Violations are not determined by the size of your company. And, when they contact you it’s not for a citation or for negotiations, it’s because you’ve already been tagged for the violation.

What’s the fine? I know of 3 businesses that were fined one for $25,000, another for $85,000, and a third for $100,000. And the last one was simply for not obtaining verifiable parental consent prior to collecting personal information from children.

What’s the solution? I personally use and recommend Len Thurmond’s Auto Web Law.

It’s a simple piece of software that you download and use right away. You simply choose the form you want, fill in the blanks and click “Get Document”.  Instantly, you have document you need for your website. Then you just cut and paste the text when you need it.

Here’s a screen shot of how it works:

For a closer look at Auto Web Law, click here.  They have 2 options:

1) Auto Web Law Pro – Has almost 70 documents. This is not a blanket legal forms software. This is for website owners and is being constantly updated as new laws regarding the internet come into effect.  (THIS IS THE ESSENTIAL PACKAGE)

2) Auto Web Law Pro + IPPP Intellectual Property Protection Plan – Includes legal forms to notify those who are stealing content from your website or digital books.  (THIS IS FOR ULTIMATE PROTECTION)

Both include Privacy Policies and Terms of Use forms.
Again this is exactly what I personally use to legally protect my websites.
If you don’t have it, get it.
Visit the Auto Web Law website HERE.

What would you pay for a list like that?

You can get one for FREE. How?

I’ll give you 3 words: AWeber, Facebook, Twitter

More at my workshop on Wed, Feb 17th 5:30-7:30pm in Honolulu, HI.
Get info and register online here.

Most entrepreneurs and small business owners quickly come to the realization that they need to a website. Here’s how the process goes. And, hey, I’ve been through this cycle myself so if this describes you, I’ve been there myself.

I love stories! Let’s take an entrepreneur named Jane, and follow her through her search for an aggressive online presence. Jane is an accountant with her own small business and has decided she needs a website.

First, Jane goes to all the do-it-yourself website creation companies out there where you pay anywhere from $10-$60 per month to create a website for your company with pre-built templates. She signs up for an account and starts shuffling through the templates, and picks out nice one with a blue background and a picture of an office building at the top of the page. It doesn’t really represent her business and she can’t put her logo on the page but she feels it’s good enough.

Jane spends all of her spare time for the next week and a half trying to learn how the template builder works and trying to get her website to look just how she wants it. On day 10, she’s run out of patience and decides to leave it how it is and hope for the best. She’s a little hesitant to send prospects to the site because it’s kind of home-made looking and doesn’t really represent her business but she does it anyway.

After a couple weeks, Jane’s business has been stagnant, and she’s thinking it’s because she’s sending her prospects to a cookie cutter website that looks like everyone else’s home-made cookie cutter website. So, she starts to look at other do-it-yourself website creation companies to see if there are better templates out there. . . maybe the $19/month company has better templates than the $10/month company. So, she makes the switch. . . and goes through the same cycle of choosing, learning how it works, and trying to customize it with no results.

It’s at this point that Jane starts thinking that maybe she should look into getting a custom site done. So she talks to some web designers and asks the question, “What web design software do you use?”. Well, from her previous two experiences with building websites, Jane thinks that professional web design software will build her a professional website.

So, Jane buys the same web design software that the pros use. It’s kind of expensive but she figures it’ll be worth it. Well, after downloading the software for 4 hours, she installs in on her computer. Then, after opening up the software, her face goes white as she quickly realizes that the software is not going to build the site for her. In fact, it occurs to her that asking a web designer what software he or she uses is like asking a car mechanic what tools he uses, buying them, and hoping the tools will fix the car for her.

Now, she has decision to make. Does she spend the next couple months learning how to use the software and basically learn to be a web designer while her accounting business suffers? Or, does she hire someone to just build a professional site for her?

Jane goes on Craigslist, asks friends, and family members, and starts looking for the cheapest web designer she can find. After all, she just spent all her money trying the home-made site services, and buying the expensive web design software, plus her business has been suffering from the time she’s been taking to sort out the website. So she finds the discount web guy who says he’ll do her site for $199 and make it perfect. Well, unknown to Jane, the $199 web guy is a college student that build his brother-in-law a website for his tree cutting service once and that’s about it. So the cheap web guy builds Jane a site that looks almost as good as the do-it-yourself website she had build herself months ago. She bites the bullet and pays the guy.

Well, now she’s back where she started. She now has a homemade looking website, expensive software she’ll never use, a dragging business that she hasn’t been giving proper attention to, and a big fat headache. Now, Jane has a decision to make. Should she hire a trusted professional to build her site exactly how she envisions it or keep her “new” website that looks like it was built in 1992?

As humorous as it may seem, believe it or not, this is a very real and very common scenario my friends.

Had Jane, simply hired the right person to build her site from the beginning, she probably would have had her site live online in about a week with no problems. She would have saved about $1700 on website creation software, do-it-yourself trials, and bottles of ibuprofen. And who know how much money she lost by minding her website instead of her business. Had she hired the right person, her site would have been clean and professional right from the start and she would have been able to confidently send her prospective clients to her website for information.

Wow! What an adventure!

So the moral of the story is. . . before you launch a new website or get an old one upgraded, talk it over with a professional web designer that you can trust. A good web designer will be able to take care of your needs a let you know know what your best options are within your budget regardless of whether or not he or she gets your business.

I know, I know. . . you still want to know what web design software I use don’t you?

Well here it is:

And, of course, there’s no way I could end this post without a plug for my web design and SEO company: Integrity Online Marketing – a Honolulu web design company

Peace.

A few months ago, I checked my credit with Equifax and boy was I surprised to see some things on my credit report. I was gong to check my score just once but now I check my credit report a few times every month. What will you find on there? Every credit line you’ve ever opened or that someone else has opened for you. All your credit lines and approximate balances, which accounts are open or closed, your credit score, and explanations of why things are scored as they are and who has reported to the credit bureau about you. It’s great and Equifax made their interface easy to navigate.

When I was looking for the right company to check my credit with, I went website to website looking for the one that I felt I could trust with my personal information. I ended up with Equifax. Their website is clean and professional. They have interactive elements with a virtual assistant and when you look at the homepage, the big red “Get Started” button tells you what to do.

I’m definitely impressed that they have a link to their Facebook page. Sometimes it takes big companies like this years and years to start something like a Facebook page.

What would I change about this website? Well, in my opinion, they’re killing themselves by not collecting names and email addresses. There’s no credit help newsletter to subscribe to. People are coming to their website and leaving without leaving any contact information. If they get a name and email collecting optin box on that homepage, I don’t doubt for a second that their sales will quickly multiply.

In a nutshell, this is what I use it for. With Xobni I can quickly search through my thousands of emails extremely fast to find conversations I’ve had with friends and clients. Also, when I read an email, the software automatically searches through Facebook and LinkedIn to find out if the name or email address matches any accounts on those sites. It makes sorting emails and connecting with people a breeze.

I believe it also can be used with regular Gmail and some other email providers.

You can download it at www.xobni.com. Enjoy!

How? With some great software you probably already have on your computer or that you can get for free. Most computers have Microsoft Outlook pre-installed so all you have to do is plug in your information and use it. One of the features of Outlook is email management. If you don’t have Outlook or prefer to use something else, a free piece of software called Thunderbird 2 is a popular solution. Both are great solutions to email organization. 

What does this software do exactly? It check and downloads emails from all of your email accounts to your computer either automatically every “x” minutes or at the click of one button. With the click of a button you’ll know if you’ve received emails to any of those accounts in about 20 seconds or less. And, what’s even greater about the software is that you can reply to all the emails using the same piece of software!

No more opening browser window after browser window to check all of your email accounts and reply to them. 

You can also set up the software to run while you do your work, and when an email comes in from any of your accounts, the software will notify you either with a little pop-up window or an audible alert. It’s incredibly efficient.  

So, stop wasting your valuable time logging in and logging out managing multiple email accounts and get your computer to do it for you. Here’s where you can download Thunderbird 2 http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/