So how about you? Are guilty of sending out e-mail to people who did not specifically request to receive offers from you or about a business that you represent? If you go around looking for e-mail addresses to harvest for your own purposes, you are guilty of sending SPAM. Instead, post your offers on your web site and market them legitimately. It’s right thing to do. When people fill out your form, they are giving you permission to send them information. Keep a record so you can defend yourself if they ever forget what they did.

If you are on receiving end of unsolicited offers, go ahead and report them as spam. Don’t feel guilty; you are not guilty party. Just make sure you really didn’t sign up for a newsletter or something and then forgot! It is sooooooooooooooo not cool to report spam that really isn’t!

I live in a part of USA where there is a large military presence. Near one base in particular were located numerous fast food restaurants. I mean, talk about a gold mine! Young soldiers, mostly guys with huge appetites, plus families with small kids and it just seemed like an ideal combination. But soldiers got sent to war and many of families went “home” where there was moral support during a stressful time and customer base was gone just like that. Many of formerly prosperous fast food places went out of business. Don’t put all of your eggs into one basket.

Remember dot com era? People invested in dot com companies, got amazingly high paying jobs at dot com companies, and bought great big beautiful houses and cars with money they made from those dot com companies. When everything collapsed, those people found themselves making and selling coffee at Starbucks, living back at home with mom and dad, and trying to finish making payments on those cars that now are a chore to keep running. Don’t put all of your eggs into one basket.

As I wander around internet, I have run into more and more people who had been making decent money with one affiliate or marketing program or another, both online and offline. Then for whatever reason program changed it’s compensation schedule and these people are left hanging out to dry. If this was all they had going for them, they were hurt big time. Only those who had other sources of income were able to make adjustments and keep going. Don’t put all of your eggs into one basket.

Many people spend an inordinate amount of time, effort, energy and money optimizing their website(s) for Google. They listen to this or that guru, buy this or that software, and do whatever it takes to get their site to number one on first page for whatever search terms they are trying to target. As long as their methods are ethical, there is nothing wrong with doing this because they are earning an honest living with their marketing efforts. It only becomes a problem when Google changes rules. And sooner or later, Google WILL change rules. The internet is a very dynamic place and nothing stays same for very long. See http://www.123iwork4me.com/article196.html and http://www.123iwork4me.com/article29.html. If people to whom this happens have all of their eggs in that one Google-basket, they will have just had rug pulled out from under their feet and will have gone from top dog to junk-yard dog in no time at all. If they have multiple sites using different marketing techniques promoting different programs and opportunities, they will be able to re-group and re-coup, recover and survive. You know what’s coming next. Don’t put all of your eggs into one basket.