Marketing and Online Privacy

Sometimes it is the responsibility of the blogger to calm fears and address concerns in his or her area of expertise.  In the spirit of addressing fears, I want to talk about something many of you have told me privately lately.  You are more concerned now than ever about your privacy online.

A first level of privacy concerns are with large institutional companies.  This manifests itself with a fear to give your personal information to sites like ebay and paypal.  On this note, please hear me out.  That is crazy.  Your personal information is safer with paypal than it is with your bank, or the IRS for that matter.  The online companies that have been around for years have worked hard to make sure they are keeping up a good business model and they work diligently to keep private what should be private.  So if it is a large financial or sales company – go for it.

A second area of privacy concerns are affiliate companies and drop shippers.  Depending upon how you do business, you will work with one or both of these types of companies.  Drop shippers help you by selling things to you at wholesale prices and then shipping them to your customers.  You can read all about worldwide brands if you want.  Affiliates give you links to place on your site, and then pay you a commission depending upon the referrals you send them.

Both drop shippers and affiliate companies will require a Tax ID, home address, phone number – pretty much everything they need to steal your identity.  The Affiliate Sources I list are all reputable companies.  Most you will find anywhere are, now it’s true that any thief could pretend to be an affiliate and steal your information, so check into who you are giving your personal information to.  But if they have been around for more than a couple years, and represent well known businesses – you should be able to trust them.

Finally, the issue of social networking.  This is actually the one I hear the most about. People often tell me that they don’t want the whole world knowing what they are doing.  So sites like twitter and facebook frighten them.  This is the one you just have to get past.

I used to live in a small town.  I had a friend who told me he took a girl out for a nice dinner and a movie, then dropped her off and went home.  By the time he got home everyone in town had heard a complete fabrication of the date and were asking all sorts of inappropriate questions.

Lies abound in every realm.  People will get in your business every chance they get, and they will always try to deceive and manipulate you.  I have seen more than my share of dirty social networkers hurting each other.  Face it – it happens.  Human’s are messed up and you will get hurt whenever you interact with them.

On the flip side, when you have a network, you also have a lot of people who know you and they will defend you.  They will fight for you (and you for them) and most importantly this network will help you to promote yourself and your websites across a variety of arenas.

You are never safe from people.  But why not take your chances and build a network to mutually benefit yourself and your network?

So get over and go tweet it!

And keep subscribe to have all your fears addressed!

More on this topic

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• 101 Pages to Wordpress Affiliate Marketing Success
• Social Networking 101 – a new Social Networking Site
• A Book Review for Serious Entrepreneurs
• Five reasons you probably don’t need a Computer

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