And you know what? You are too. If you have ANY kind of internet marketing skills you are already a million miles ahead of those people out there that have no skills at all. Guess who doesn’t have enough time to learn those internet marketing skills, but would benefit most from them? Local small businesses.

If you are on my mailing list you will be following along with the story of my start-up company and my guinea pig clients. The first client has no internet presence at all, yet they have grand ideas and they have a market they need to crack. How are they going to attract customers beyond their Yellow Pages entry?

Kind of a no-brainer isn’t it?

Yet it is all voodoo magic to small business owners. Keywords? Niches? Statistics?Terrifying stuff!

Ok some of you are still going to be worried about your knowledge levels in these areas. That’s cool, I will be talking to you a little later about how you can still go out and start your own business as a local small business internet consultant. Remember if you even know what those words mean, then you are still a genius compared to to those small businesses.

Just for today, think about what you do know, instead of lamenting what you don’t.

I made a statement a little over 12 months ago about a business plan during the Thirty Day Challenge. A statement that caught the eye of Ed Dale who repeated it to everyone doing the Thirty Day Challenge. That statement went something like “I have this cool business model plan where I can build and sell websites (with attached affiliate continuity) using the 30DC”. This year’s 30DC built on that idea and people are selling the one or two sites they made. To ice the 30DC cake,  30DC inc is now openly BUYING websites, waving real cash…the fruit is hanging so low here, it’s dragging on the ground.

So have I been able to build and sell multiple websites ? NO. Why? Because I have tried to do it ALL by myself.

How is that passive? How is that moving towards the four hour work week model? How can I pick that low hanging fruit?

Get someone else to do it!

“Oh” you say disappointed “Outsourcing*. You know that’s really scary. I wouldn’t know where to start….”

I thought the same thing and I had real life experience with outsourcing. As part of my day job I spent a month in India training people to take over work from Australia. All went well, but as soon as I left and came back to Australia it was like everything that had been trained was forgotten. Even though all of the steps were documented, there was this massive problem with execution.

I initiated an investigation and found that the issue really was cultural rather than due to any misunderstanding.  Indian society is built on respect for authority, so much so that the expectation is that the manager (person next in the ladder of authority) will solve all issues by making a decision. If that person does not exist then things tend to grind to a halt. After I left, there was no one there to tell them what to do when X happened. Outsourcing is handing over everything and letting someone get on with it with no input from you. That clearly was not the case here. Don’t get me started on the 3 monthly staff churn either….

This experience put me off of out-tasking any of my web work, but also trapped me into only having a finite number of hours to fit everything in . Like everyone else in this world I only have 168 hours a week…not much is it? Especially if you have a day job like mine that eats 40 hours, plus sleeping time that is another 56 hours, plus family time etc etc…and then you have 4 hours a week left to build websites to sell. Logically I will never have enough time in my current situation to create and maintain enough websites to make an income from; which is why I haven’t been able to do it…until now.

So what has changed?

After listening to a podcast**that made mention of an outsourcing service that was being used by people like me, I was curious enough to go listen to the audio at Replace Myself. I was impressed enough to sign up “just to see what it was like”.  Twenty four hours later I was hiring my first employee.

Everything came together perfectly

• the skill set was right
• the work ethic was right
• the cultural norms were right
• the university education was right
• the price was MORE than right
• the English was right
• the fact people put “experienced using Market Samurai” in their resumes was right

My first employee, Angelica, is working her way through the 30DC as we speak. She sends me daily emails of what she has done (with screenshots!) and also adds her opinion on the philosophical and motivational training by Karl. She really wants to get to the writing part because she loves article writing and research. I am embarrassed to admit that for her 40 hours a week I am paying her a measly USD$35 during her probation period, that will go up to around $50 after three months.  Money that will be recouped in the first site sold, and with multiples being created, it’s gravy all the way after that.

I am so excited about this that I am prepared to write this blog post and risk being shouted at for one long infomercial. The thing is, you would be MAD not to do this. Totally insane. This is the REAL passive income making exercise that everyone strives for. Listen to the audio at Replace Myself and sign up if it is right for you.

* Most people use outsourcing when they really mean out-tasking.

**Small Business Big Marketing

Picture courtesy of Steve Punter

Found an fabulous online resource where you can (for a fee) get legal questions answered by UK lawyers.  I posed two questions to the service

Question

1. UK Copyright Law-
I purchased an ebook (written and published by someone in the UK) and reviewed the contents on a website
The ebook described amongst other things, a way of doing things online to achieve a claimed result. I repeated this process in my own words, in a slightly different order, with annotations as to my experience in performing the process as well as warnings and links to terms of service etc.
None of the ebook contents were copied.
The author of the ebook has made a DMCA complaint to my host who has suspended all of my websites. I have made a counter DMCA back because I do not believe I have infringed copyright at all because I have described a process, not copied any of the contents.

I have not claimed the process as my own.
I was fair minded in my description, being both positive and negative

Can you please advise me whether my thinking is correct.

Answer

The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 s30 allows you to review someone else’s work under fair dealing. You also acknowledged the author and never made any attempt to pass of the work as your own.

Also, from what you say, the ebook contained ideas on how things could be done. There is no copyright in an idea only the written expression of the idea. If you expressed that ideas differently, then you have not infringed copyright.

If you have any challenges with this and need an expert opinion, you can contact the Copyright Protection Agency Limited by clicking here: Send them an email with this question and they will give you the definitive answer, however, from what you have said above, you now have the definitive answer…I’m sure that they can give you a second opinion if you need it.

Question

2. Do I have grounds for defamation when someone posts comments on my blog such as “you are a liar, a downright dishonest cheat” ?

Answer

Such statements, if untrue, would certainly give grounds for an action for defamation.

——-

While the legal advice is probably not going to stop the negative comments I do hope they stay the defamatory ones. As for the copyright one, well I knew where I stood when I wrote it, but alas that hasn’t stopped the nuisance actions of others in causing my sites to be taken down (all of my sites on Blue Host are suspended).

Next step is to look at the financial loss from the frivolous DMCA claim and how that can be recovered.

If you have been over to the SWBN blog and seen a blog suspended notice, you might be wondering what is going on.  Yesterday the author of Twitter Rocket (TR) filed a DMCA (Copyright Infringement notice) with the domain host regarding the post titled “Twitter Rocket Spam Report“.

The standard procedure for the domain host when this happens is to take the site down for breaking the Terms of Service. If the person who has been reported, disagrees, then they make a  statement in a counter DCMA and the host brings the site back up and the complainant makes the decision whether to resort to the legal system.  If today was a week day the site would be back up and all would be as it was with the blog post still there. Alas the Gods of the Weekend have intervened and BlueHost’s legal department are off till Monday.

So until then, let’s look at the facts -

In the emails that went back and forth between us it was apparent the author, Ashley Morgan (AM), was not worried about negative reviews, he believed that the TR process itself was covered under copyright.  If I had published any of the words, typography, written instructions then he would have a point. But I didn’t.  I made a careful and thoughtful review of each of the steps using none of the published material. The numbering isn’t the same, the order isn’t the same; there are 5k words plus in that eBook and the only word I quote directly is “dramatically”.  In short, no leg to stand on (terrible pun there)

To further clarify, here is what the UK Copyright Service says about situations like this (AM is in the UK)

“How do copyrights differ from patents?

Patents apply to inventions or ideas, whilst copyright applies to written or recorded work.

In the example of a document detailing an invention or idea, the patent protects the concept, idea or invention itself whereas copyright would protect the written document. An infringement would occur if the written description was copied, whilst a patent would protect the idea being put into use. “

and further

Are ideas covered?

No, but dependent on what the idea is, i.e. an invention, it may be possible to apply for a patent…

Copyright does however protect the physical content of drawings, diagrams or plans for inventions but it cannot prevent the invention/idea from being used elsewhere. “

That is pretty clear, if I copied the words and description I would be in trouble with copyright law. If the process or concept had been patented and I was trying to sell it or pass it off as my own, then I would be in trouble with patent law.  There is no issue with copyright and the author has made no mention of patent so my assumption is there isn’t one (not even sure if you can patent a process like this anyway).

AM mentioned in one of his emails to me that what I was doing was revealing the recipe for KFC chicken; fyi recipes cannot be copyrighted OR patented. You can however create a Trade Secret, which KFC chicken is, and enforce it with a non-disclosure agreement for all who come in contact with it.  Still there isn’t any such agreement included with this matter.

The Other Stuff

There are a few interesting (well I find it interesting) points about all of this. The first point is I am totally flabbergasted that AM would even get upset at all after his own “expose” of a Twitter follower method.

Quote

Always eager to burst the bubble of scam programs like Brute Force Twitter I’m going to share with you the contents of the program. Before any lawyers, or pretend lawyers, get all frustrated and squirm in their ill fitting suits, I’m only going to share with you what I have learned from reading the ebook and watching the videos. I’m not going to copy and paste the Brute Force Twitter method, I’m simply going to tell you honestly what I learned from it and how it works. Of course, this means I’m going to reveal all the big secrets, like the piece of computer equipment that everyone has that makes getting Twitter followers much easier.

And then he goes on to describe it…. so it’s OK for him to do it to someone else, but not OK for it to happen to him. A harsher person would cry “hypocrisy”, I will just continue to be gobsmacked.  AM mentioned in email that he was OK to do that because he believed the other Twitter following scheme was a scam,  and what he proposes isn’t a scam. I’ll leave it up to my readers to make a call on that one.

Next are the product evangelists for AM. Awesome that he has generated such a enthusiastic and supporting following, but there is the issue with integrity and authenticity with one or more of the members. This won’t be AM’s fault unless he has given instructions to his followers to behave in a certain way. Example – the responses to the post by one of the followers appeared to be either trying to cover up the contents of the eBook, or didn’t know the contents themselves. They were adamant that I did not know the contents and that I was guessing. Of course AM wouldn’t go to such lengths to put in a DMCA if I had “guessed” the contents, so I do wonder where that follower gets their strange ideas from.

AM also asserted in the email exchange that I did this purely for traffic. Have to say an absolute unequivocal No to that one. I really try with every post I write, to answer a question or issue, a person in small business has, or may have. Several people had asked what my verdict was on this product as the TR contents are not available for perusal before purchase (if anything is scam-like, that little gem is it). I even offered advice to AM about how he could make the product better so it would work for small business people in the comments of our blog, and queried why he was selling so CHEAPLY life-time support (do NOT sell your self for life for a one time payment $97).  I tried to point out this is an opportunity. Maybe he will think so too in the future, it could be the win-win that he mentions when discussing creating syndicates.

Lastly I will admit I am annoyed at myself for wasting a lot of productive time writing this post and the other. As you know my recent mantra is, will this activity lead to making me money? Well yes it probably could, but definitely not in the way I want to.  When I create content I don’t want it to be a dead end, a statement and nothing else. I should have also pointed out how others can make similar products and pulled apart the marketing methods so others could incorporate them (not just advice for the author).  I will do so next time.