This was sure an interesting scenario. I received a phone call from a gentlemen that was all the way from Ontario as he was notified by some of his site visitors that his web site hosting service was suspended for some reason. The company that he was dealing with happened to reside here in BC and so he had been trying virtually every way to get a hold of them with no luck.

The amazing thing was apparently he contacted a lot of other people who tried to help him as much as possible too and before contacting me they found out that the company’s corporate mailing address was simply one of those UPS mailboxes. Phoning didn’t help either as the message would always say that the person’s mailbox was full and could not receive any new messages.

So initially the person simply left his name and number and I did end up calling him back to learn the story. It’s funny too as he just said he got hold of my business phone number by doing various searches and drew a big circle around it on his notes as the person that could help him. Strangely enough, I didn’t even have any affiliation with the company in question but were aware of them.

It actually cost me money to help him so far as I had to talk to him long distance as well as taking a bit of time to see what I can do, but it’s always good to help people whenever you can as long as the request isn’t unreasonable or in a demanding fashion even if they aren’t your customer. I personally hate it when you say walk into a store to ask for help only to have the company/staff give you a blunt “no purchase no service” type of attitude.

To make this situation even more awkward, I found out that the company had what seemed like over 200 different websites that pretty much sold the same thing except they were all branded differently with various names to try and capture different markets. The person sounded sincere though and so hopefully I can help him get his site back up assuming the original provider didn’t simply delete all of his site files.

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I was checking my e-mail and got this document from Forbes which was basically an official press release for the business and finance blog network. I have been getting requests from people who were wondering what was going on too, so here is the press release:

NEW YORK, NY (March 24, 2008) – Today Forbes.com, home page for the world’s business leaders, announced the creation of a Business and Finance Blog Network, comprised of a community of pre-screened, influential business and financial blogs.

The Blog Network’s content will focus on senior business decision makers and high-net-worth investors. Topics will be relevant to the banking, trading, hedge fund management, affluent investing, and senior business decision-making communities. Participation in the network is by invitation only, and all blogs are vetted by Forbes.com editors for appropriate content, and to ensure that they are in keeping with the Forbes editorial brand.

The network will allow advertisers to target a highly engaged, exclusive niche audience of senior business decision makers and affluent investors easily and effectively. Four hundred-plus blogs have already joined the network, with many more expected to sign on before the official launch in the next few weeks.

“There is no denying the growing importance and influence of blogs within the media landscape,” said Forbes.com President and Chief Executive Officer Jim Spanfeller. “Forbes.com can ensure advertisers are reaching a hard-to-find and very desirable audience within safe, well-lit environments by exclusively inviting ‘best of breed’ business and investing bloggers to our new Business and Finance Blog Network.”

Nick Ricci has been appointed General Manager, Sales. He will be responsible for overseeing the sales, marketing and promotion for the Blog Network as well as the Forbes Audience Network (FAN), which launched in November 2007. Nick joins Forbes.com from About.com, where he served as Senior Vice President, Sales and Ad Operations. He has also held senior sales management and marketing positions at Times Mirror Magazines, Cox Interactive Sales, and Hachette Filipacchi Media US. Nick is already in the process of hiring and building a dedicated network sales team.

“I’m thrilled that Nick has joined Forbes.com to oversee the sales efforts for the Blog Network,” added Spanfeller. “He is a seasoned executive with several years of sales and marketing experience who will play a key role in driving the network’s success.”

So according to this there are over 400 blogs in the beginning. Gonna be interesting to see how that pans out as that is sure a lot of blogs to choose from with a different variety of content.

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This is a continuation from that very strange e-mail request I posted last time in regards to a request I received to close down my blog for competitive commercial reasons. I have a clear idea of what went on after doing some research and thought it would be an interesting thing to blog about from a business perspective.

Earlier this month a person contacted me through this blog with the following message:

hi,
I need some small help from you regarding your blog. Please reply if you have received this message.

Thanks much!

As always, I like to help people whenever I can and sure enough I replied with a simple acknowledgment saying

Hi there,

What type of help do you need?

The person then responds with something that just left me dumbfounded which said the following:

Hi, Thanks for replying.

This is regarding www.al6400.com/blog/2008/01/28/princeton-premier/
This page comes up in top results when we search “princeton premier” in google.

Now, the princetonpremier.com guys posted an online project and I am working on that to do SEO and remove this type of results from google search. After so much of effort, I am still clueless. And they are not making the payment unless they see some result.

My request to you is please disable this blog of yours for 15 days or so. This will have some effect on the search results and I may receive my fees. You may re-enable this after that period.
Please let me know either-way. I am solely dependent on freelance projects like this and can not afford to lose payments.

Thanks much.

Shocked, I responded by saying

Hi there,

This has got to be some kind of joke correct? I am having a very hard time believing what I am reading here without some kind of authenticity verification about what you have written.

Just some quick background information for those who don’t know, I made a post about a questionable e-mail offer I received from that company which has garnered a lot of attention and considering people from that organization had a perfect opportunity to make their voices heard without bias, as it appeared that a representative of the company did make a reply initially, it just made this whole situation even more unbelievable.

I was thinking too on how even from a business perspective who goes up and asks say a competitor to shutdown for a few days? That’s like two stores competing with each other during the Christmas shopping season and asking if the owner could close his store down for awhile as they are getting too much exposure.

The guy was dead serious though and understandably he didn’t want to give out details. However, that didn’t stop me from getting to the bottom of this. After putting all the pieces together, everything pointed to the fact that the company was using some kind of outsourcing service to perform the service in question. It just so happens that I am very knowledgeable about that particular field/industry and it didn’t take me very long to find this request:

It appeared as if the company was actively seeking to hire people to push down sites such as my blog from showing up for certain keywords to avoid negative exposure of their business/product. This made me really wonder on why the organization didn’t simply reply to the concerns expressed by all those people that commented on that post instead as I’m sure this doesn’t exactly help their cause.

This incident in particular sure demonstrates the importance of making sure that you can do the job before making promises to do something huh? In this case too, it looked the buyer and the service provider didn’t do a thorough enough job in interviewing each other beforehand. So what would you do if you were running that business now?

I guess the traditional method would be that the company would come out and apologize to anyone who feels they were mislead in any way while offering people a refund if they wish to accept full responsibility of the negative publicity that has been generated. At the same time, they would then somehow publicly announce their efforts to correct things if warranted. Of course, this is assuming that they want to continue its operations.

Another thing that this incident made me think about is the power of social media nowadays where a simple opinion or perspective about an issue can manifest into something enormous. This was definitely one of those seeing something new everyday moments for me.

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Since it is a long weekend due to the Easter holiday, for most people that usually means time off away from work/business. At the same time, a lot of people actually want to work on these days as many companies throw out incentives for people to want to work.

For example, I know one person who works for a cable company which requires around the clock customer service. To encourage people to work on holidays they are willing to pay people two to three times as much the legal requirement. Sure enough, a lot of people are more than happy to do so as a result.

When I think about it, when I was younger I used to always want to work on holidays as it was a great way to save a lot of money and not to mention the work was usually easier since it wouldn’t be that busy due to people going on vacations. Whatever works for your lifestyle I suppose.

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Just a few days ago I started doing my monthly credit card charges to pay various vendors and as usual I try to take advantage of the monthly cut-off dates for transactions on my credit card to keep more money for myself such as earning more interest in a savings account.

What I mean by this is that credit cards have a billing cycle where if certain transactions do not get posted on your credit card by a certain time period of the month then the charged amount will be posted on your next month’s bill instead. Therefore, you get to keep the money in your bank still and won’t have to worry about it for more than 30 days later.

As an example, for myself any transactions that do not get posted to my credit card by the 16th of any given month won’t appear on the upcoming bill but rather the next one. So let’s take a phone bill that I receive monthly usually around the first to second week of the month. Like most bills, it indicates that payments need to be received by a certain date like say the 28th of the month or else you will incur a late penalty.

Now, if I just paid the bill right away with my credit card upon receiving the bill like say on the 12th of the month then that means I would need to withdraw my own money to pay for it in the upcoming billing cycle. Instead, because there is a rather good grace period for the bill I wait until the 17th of the month to pay the bill with my credit card. Therefore, it satisfies the vendor as they got paid on time and I don’t really have to withdraw money to pay for it until more than 30 days later.

One thing to keep in mind is that if you try this technique then it would be wise to make sure you pay the bill with at least two to three days before the actual due date of it as many times there is a delay in receiving your payment. If your due date was the 28th and you submit your payment on the 27th with your credit card there is a good chance that the vendor won’t receive it on time and hence you will incur penalties. This technique has worked very well for me personally and is another example on how a credit card can be a great tool if used responsibly.

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