people WANT to read. Stuff that they enjoy, and then want to SHARE. Because the real power is in the sharing, not in the posting to the article directory.
In fact, posting articles to an article directory is a COMPLETE waste of time if they do not get picked up and linked, or reprinted. Seriously.
Blogging has similar requirements. Blogging works when people READ the blog. There are a gazillion blogs out there filled with nothing of value. If yours is just another of those, then people will forget it so fast that you’d get more mileage out of getting arrested and making the news. There is no distinction in owning a bad blog. 95% of blog posts are not read by more than one person – the person who wrote it. If you want others to read what you write, they’ve gotta LIKE it enough to take time out of their busy day to see what you have to say today.
An amazing number of people will pay for writing services though, without ever checking to see if the writing is even good! They think that somehow if they fertilize the web with enough manure, that something good will grow of it? There’s already enough manure on the web, and people universally ignore it. If people ignore it, search engines do too.
Quality, and enjoyability are the factors that make an article worth writing.
The Parable of the Donkey
A traveler bought a donkey to haul his belongings. He had a long way to go, and could not carry all of his belongings himself. He chose a fine, strong donkey, from a breeder who was known for breeding sturdy pack animals.
The man loaded his belongings onto the donkey, and set out upon his journey. After a number of days, he reached a city. He entered the marketplace, and there he saw many merchants, selling all sorts of wares. One merchant caught his eye. He sold hats, for donkeys. The traveler thought the hat so interesting he just had to have it. He bought it and put it upon his donkey. It covered the donkey’s ears, and made it harder for the donkey to hear, but the man liked the hat so much, he hardly considered it. He did wonder why his donkey was less responsive to his commands, but blamed it on the animal.
He traveled on. In the next city, his attention was taken by a merchant selling leg decorations for donkeys. This he had to have! He quickly bought a set of four and fastened them onto the donkey. He thought they looked very fetching. His donkey adopted a funny walk to keep from bashing the leggings into each other, and the man found himself criticizing the donkey for being awkward.
In the next city on his route, he discovered a decorative pack saddle. It was far heavier than the plain one he had been using, and it did not accommodate the burden as easily. But he liked it so well, he strapped it to his donkey, and loaded his goods onto the pack saddle. The load was somewhat unbalanced, and some items had to be tied to the side with ropes, where they dangled and beat upon the donkey’s legs. At the end of the day, some goods were damaged, and the man was angry with the donkey.
A city later, he found a full body blanket for his donkey. It was meant for night use, but he liked it so well that he unloaded the donkey, put the blanket on, and reloaded the animal. During the hot day, the poor beast overheated, and had to rest more frequently than usual. The man cursed his donkey for being slow and lazy.
Traveling on, the man found a merchant selling shoes for his donkey. Not the typical iron shoes, but full covering, lace up shoes. He thought them so clever that he immediately put them on his donkey and happily paid a high price for them. The donkey could no longer feel the earth beneath it’s feet. It stumbled and plodded instead of stepping lightly. The man found he needed to hit his donkey to keep him moving fast enough.
The man was angry that his donkey was no longer the sturdy and sure animal he had bought. It frustrated him. He beat the animal to make it go faster, and to punish it when it stumbled, and hollered and cursed it when it did not obey his commands.
Finally, he could take it no longer. Arriving in a small desert town, he determined to sell his donkey for what he could get, and purchase a new one. In a hurry, and frustrated with his animal, he sold it and only removed his original traveling packs, leaving the animal to the new owner with all the trappings in place, and set off with his new donkey (a quick and responsive beast), with his eye out for new accessories to bestow on this new and “better” animal.
The new owner of his old donkey patiently removed the blanket, the pack saddle, the hat, the shoes and leggings, and rubbed down the tired animal. He fed it a good meal and rested it for several days. Then he placed a plain and simple pack saddle on it, loaded it with a sizeable burden, and marveled at the strength and sure-footedness of this donkey that had been described as a weak and clumsy thing. He set out on the road, soon passing the first traveler, who was making his way with his new donkey, slower and slower, as he again loaded it with unnecessary trappings.
It seems so clear when it is choices someone else is making regarding a donkey. But when it is our own website, and we think the next new gadget is “really cool”, we have a harder time making wise choices.
The rule is simple… If it does not help achieve the primary goal, don’t do it.
If you want your website to SELL, then don’t put things on that get in the way of that. Otherwise, your website will be less responsive, slower, and will stumble and fail to perform effectively.
If You Don’t Actually Know Me, I Don’t Want to Be Your Fan
The whole FaceBook Fan page thing has me really wearied. I get fan invites from everybody and their dog. Most of them don’t know me. Not really. If they have never bothered to make any kind of personal contact, why in the world do I want to be their fan?
Lately though, if you allow a Friend connection with anyone you do not personally know, the first thing you get from them is a fan invite.
I think that the whole fan page thing is sort of run wild. When fan pages were not so well known, you had a chance that people might want to subscribe. But now, since everyone has one, the competition and lameness factor has risen to such a fever pitch that it is now far more difficult to create an effective one that actually serves a purpose, or to get it noticed.
Now let me assure my clients that I don’t mind when they send me an invite. After all, I KNOW them, and I have a vested interest in their business. But I don’t subscribe to all of those either – some cover topics I am not highly interested in.
And I don’t mind when my real friends send an invite either. I KNOW them, and they KNOW me. There is a relationship there.
But I’m selective about which pages I subscribe to. There is only so much time in the day, only so much room for STUFF in my life. If I subscribe to a page, it has to MEAN something to me. If I don’t, it isn’t an insult. I don’t like lime green, I dislike jazz music, I’m death on get rich quick scams or anything that even comes close. Lots of other personal quirks… I choose based on my likes and dislikes.
Right up there with Fan pages, are Causes. I don’t do FaceBook Causes. They are pretty much a useless gesture. A bunch of people sitting around commenting on a problem, but nobody really doing anything other than joining. It doesn’t change a thing. If I want to change the world, I am going to get busy doing something effective, not just gathering a group of people to notice that there is a problem. And then I’m selective about what I take on also – there’s only so much of me to go around.
I don’t live my life on FaceBook. I don’t play games there, and I don’t expect life to revolve around it. I live out here, and drop in for newsbites once or twice a day, and drop a little info of my own. Beyond that, it isn’t even real.
Most fan and cause notices I receive are deleted without further investigation. If I do not recognize a name behind it, it doesn’t even show on my radar. I don’t think I’m unusual in that… at least in final outcome.
Maybe a lot of people DO subscribe without really paying attention to what they are doing. Those people aren’t valuable contacts. They subscribe with the same degree of attention they pay to your announcements.
The key to effective networking is relationships. You can’t build relationships unless you get to know people. A fan invite is an assumption of an existing relationship – smart people just don’t respond unless the relationship is already there. And if you KEEP sending them (I get them from some people several times a week, even though I consistently ignore them), you just annoy people. Annoying people you want to reach is NOT a good idea!
Spend less time broadcasting, and more time making meaningful contact. It will get you further.
Frustration Extraordinare – HughesNet and WildBlue
This is the average process I go through lately to edit a page for a client.
- Type in the URL.
- Wait for 30 to 45 seconds for the page to load on average. Often this may take as long as 2 full minutes.
- About 3 out of 5 times, the page will fail to load completely. About half of the page load failures are incomplete loads, and about half are “Failure to Connect” notices.
- Make changes when the page finally loads, click Save. Go through the frustrating page load process again, hoping the changes are not lost.
This is a daily aggravation. We have two satellite dishes on the site of our house. One from Wild Blue that costs us $69 per month. One from HughesNet that costs us $79 per month. Each is so unreliable that we have to have a backup – that is more than $150 per month for internet once taxes are figured in.
WildBlue was adequate when we first got it – but we outgrew it fairly rapidly. And they have no options for growth beyond a certain point. When you hit the ceiling, they simply shut you down until your usage comes back in range – and that can take 3 weeks or more.
We got HughesNet in an emergency, and it was good at first. Their limits work differently than WB, so we’re never shut down for long if we exceed bandwidth. But lately, we’re having to be really careful what we do, because we’ve outgrown them too. We can get faster speeds, but we cannot get more bandwidth. When we first signed up with them, they had a higher bandwidth option. But they’ve since decreased the available options, and we have no place left to grow.
And the worst is that both companies have degraded seriously in performance. WildBlue is now behaving like they’ve throttled us, when we have NOT exceeded bandwidth. The performance is hideous – pages don’t load at all, and email takes forever to download. It is completely unacceptable, we are not getting anywhere near what we pay for, we aren’t even getting USABLE internet most of the time now.
HughesNet is also apalling lately. If you call them, they will run you through diagnostics, tell you you have to be reporting the wrong numbers (which are so slow their own techs cannot even believe they are real), and then wander off – they do follow up a few days later in hopes that the problem has miraculously solved itself. It never does. Our friends who also use HN have called about the slow speeds, and have been told they exceeded their bandwidth, when they have not even USED the internet in the last 48 hours! (HN has a 24 hour revolving limit.)
I ran some diagnosics recently, and they returned latency speeds that were 5 times longer than dialup speeds. This isn’t the speed of the upload or download data, rather this is the delay between the request from my computer, and the response from the other end. Often there simply is no response at all, so the browser returns a failure to connect error.
It is clear that both have vastly overloaded their satellites, and no longer care about usability for their clients. We are losing money on both – if we had an alternative, we’d be gone in a shot. I believe they make their money from people who accept it because they have no choice. The dumb thing is, many people would pay more for decent service – we would if we had the option, because our business is entirely dependent on good internet access. It is very frustrating to have no choices at all. It hurts our business, and there is nothing we can do about it.
It looks like an alternative is coming. We have two companies which will be bringing in high speed internet options soon. We’ll test them, and assuming performance is even a little better, HN and WB will be dropped. Sadly, a year ago, we’d have known we’d drop WB first, and keep HN as a backup. At this point, there is nothing to choose between the two, they are both so bad that neither is even good enough for a backup!
I don’t expect this post to change anything. The net is littered with negative comments on both of these companies. They do not listen when you contact customer support, so I doubt they are concerned with a negative reputation online either. They should be – internet options are growing for small towns across the US, and if they do not get their act together, they will simply fade out of existence.
I don’t have time to waste on CraigsList
I hear friends of mine recommend CraigsList to get business by advertising there. Frankly, I don’t have the time to waste. I’ve had several experiences with it, none of them good. The problems were enough that I find the entire venue to be a collosal waste of time.
First, I posted a business ad – nothing but spam came back from it.
Next, I posted several separate ads, for similar things, but distinctly different. In Canada, they were all allowed to remain active. In the US, all but one were flagged as duplicates, even though they were not. I got some spam from the ads, but nothing else.
I recently posted ads for three different laptops – Three different brands and model numbers, three sets of specs. One was allowed to stay, the other two were flagged as duplicates. An HP Pavilion laptop for $500 was flagged as being a duplicate of a Dell Inspiron for $300, and apparently so was the Dell Inspiron (different model number) for $200. No terms of use were violated in any way.
Oh, but before the items were flagged, I did have time to receive a total of six scam emails – CLEARLY scam emails, regarding the postings.
I don’t have time to wrestle with a careless company that can’t even determine when something is genuinely a duplicate post and when it is not. And I don’t have time for the spam.
One of my biggest gripes about it is that you can ONLY do local. Ummm…. Local for me is 300 people. My business is national. There is no way you can effectively use CraigsList if you have a national business. Let’s see… Pick one city in the US to advertise to. Just one. And you can’t advertise to another with anything remotely similar for another 30 days.
Who has time for that?
As a rule, I don’t usually post ads that expire in 30 days. I just don’t have time. Online ads are rarely effective anyway, and classifieds are some of the least effective.
And even if your ad DOES last for 30 days, nobody looks at it after the first three days. It takes time to write a good ad, time to get in there and post it, and then people see it for three days. Hardly worth the bother.
If you are in a small town, marketing nationally, or if you are selling something that people are not fighting over due to high popularity, CraigsList isn’t going to be an effective venue.
I never liked the idea of being thrown in with the prostitutes anyway.
UPDATE: I got half a dozen more responses from the remaining listing – all of them scams. Sloppy writing, incorrect English, and requests for a lot of information from me and promise of a cashier’s check if I ship it – not one mention of asking for more details, request for photo, or anything a real buyer would do. Classic for scams.
I am not an inexperienced seller – I have sold dozens of computer items on eBay and have an excellent feedback rating there. We bought and refurbished, then resold laptops for several years, so I know how to do so successfully. A complete lack of legitimate responses, and being flooded with scam responses is not typical for other venues where I have sold such items.
The Ethics of Education and Promotion
If you have an educational site, is it ethical to promote items on the site that you profit from, or is that a compromise of your informational integrity?
I have a business educational site. The purpose of the site is to promote scam awareness, educate people about what helps them really earn, and how to spot a good program or a bad one, the advantages of independent business endeavors, etc.
I have two clients that offer multi-level distributorship programs. There is no charge for either one. Both are ethical and have a good chance of returning a profit if someone works them.
I’ve toyed with the idea of joining both just for signups and sponsorships. One of them would require that I purchase items at least for my own use. They are items I am likely to use anyway. The other would not require purchases, and would allow me to function purely as a recruiter.
One consideration is TIME. Do I want to invest the time to really make them work. Since I have outlets that would allow me to plug in information to existing channels, I think it could work without undue effort.
The major consideration though, is ethics. Is it ethical for me to promote specific programs and profit for them on a site that purports to be unbiased?
The thing I’ve learned is that this is what people WANT. When they come to a “build a business” site, they want to be told, “Here are some honest choices.”
But I still wrestle with it. Still unsure of whether it lowers my credibility and makes me just another “work at home” site that exists to promote a program instead of to benefit the end user.
Don’t Be a “Harry”
That isn’t his real name. But we’ll call him “Harry” (no offense to anyone named “Harry”).
He seemed like a nice guy. Eager to get started with the project. We proceeded to install the site and work on the design. “I like this style” he said. We created that style. “Change that.” We changed it. This is normal. Harry liked to email every morning, demanding a status update for the day. This isn’t normal, but we replied anyway.
Harry also liked browsing the web, looking at his competitor’s websites and at other service provider websites. And it gave him ideas. Soon he began saying things like, “This site has THAT. I want it too.” Never mind that that business owner paid tens of thousands for their site, and his was a budget site. I made changes to the design when possible – some were deep coding changes, very difficult to do. One month into the project, the time was already over what we normally spend on a flat rate project. He added in another saying, “This site has THAT, and it will look great on my site!”. I’m sure it would, if he had the budget to afford it. When I protested, he said, “But you said satisfaction guaranteed, you have to do it!” I said, “I also said there were limits, and I’d tell you when you hit them, and this is one.”
With flat rate projects, setting limits is always subjective. If we have a motive for being willing to try something (so we can learn how to do it if it is new), or if we think the results may be terrific and look good in our portfolio, we may go beyond what is typically reasonable, and make exceptions. Project creep has a different meaning here, and it is always hard to know where to draw lines. If they are small things, we usually just shrug and do them.
With this client though, small things never STAYED small things. Harry liked to change his mind. And he wasn’t very good at making decisions either. “Let me see it this way.” “No, I guess I liked it better the first way.” “Change that color.” “Change it some more.” “Ok, that’s good.” “No, wait, I guess I don’t like it after all.” A simple thing would take DAYS to get exactly how he wanted it. He fussed over 1 pixel differences, the length of gradients, the precise angle of things, the thickness, the shade of the colors in a bevel, the depth of the shadow. EVERY single aspect of every single element was subjected to minute examination and criticism.
We really do try to please our clients. But Harry’s demands never ended. When he was informed that his home page content was part of Phase 2, and not part of Phase 1, he complained that if the content was not in, how could he tell the design was good? He demanded more and more, refused to pay the second Phase fee, and kept changing his mind. We have never, in more than 10 years of web design, EVER had a pickier, more demanding, more indecisive client. He didn’t just set a new record, he was so far beyond any other client demands that I doubt we’ll ever see his equal.
Our graphic designer created a logo for him. A painstaking process that took a week before he was satisfied – understand, he started by telling her EXACTLY what he wanted. She created EXACTLY that, and he still fussed, and agonized over the placement, shape, size, and edging on every single item, even becoming crude at one point. He finally declared it finished. One week later, he went back to her and told he he wanted something else instead – no mention to us that he was doing so, no mention to her of any kind of compensation for doing so. I think he thought we’d pay for it. When things finally fell apart (a month later) he was still picking and fussing over the second logo.
Two months into the project he began to complain. Why weren’t we done yet? How much longer was it going to take? I told him that as long as he had additional things for us to do, and as long as they were technically complex, it would take time. He began demanding a deadline. I told him that unless he could tell me definitively when he’d be satisfied, I could not tell him when we’d be done.
His demands begin to get silly – “I don’t have a link to my blog, just put in a dummy so I can see what it looks like.”, and “Don’t put the image on the site, email it to me so I can see it first.” That, even though the site isn’t live yet so there is NO reason not to put it up, and if I DID email it to him, he’d just say, “I don’t know, let me see it on the site.” On a frugal contract, every bit of wasted time counts, and he loved wasting time. He’d often say, “I don’t know which I like, make both and let me see.”
By now, I’m feeling dread each time I check my email. I’m waking up feeling dread over working because of him. I’m behind on my other clients because of the time he is taking. There were many reasons why we let it go on that long – partly because I gained some valuable reusable code from his requests, partly because it always seemed each was the last. I still sort of felt he was basically a nice guy, just indecisive and a penny pincher because of the industry he was in.
Then one morning he demanded a deadline, said that I WOULD give him one, and that I’d finish it up within this amount of time.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, business is good, and by now I’m thinking a refund will be a relief. I no longer care whether I please this client or not. I just want it to end, one way or another. I emailed back and said that there were three things left to finish. I would do them, and then I was DONE with Phase 1. Nothing more. That he could pay for Phase 2, or not. If he did pay for Phase 2, I would limit the time available. He replied that I could not do that, that the contract stated that satisfaction was guaranteed and that I had to do what he said.
Up until that point, I still thought he was just basically an indecisive, but decent person. At this point, it became clear to me that he was a manipulator, who had intended from the outset to try to push a low budget contract into a high end service by being demanding. I don’t like to believe bad of people. But his actions since then have left me little other conclusion.
Primarily the fact that he takes no responsibility for his own actions. He made choices, and those choices had consequences. When the consequences were not what he wanted, it was someone else’s fault. That is classic for manipulators.
This is NOT a typical response for our clients. We have VERY few clients who request refunds. If we had a lot – or if we had a lot of clients who complained of the things he was complaining of, I’d know we had something to fix.
He now informed me that I could not change the contract in the middle. I pointed to the termination clause, and said, “Yes, I can.” The contract allows me to terminate the contract in writing – he has the same right. He then has three choices – he can renegotiate for another phase, or he can go elsewhere and take it with him, or he can request a refund and have no rights to any of the items created so far. After sending that email, he disappeared for several weeks. I finished what I said I’d finish, and moved on with life. He has since requested a refund, demanding more than what is covered in the contract. We will issue what IS covered in the contract. His stated reasons for requesting the refund are unreasonable delays, lack of communication (daily emails weren’t enough), and failure to deliver a satisfactory result. Ummmmm Yeah…..
This client was the all time most difficult to deal with for us. So much so that his behavior has become an example in our training classes (name withheld), for spotting and dealing with difficult clients. His inability to make a choice, his unwillingness to be satisfied, and his inability to accept the consequences of his own choices caused problems that we, as service providers, dislike having to deal with – they are costly and emotionally difficult to deal with. Among our subcontractors, his name is legendary – they all know him by his first name, and when someone is being difficult, they will say, “I hope this isn’t another Harry.”, or if they are picky but not unmanageable, “At least this isn’t a Harry.” Sad, really.
The moral? When things are breaking down around you, and you are looking for someone to blame, look to yourself first. See what your part was in contributing to the problem – I recognize that I gave in at times when I should have set a limit early on with this client, but I also know there was little else I could have done to avoid things getting ugly. If things keep breaking down on you, and “People” keep failing to meet your expectations, it may be your expectations that are the issue. Own your part of the problem, and do something about it.
It is pretty sad to become the bad example, to have your name known and remembered with a shudder.
Don’t be a Harry.
Competition and the Wal-Mart Equation
I’ve heard people complain that “Wal-Mart comes into a town and drives small businesses out.” I do not think this is true. There are those who resent me for saying this. But I think it is simply a matter of competition.
People buy from Wal-Mart because they sell things people want. Any business can do that. Any business that fails to do that should not BE in business.
A town near here refuses to let Wal-Mart in, though the company has made multiple attempts to do so. The town has one grocery store that maintains a monopoly, and two variety stores with bad service and poorly maintained stock. There is a sense of entitlement in the town, and a fear of competition. The residents dislike being held hostage by these businesses, and people who live in outlying areas drive up to a hundred miles out of their way to avoid shopping in this town. The businesses in town succeed not because they are good, but because the residents have no choice. That hurts the town by driving away other potential business.
I have always maintained that any business that does their job right has no need to fear the competition. You can’t always do the job cheaper, but you can usually do the job better than a company that is focusing on doing it “cheaper”. For every person who will doggedly go to Wal-Mart to buy, there is one who refuses to, and another who will go where they feel best about buying. Wal-Mart can’t put any business under that is paying attention to the market, and really giving the customer what they want.
A town in the opposite direction from the first one has three major grocery stores – one of which is Wal-Mart – and a K-Mart, and many other thriving businesses that overlap into those businesses. The service level through the town is much better, businesses are better maintained, and most are thriving. The two other grocery stores have specialized – offering variety that Wal-Mart does not offer (they spotted that Wal-Mart only carries what is most popular, in volume). They simply adapted, and went on doing what they did best – creating an environment where their customers feel good about shopping. Two other grocery stores went under when Wal-Mart brought in the grocery department. They had been struggling to begin with, and their corporate model was too similar to Wal-Mart’s. Wal-Mart simply did it better, and the others could not compete (in fact, one of them went under and was sold out as a corporation around that time).
My competition isn’t Wal-Mart, it is GoDaddy. The big, inconsiderate, cheap and shoddy company that outguns every small web service provider on marketing. I can’t compete with them on their terms, and I don’t even try. I just do the job better, offer better value, and give my clients personal attention that a big corporation can’t begin to compete with.
Any business can do that. They often get caught up in price wars though, which puts them in a losing position to begin with. You can’t compete with big business on their terms. You can’t fight fire with fire in this instance. You have to figure out how to fight fire with water – do it differently than they do it. Do it better where they CANNOT do it better. Corporations operate within a set of strict limitations. They have their course, their methods, their policies. Changing them is like trying to turn a ship under full steam – it doesn’t happen very fast, and it can only happen in small degrees. If they try to compete with you on terms other than their existing corporate policies, they will capsize and undermine their entire success model. So it is pretty simple for you to adapt and maneuver into a position of successful competition, just by doing what they CANNOT do.
When businesses blame Wal-Mart for driving them under, they’ve misplaced the blame. They didn’t go under due to the presence of another business in town. They went under because they did not respond in an effective way, and chances are, their business model was flawed to begin with. When people have no choice, they’ll settle for mediocre. When they have a choice, they won’t. High quality and truly good service DO win out even in a highly competitive market. A good business model will succeed in spite of competition, a bad or shaky one can only succeed when there are no other options.
Look to yourself, and stop blaming the competition.
Legality of Cash Gifting
A lady called me today. She sounded worn, a little scared, and uncertain. She wanted a website – but you could tell she was not certain about even asking – not sure she could afford it, probably. I gave the standard reply: “Depends on what you need.” Then I asked her the standard exploration question: “What is your business?”
She said it was a Cash Gifting Program with a replicated website. I didn’t think much, I just said what I knew. “Ummm, those are illegal.” Then I followed with, “That kind of program is illegal, and you need to report this to the FTC.” She said “Thank you” a bit stiffly and hung up – I’m not sure if she thought I was nuts or deluded, or if that first sense of disaster was just sinking in. I wish I’d have thought to stop her, talk to her a bit more, help her know what to do.
Then I went on a research hunt to find documentation of what I knew. Well, a Google search for “cash gifting legality” returns all sorts of deceptive information. Claims left and right that cash gifting IS legal, based upon reports or information from the IRS.
Frauds! The IRS is NOT the issue here.
- Cash gifting to friends and family is legal.
- Cash gifting SCHEMES are NOT legal! They are nothing more than pyramid (Ponzi) schemes! CLEARLY forbidden by US trade laws. They fail on EVERY point!
Don’t believe me?
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/alerts/alt056.shtm
Such schemes use various methods to try to get around the laws using clever descriptions, but their descriptions are NOT what matter – the way in which the LAW describes it, and the INTENT of what they are doing is what makes it illegal.
By IRS definition, a Cash Gift is something given by a PERSON, to another person, with no expectation of return.
By FTC definition, an illegal pyramid scheme is one in which there is no legitimate product or investment going on, and which depends upon the recruitment of an ever larger group of people in order for anyone other than the top members to realize a good return on investment.
Any time an organization exists, formal or informal, for the purpose of Cash Gifting, the purpose and intent is no longer giving with no expectation of return. When you give someone money, and expect to MAKE money from it, it is not a Cash Gift, it is an investment, and you are a business. And this is a business with no product, no real investment occuring, and which only pays if more people join and pay into it. Pyramid Scheme, plain and simple!
These schemes, no matter how cleverly described, and no matter how slippery the leaders, get shut down. They are illegal, and no amount of claiming they are not will make them legal. No amount of “lawyer approved” claims will make them so – in fact, if they CALL it a “Cash Gifting” program, it is illegal, because Cash Gifting for profit is in itself illegal.
The thing is, why would you want to take the chance? People who create these are not “nice people who just want to help others”. They are scammers who want your money!
By participating, YOU are participating in an illegal scheme. If you DID make money at it, you would be liable for prosecution!
Why in the world would you want to take the chance of doing something that is clearly illegal, just because someone says, “Oh, our version isn’t illegal”? There are SO MANY things you can do that WORK to earn money, why would you throw away your money on such a thing when you know deep down that it just isn’t going to end happily?
Scamming is two sided. A scammer cannot take someone for their life savings unless there is someone on the other end of it who is greedy enough to want something for nothing – or unreasonable returns on their life savings. The person being scammed has to be WILLING to take the RISK of being scammed.
Ignorance accounts for some of it – but I don’t buy that most people who are scammed are ignorant. I think that they may be a little that way. But I think that in most cases, a little voice in the back of their head warned them that it probably wasn’t legit, but they let their greed or sense of desperation silence that little voice.
Don’t let greed overrule common sense. That little voice that warns you is the strongest protection you have against being scammed.
And beware of people who use supposed loopholes to try to persuade you that the thing that is illegal is somehow legal because THEY are doing it. If they have to use loopholes, they just aren’t good people. They are going to bend the law and look for loopholes with YOU, just the same as they are telling you they are doing with the government.
Good business doesn’t need to tell you that they are “legal because…”. Good business is CLEARLY legal.
Signs That Your Network is Dying
Forums and networks are HARD to get started. And once you get them going, it seems to be very difficult to KEEP them going.
We all like to think that when we begin an effort to get people together for conversation that there are millions of people out there who want to discuss the same things we do. But others rarely have the same agenda, even when they SAY they do.
Forums and conversational venues RARELY take off spontaneously. Getting them going takes a LOT of effort, and so does keeping them going. There are longstanding tactics that everyone uses – which sometimes are successful, but more often, just feel tired.
- Regular moderator posts.
- Encouraging members to spread the word.
- Contests.
- Controversy.
- Daily “topics”.
- Allowing ads one day a week (the result of which is, that usually, one day a week, you have lots of posts, which nobody reads, and that this is the ONLY day each week that you have posts).
We all do these things on our networks in an effort to keep it going. It may or may not help, and often it does not.
How do you know your network is dying?
- When the only posts are ones you make yourself (or your moderators make).
- When the only posts are on “ad day”.
- When people ask questions and nobody replies.
- When nobody ASKS questions anymore.
- When the majority of new signups are hit and run spammers.
- When your long time users no longer post.
- When your moderators start dropping out.
- When the only members you have that regularly do anything are the same people you associate with everywhere else online. Without new blood, networks die.
People online, as a rule, have a short attention span. While it is hard to get a venue going, it is even harder to keep it going for more than a year or two if you do manage to get it going. The initial burst of enthusiasm that people have over something new is short lived – about two months. You often find that once they lose that, there is nothing left and they wander off to see if someone else is more interesting.
Once you see those signs above, it is very difficult to bring it back from the edge of extinction. Oh, you can try, but often you are just beating a dead horse.
Nobody likes to admit that something didn’t work. But more venues fail than ever succeed, and the statistical difference between success and failure is monstrous. Perhaps one in a thousand ever even gets off the ground, and perhaps only one in a hundred of those keep going for more than a few months.
- A heavy marketing campaign can help.
- Listening to your users can help – if they talk. Often they don’t.
- Intense involvement on your part, and recruitment of other helpers can help.
But there’s no magic formula, and there is sometimes no way to rescue a venue that is in decline – the perception of decline can be almost impossible to reverse.
Often, it is simply best to go on to the next thing.
When the Customer is Not Right
Circumstances in my business have given me a lot of reason to think about customer service, satisfaction policies, and refund policies. Having always felt that a business owner gives MORE, not LESS, and having been raised on the philosophy that you just accept hardship and cope with it, it has taken a great deal of thought, and reasoning to create some new policies which set a limit on how far certain types of clients can push me.
We charge flat rates, so we often have to set limits on what can and cannot be done within a contract. With the average client, a polite, “I’m sorry, but the technical difficulty of that feature is beyond what your contract covers” is enough to let them know where that limit is. And typically, we don’t have to issue refunds, because when problems are encountered, we can address them and help the client move past them.
Two situations recently made me start really thinking about when the customer ISN’T right, and when a refund should NOT be issued. Those are hard things for me to define, and I dislike it intensely when someone is displeased with the outcome. But when the problem is not one that I caused, but which the client brought on themselves, I am not responsible for making it right.
In one situation, the demands of the client became such that it was interferring with my ability to keep up with work for all of my clients. I eventually said NO, because it was unfair to the rest of my clients for one client to demand so much time and work that it was impossible to keep up with the reasonable requests of the others. I had one dissatisfied client. But to satisfy that one, I’d have had a dozen dissatisfied clients. And it needs to be stated, that this involved a fairly low priced contract, for which I had already delivered about 5-7 times the amount of work agreed on. This client would make requests that wasted time, and think nothing of it. “Just make two copies of that graphic so I can compare them and decide which one I like.” or “I don’t have the right text or image yet, just make one up so I can see what it might look like.” Those things waste time, and cost extra work that is not reasonable when time is not charged hourly.
In the other situation, the client asked and was informed about the amount of work their part of the contract would entail. They assured with enthusiasm that they were up to it, and were ready to get it done quickly. This was a half-priced contract where we were responsible only for install, design, payment processor setup, and support – we would do personal training on request at no extra charge. The client began the work, then lost interest, and changed their mind. We offered a training session – which they scheduled, then canceled. They then accused us of not informing them of the amount of work needed (which we had done both in person and in writing), and demanded a full refund of all money paid. Since we did not have a refund policy for this specific service, we looked at our general policies (which they had agreed to during the payment process), and offered a refund based on those terms. This meant half of the setup fee was refundable. The client said that was not acceptable, that they had never agreed to any such thing, and that we needed to refund the whole thing or they’d file a complaint with the payment company. We promptly refunded the amount of half of the setup fee, as we had stated we would, and informed them that they HAD in fact agreed, showed them the document, and informed them that since the services agreed on HAD been completed and delivered, and that there was no issue of either non-delivery, or misrepresentation of services, they had no justifiable reason to file a complaint.
In both instances, there were strong reasons for setting a limit with the client, in spite of having strong customer service ethics. It came down to sustainability and what is reasonable and fair. To satisfy ONE client in this instance, would have done long term harm to our business.
In the first instance, keeping this client and answering all his demands would have undermined our entire business. We over delivered, and he got far more than his money’s worth. He was angry that I refused to do more without additional pay. But this, again, was not something we caused, and was beyond reason to expect on his part. It was better to have one dissatisfied client than to allow one client to destroy our business.
In the second instance, we were dealing with a situation that we did not cause – in fact, we try very hard to ensure that clients purchasing that type of product KNOW that it will take work. She changed her mind. That wasn’t something we caused. This is a service for a direct sales company. Had we just given the refund to make her go away without being upset, then she would tell her downline to go ahead and order a site from us, that if they changed their mind, we would refund. That would do a lot of harm long term. We were fair and honest with her, and the problems were not things we caused, and we offered several options to try to help her overcome the problems, but she did not want to even try.
I really struggled with figuring out the appropriate thing to do in both of these situations. In normal circumstances, I am more than willing to go out of my way for a client, and to do more than they paid for. We typically include a certain amount of wiggle room in our flat rate quotes, and I expect to have to work hard for what I earn. I generally LIKE my clients and want to give a lot for them. But there also has to be a limit. Otherwise a business is not sustainable.
Because of these two clients, I now have a new refund policy for the one particular service, and I have a new guideline for myself, to know when it is better to “fire the client” than it is to continue working with them. Neither of those things are handled lightly – I never want a dissatisfied client if I can avoid it. But I also recognize that some clients never WILL be satisfied, and that beyond a certain point, it is THEIR choice, not mine. When I have done all I should have done, and more, then it is ok to let them be unhappy, and to walk away. It still isn’t a nice thing to have to deal with, and I don’t think I will ever be able to do that without a lot of thought and analysis of the situation, to make sure that I was in the right in doing what I did.
I don’t know if I have a point in all of this, except to share the experience and maybe the bit that I did get out of it. If I have a point, it is maybe that when you ARE doing it right, this kind of decision generally WON’T be easy. It wll always cause thought and discomfort. But that lines must be drawn for problem clients, to keep the business sustainable for the GOOD clients.
When you did not cause it, and when you did more than was reasonable to try to make it work, it is ok to let the client choose to be dissatisfied.
WildFire DSI Released Today
I rarely make product announcements, but am taking the liberty of doing so today. We’ve been working on a nifty little script for about 9 months now, and it is finally ready for prime time.
WildFire DSI is an auto-installer for Open Source or Custom website Scripts. DSI stands for “dynamic script installer”.
It works with our hosting billing manager (WHMCS), and on Cpanel/WHM reseller accounts, VPS, or dedicated servers. It has a lot of features which make it really cool, if you don’t mind my tooting my own horn for a bit.
The neatest thing is, that it can install just about anything. We have templated install files for Joomla, Joomla with VirtueMart, WordPress, and CRE Loaded/OSC. If it will install those, it will install practically anything. And it can install as many different ones as the web service provider wants to install.
In plain English, this means a client can go to the ordering system, choose from a list of website packages, for example:
- Joomla with no frills
- Joomla with a directory
- Joomla with Virtuemart
- CRE Loaded
- WordPress
- Joomla AND WordPress together
- Magento
- Or just about anything you want to offer them.
When the client purchases the site structure, the system identifies the one that was chosen, and automatically installs it. Instant website.
Our coder was truly brilliant about how he created the functionality. It is so flexible you can even make it personalize an install for the client.
We love this, we’ve been using it in our own business, in one form or another, for about 6 months. It allows us to pre-configure the install packages, which saves us so much time on the installations we do most often. It has also allowed us to tap into some fairly lucrative vertical markets (targeting a website service for a specific industry).
It went live today, at http://www.dynamicsiteinstaller.com, complete with affiliate program.
I really didn’t even want to sell this. It is such an advantage for our business, and such a powerful tool, I wasn’t sure I wanted to let to go to empower my competition. I sort of wanted to keep it just for our students and our own business. People keep asking for it though. And I guess I want to share my knowledge and tools more than I want to hoard them.
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