I may have lost a client to an unscrupulous “black hat” SEO firm using trickery and linking schemes to inflate results for near term. But for long term, these issues as well as many others I run into are simply not in my character to cater to when I know what is right ­ and I won't.

You know you’re too ethical when:

=> You give your clients details and real-world view of what is required to achieve online success ­ whether it is what they prefer to hear or not.

=> You do not minimize what is involved in efforts, time or cost to reach their goals.

=> You are clear and realistic about your own skill set and only offer services you excel at.

=> You provide referrals to other juried businesses whose expertise is outside your realm of experience.

=> You charge a fair price for your offerings reflecting quality of product/service offered.

=> You point out to clients in detail when their goals are unrealistic and why.

=> You don’t hide your product's actual cost in other “fees”.

=> You have your terms, policies or modus operandi available online for client review 24/7 and you back them up.

=> You back up your work, offering refunds when necessary and don’t charge to remedy oversights or errors on your part.

=> You do not buckle to clients or customers who demand you deviate from what you know is right just to get their business. => You don’t e-mail anyone without their explicit permission to do so - period!

My business is all about ethics and integrity in an industry of hype and misinformation. I've not signed every potential client that has come my way, but that is O.K. I know that for those who are smarties and hire me that they made right choice for all right reasons ­ not because I was willing to compromise my ethics, cut corners or break rules just so either of us could make a buck. In long term, we both succeed.

It’s so nice to be able to look at my cute little face in mirror each day when I go home. For those who haven't been able to do that lately, add a dose of integrity to your life ­ you might find honesty refreshing and actually fre*eing compared to sinister deception for commercial gain.

"Never give in! Never give in! Never, never, never. Never -- in anything great or small, large or petty -- never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense." ~ Winston Churchill

If you were able to face things in your organization without flinching or avoiding, if you were able to make tough decisions and knew you were at least 51% correct in those decisions, if you were able to get others to get work done and enforce compliance to your orders, you would find you would become significantly more successful and you would sleep better at night.

What do I mean by that? Let’s say you are looking at trying to solve a problem and you work out solution. But solution, however simple, is difficult to face. Perhaps it requires determination of a staff member. Perhaps it requires changing how you have always done things. Perhaps it has possibility of upsetting someone. So you choose to do something else. Something less right, or something more wrong. And when it doesn’t turn out exactly way you want it to, you look at this and although you might feel frustrated, you apathetically write it off as experience.

But if you have ability to face it, if you have ability to tell that staff member something that you know might initially upset him/her and in end gain agreement of staff member that it is right thing to do, you find that stress associated with not facing something, is significantly higher than just facing it.

Have you ever lain awake at night trying to figure out how you were going to handle a particular staff situation?

Perhaps you have someone who is basically causing trouble whenever you are out of office for a day or two. You find you are always calling in to check on this staff member to see if he or she is causing any difficulties or problems for others in your absence. You think about this person all of time. Basically you know you should fire this staff member, but you lack courage to do it. Your group is looking to you to handle it. You lie in bed at night and think it through and what you dream up is something way more difficult to handle than just walking in and telling Joe that he needs to knock it off or he is gone.

You should be a leader – just implement what you know needs to be done and ensure that it gets done. That should be you. You know what to do. You know how to handle things. Your staff is counting on you. Can you do it without losing sleep? Maybe not at first, but when you do and see how easy it actually is you’ll “sleep like a baby”!