How to Lose $4,000 in a Day by Blogging

This is not a step-by-step guide to losing money, that would be counterproductive. Instead, I will give a brief horror story and then give you a few things to do to be sure not to fall into the same predicament.

Today, my family and I lost a website that brought in $4,000 in sales. My girlfriend, with whom I share a home with along with my son, is an independent consultant with a popular adult toy party company. I was also her Internet marketing consultant. Yesterday we get an email from the corporate office stating that our blog is not within guidelines.

Let’s back up to October of 2008. This was about a year after she became a consultant for this company. We both decided that I should plan, create, and edit a blog for her fairly new business venture. Being that I’m a professional Internet marketer and blogger, how could we go wrong?

I did the proper research to be sure that our blog was adhering to company policies and within guidelines. We were, according to the company published documentation.

Within a month of launching the blog our sales were at $1,000. Within 4 months, $3,000. The next month, we cleared $4,000.  By now, this blog is paying the bills, but guess what happens next. Sabotage. Someone, some bitch, alerted corporate to our blog and how successful it was in the search engines. Imagine that, someone complaining about your success.

Let me make this simple to understand. I’m an SEO and a blogger. My job is to sit in front of this computer, optimize websites and create content for our blogs. I spent literally hundreds of hours on my girlfriends team blog. Creation, optimizing, redesigning, photoshoping, tweaking, and then more of each.

Because some jealous asshole can’t duplicate our success, they decide to “tell” on us. I say “tell”, because we were within company guidelines. Nevertheless, this saboteur has forced a corporate eye on us.

For the next few weeks we are relentlessly nit-picked by a corporate adherent who is completely unfamiliar with the ever changing Internet marketing industry. To keep it short, I had to shut down an authority blog and move it to a free wordpress blog over at wordpress.com, because that would keep us in compliance. Fine, 3 weeks later it’s done. Yeah, it took 3 weeks.

After the move was completed, I emailed the Adherent so that the new blog could be reviewed. Guess what? It was Good!

Yesterday, we get an email stating that the same blog was out of compliance. 5 to 10 emails, and 2 conference calls later, we end up losing this blog too.

The future of Multi-Level Marketing, Home Based Businesses, and Independent Consulting companies lies on the Internet. The ignorance of the ill-informed “executives” that are running these huge companies astounds me. The big picture is to make money. Not only did we lose that income, but the company did too.

What to Do to Avoid This Situation

1. Find out who decides your fate when building a blog or website that represents your company.

2. READ and RE-READ your company policies and guidelines for creating blogs and websites.

3. Realize that even though you are within guidelines, the Adherent has the last word.

4. Log calls and emails that you have established so that you can refer to them in the case that the Adherent changes his/her mind.

5. Send a draft of each post or page to the Adherent so that they can review it and ok it.

Yeah, I’m a little more than pissed. I just had to flip a $4,000 switch that took me many hundreds of hours to turn on just because someone at corporate can’t properly define blogging, SEO, or search marketing.

I am NOT a consultant of the company described above. I woman that I’ve worked with, is. She has no control over what I write on this blog, therefore, cannot be responsible for what is written here. Due to her companys overly stringent Internet policies, I’m no longer her marketing consultant.