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.

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.

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.

Our company uses the “90/10 rule” instead of the “80/20 rule”.  Because we have discovered that if you choose the right 10%, it really does get 90% of the results.

If you are expecting only 80% of the results for 20% of the labor, then you are expending too much effort for too little result. You are doing things that don’t really matter, or doing them inefficiently, or you aren’t really paying attention to what IS getting the results.

We can create a “substantially equivalent” performance in a website, when creating a $5000 site that has to compete with a $50,000 site. You just gotta pick the right stuff, approach it with creativity, and not waste one bit of time, effort, or application. That’s 90% of the results, for just 10% of the cost, time, and effort.

I’ve found this to be true in other areas of life also. There just isn’t enough time in the day to do everything. You have to hit the most important stuff and let the rest go.

It ain’t slacking – and it isn’t doing a sloppy job. In fact, it means giving all you got to that 10%. But the results are so amazing that it really fires you up when you get it working right. Because you can produce so much, and just run circles around the competition.

It works in the home, it works in the office, and it works online.

If you really want to excel and be original, 80/20 just isn’t good enough.

I love a good forum – if that forum emails me when there are posts. I liked being able to post something of value, and get conversation about it. And I liked that the conversation was there, and searchable. I liked being able to ask a question, or brainstorm something, and get responses.

Ryze was one of the best venues to find forums like that – they call them “networks”. But Ryze is dying. It hasn’t been sudden, more of a trickle of attrition.

None of the new big networking sites can come close – their group conversation tools stink. And before you say, “what about Twitter?”, let me clarify – I’m talking REAL conversation, where you can make a comment of more than 140 characters, and where the comment lasts longer than the time it takes to scroll off the bottom of the stream of inanities that flood in.

Blogs don’t cut it either.

FaceBook has “groups”, and “pages”, but there is no notification on either the wall, or forum activity for those. It is like you join a group, and then it NEVER reaches out to you. The only way a group can tap you on the shoulder and get your attention is if the owner does a mass mail to the group. Too many of those, and people drop the group. So on FaceBook, groups really aren’t groups at all – they are just lists of people who never participate because there is nothing to remind them to take time from their busy lives to check in.

Statistically, forums that require you to check in to see if there has been any activity are failures. Stupidly, FaceBook has never figured this out.

But then, neither did FastPitch, LinkedIn, or any of the other major platforms that I checked out. I think they like transience. It takes smaller databases.

So group conversations that are meaningful have all but disappeared.

Sad, really.

And sadder… We downgraded our Ryze memberships today. With a sense of loss as we did so. We closed our own network there, and unsubscribed from some that have become either nothing more than questions about why there are no posts, or mostly ads – and one that has degenerated into mostly a commentary on Twitter (If I wanted Twitter, I’d be THERE, not somewhere else reading about it). The last people to go are the spammers, and a few die-hards who want to try to doggedly MAKE it what it once was.

Our profile is still there – it could come back. I don’t think it will. I give Ryze 6 months before they are forced to close their doors. And it is because they did not listen. They offer something nobody else does, and it has been successful, and is still valuable, but not without additional tools to entice people in to begin with, and to keep them there. And implementing the tools should not be difficult, the technology is readily available. Heck, I can do it using Open Source software! They could still pull out a spectacular recovery. But I think they won’t.

And the loss is more than just a venue… It seems the loss of what they did that no one else has had the intelligence to implement in a smart way.

Ok, this is not something I want to do. I like to believe in the good intentions of people. And I rarely feel the need to write an article solely for the purpose of exposing a business that acts in a way that I can only consider to be highly unethical.

Grant Writer’s Institute, which goes under several other names as well, has been promoting our grant to the people whom they are charging hundreds of dollars for something that is quite a bit less than they are encouraging people to believe that it is. They provide an information packet that supposedly contains information on grants that business owners can get to fund business expansion or startup. They have added us to their list, and we are being contacted regularly now by people who have been taken by this company. We have been contacted directly by three people, and have had applications submitted by others. The three people we were contacted by all reported how useless the information was that they were given, and that it was misleading and incomplete about the reality of actually GETTING a grant.

They operate on the fine edge of legality. They word their information carefully, so the eager applicant will THINK they are getting something they are not. They are not picky about the “grants” they recommend – some are actually contests, not grants (and there is a huge difference). Some require fees to apply. Ours is not money, and they represent it as such – it is clear they have never even read our site beyond the word “grant”.

We received an application, which some guy apparently paid them to prepare.

• Now, in the first place, our application can be prepared by ANY qualified candidate – if you can’t prepare your own grant application for our program, you are not qualified to operate a business!
• In the second place, the job this company did on preparing it was appalling.

It was obviously prepared by someone who did not speak English natively. To their credit, they did conceal it well, but there were inconsistent phrases which gave it away. This is something a professional company would have paid more attention to.

They did NOTHING to help this person to actually appear qualified. It was patently obvious that they just wrote down whatever he said – even the things that were redundant, and a bit rambling. They did not help him actually present his information in a way that would help him qualify for the grant. The information presented is in fact completely unsuitable, because there is nothing in it which even outlines a viable business concept. It is completely unoriginal, and the business, as outlined, would have no chance of succeeding.

This company is NOT a professional grant writing company! They lack the most basic skills in presenting grant application information in a way that will help an applicant actually GET an award. They take money while representing themselves as such, but the kind of work they did on this grant application suggests that they are not concerned about whether you actually get the grant. They do not appear to be concerned about learning what the requirements of the grant are – no one from their company has so much as ASKED us for any of the judging criteria (and a good grant writer would do that), and they clearly did NOT read the available information about our grant requirements, or they would have done a better job.

A real grant writer looks at many factors – the grant requirements, the likely judging criteria, the competition level for the grant, and the best way to present the information given so that it meets those requirements. They will recommend wording things in a way that presents them in their best light. They will outline the value and feasibility of a proposed project, and they will detail the greater good of the project.

There was no effort whatever in this application toward actually helping this person GET the grant. The job they did could have been done better by a high school student.

The information I am presenting here is documented, and can be legally proven in a court of law. I am not committing libel – I can prove what I say. We have the applications, we have the witnesses.

• Avoid this company, and all of their affiliations.
• Do not EVER pay more than the cost of an average priced book for ANY kind of grant listings. And be careful even with those!
• If you can afford to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for grant information, you can afford to bootstrap a business. It does not take much to do so, as long as you are willing to work and be creative.

I am sorry to have to write this. I’m sick of having to explain to people the reality of grants – and seeing a company like this just makes me ill. It will eventually catch up with them – you can’t do this much harm over and over without it eventually coming back at you.

Right now I’m torn – I can seek legal help in making these people stop using our grant in their listings. But if we do that, we lose the ability to build a potential case against them. We also lose our ability to advise the people they are harming on what possible redress they might seek. So I haven’t yet decided exactly what to do, other than publishing what I know, and sounding warnings far and near.

If any legal entity or reporter wishes to pursue this, we will cooperate fully, but we will not release applications, or contact names without permission of the applicants, or a court order, pursuant to our privacy terms.

A prospective client asked me that yesterday. I said no… Our price is $25.

Sometimes I say yes. This time I didn’t.

He then said, “Some other companies say they can do maintenance and hosting for $20.”

I replied, “They cannot do for $20 what we do for $25, and we cannot do this for $20.”

Sometimes I come down in price – we sometimes have a little wiggle room, we sometimes are able to negotiate with a client to reduce services that they do not need as much, or we sometimes can see that a particular job will be worth doing and will pay us back if we come down on one price.

But this time I could not. This particular service is already stretched to be able to offer it at $25 per month. And it offers a ton of value. To come down would mean running into problems as we overstretched ourselves.

I have always had the confidence to say no when I knew I could not come down on a price. But this is one of the first times I have been able to boldly say that the value made it worth it – and it honestly does make it worth it. That felt good. I recommend trying it!

If you have thought out your prices, and there is wiggle room, there is nothing wrong with negotiating. If there isn’t though, sometimes you just can’t do it. When you can’t, it is easier to be bold when you know your prices are worth the value.

If you are destitute and have more time than money, you have nothing to lose by coming down even when you know it is worth more (and sometimes we do so for reasons of kindness – when we choose to help someone out). But if you are in a position where doing so will cost you over time, it isn’t wise to do so, especially in situations where the client can probably afford it if they understand the value.

About a week ago an overseas outsourcing company contacted me through a venue that I frequent. Since I was looking for a coder for a specific database conversion project, I asked them for a quote – they had told me that it could be done for $10 per hour. I send them the two databases, along with instructions about what needed to be done. I knew it would take me about 5-6 hours to do it. It was not work I liked doing, so I was interested in outsourcing it.

Their quote came back for 24 hours of work, at $360. Hmmm. That isn’t $10 per hour…. And it is more than triple the maximum amount of time that I’d allote to the project.

I then contacted a regional coder – she charges $85 per hour. Ouch! That is a LOT compared to $10 per hour! Or even $15!

But, she could do the work in 2-3 hours. Hmmm…. $170 to $255, instead of $360! Which one is the real bargain? Especially when you consider language, cultural, time zone, and legal recourse limitations.

Even when you are comparing local with local, hourly rates are just NOT a reasonable basis of comparison. The best way to judge, is to ask for a list of included services, and a flat rate, or at least a firm estimate. Any experienced professional can give that, and a newbie can still offer reasonable guarantees that it won’t go over a certain amount.

Often, higher hourly rates pay for the following:

1. Reduced legal recourse risk. It is easier to recover from people who are within the same country as you, or who are in a country that has reciprocal agreements with your country.

2. Easier communication – time zones, language and cultural differences, or inexperience on the part of the technician in communicating with clients can all cause communication barriers, which equate to lost time or poorly done work.

3. Better tools – Better tools mean better quality output, and faster work speeds. The right tools can shave hours off many kinds of tasks, so hourly rates become meaningless when you are trying to compare the cost of one service that is done manually, and one that is done with better tools to do it more efficiently.

4. More experience – this means both faster output speeds, AND better quality. But it also means that an experienced professional has knowledge of “gotchas” that might bite you if you work with someone who is less experienced. For example, in our industry, there are certain things that municipalities or non-profits of certain types have to do with their sites, or which they cannot do on their sites, which are different than the standards required by small businesses. Experience protects those entities from potential lawsuits.

5. More Accurate Applicable Charges – One company may charge for research time, if they lack experience in a certain area, another may not. One company may charge for negotiation time, another may not.

6. Less Lost Time – Higher quality and accuracy can be worth paying a higher hourly rate for, because it saves you in the long run. If a lower hourly rate means work has to be redone, it costs you even if you don’t have to pay for it directly.

7. Attention to Different Kinds of Details – Often higher hourly rates are charged for higher risk projects because there are more details to attend to. Simple projects do not require this, but complex ones may. Often, as a business grows, so do their risks, so a service level that was appropriate for a startup may not be appropriate for a larger faster growing business. Higher risks almost always mean higher hourly rates, but they also result in more protection for the client.

There are MANY good companies who charge low rates. There are MANY new businseses and service providers who can do a very good job at a fair price. This is not in any way a condemnation of lower priced companies.

Rather, it is an encouragement to actually compare the REAL price, and the REAL VALUE rather than making a knee-jerk reaction based on the appearance of price, by using a number which is actually meaningless.

It would be like saying “A car that gets 35 MPG is better than a car that gets 12 MPG” without comparing anything else, like the reliability of the car, the size, the intended purpose, or even the side the steering wheel was located on!

Judge price and value based on factors that really matter, and you’ll find that what appears to be the lower price, often isn’t!

Who spends $3000 to get information on getting grants, but will not invest that much into their business instead?

We’ve been getting grant applications lately from people who are TOTALLY unprepared to operate a business, and completely uncommitted to their business! How do we know? Because they have NOT done what is OBVIOUS to even TRY to start their business!

Instead, they have come to our website, filled out our grant application, and tried to persuade us that they are deserving of a business grant, when they have not done anything to even start their business. Not all of our applicants, but many of them.

Here is the reason I am so frustrated over this:

They are not even READING what the grant IS!

We are getting people who are asking for MONEY, even though our site clearly says, in many places, NO MONEY IS AWARDED.

Most of them do NOT need a website! Don’t even WANT a website, but since they did not read the grant information, they are clueless about what they are even applying for!

So these people, who want an offline business, which they could bootstrap if they were smart about it, are sitting there talking about their dream, applying for grants so someone else will give them their business. Most of them could get started if they’d just start doing something. Start small. Start bit by bit and work toward it. Do SOMETHING productive other than just running around looking for someone to fund it for you.

The great irony is that some of them have PAID MONEY (often a GREAT DEAL of money) for information on getting grants. In some cases, it was enough money that they could have started their business if they had been smart about what they spent it on.

It is peculiar to me that they will spend money on a supposed shortcut, but they will not spend the same amount of money on a more sure way of doing it.

So I’m puzzled at human nature today. If you just stick your hand out and expect it to be filled, no one will ever consider you to be deserving. You’ve gotta do what you are capable of doing. I am going to have to find a polite way of communicating to these people that they got taken on the grant information, and help them to understand what it takes to REALLY have a business.

‘Cause I ain’t going to hand you money. And I’m only gonna hand you a website if you’ve worked hard already and can indicate to me that you will actually do something worthwhile with it.

There is some misunderstanding of this concept. Recently I have heard two people condemn the phrase, one calling it “silly”, another calling it “dangerous”. These people will never be innovators or true entrepreneurs, because they have completely missed the point, and changed the meaning from what it really is.

When you think outside the box, it does not mean you do not apply common sense, or that you do not abide by necessary limitations that affect safety or legality.

It simply means that you do not let preconceived ideas, or the “rules” imposed by other people, which do NOT apply, constrain you from thinking creatively.

We do that… We assume that because 90% of people in the US send their kids to public school, and because we have done it that way for generations, that somehow it must be better. We assume that if the SBA teaches people to start a business and tells them that they have to have heaps of money to do it, and that they must have a business plan that conforms to bank requirements in order to get that funding, that this is how it must be done. We think that if we have been taught to do things a certain way, that we must do it that way, even when that way may not make sense for our particular situation.

Innovators and true entrepreneurs are not held back by limitations that do NOT affect safety or legality. They are able to see beyond the preconceived ideas and methods that others are constrained by.

In the web world, things are done on an enterprise scale, and taught for that scale, and nobody ever really stops to think that they simply do not scale well for small business, or how different the needs might be. They assume that you must do this, you must do that, and if you do not, that your website won’t perform. They do not stop to think that on a micro-scale, the things they require won’t make ANY difference at all, but will increase costs, and that perhaps they should be done at a later time when it WILL matter. Our “out of the box” thinking was to simply analyze those factors, and make decisions based on reality instead of assumption or dogma.

That is all it means to Think Outside the Box. To approach things from a new direction, and to consider new ideas in a productive way.

If you intend to go somewhere new, you can’t do it by following other people. You take the wisdom of others and learn from it, then you formulate a new plan that still fits the wisdom, but which does not incorporate the ideas that do not apply just because everyone else does it that way. If you want to LEAD, you have to get out ahead and try something nobody else is doing. If you want to succeed at it, you cannot compromise known safety or legality factors, the things you risk are just yourself.

It isn’t silly, and it isn’t dangerous. It is bold, and the path to true success.