Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

The Danger of Defending Yourself
How much time do you spend trying to make sure you don't get ripped off?

So many questions that people ask about promoting their businesses revolve around how to defend themselves. "How can I make sure that no one steals my content?" "How can I make sure that no one cheats me on reciprocal link exchanges?"

I'll admit, I've spent a lot—too much—time worrying about those exact same things and pouring hours into searching for those ripoff artists who try to take advantage of other webmasters. But the fact is that you find very few of them.

Sure, there's the occasional idiot who thinks that they only way to get ahead is to take advantage of someone else. But most of the time, the ripoffs that we worry about never happen.

The danger of spending a lot of time worrying about these things and trying to head them off is that it's time spent adding absolutely nothing to your business's growth. That four hours you spend searching for people plagarizing your work or cheating you on a reciprocal link could be spent doing promotional work that actually builds your traffic and your sales.

And what's even sadder, when we get all wrapped up in the ways that others might rip us off, we often hold back on things that could benefit us. We hold off on writing that ebook that we can sell because we fear the stray user who might give it out for free to someone else. Or we hold off on submitting articles to the article directories out of fear that someone might use our articles without including the link back to our site.

Idiots happen. But that shouldn't prevent us from moving forward with our business. Stay aware of how your work is used, but don't obsess over it. You can gain a lot more by spending your time on promoting your business than you can save by incessantly playing detective over it.
Jeff