Don’t Put Your Ego Above Your Productivity

by Daniel Scocco

As soon as your website starts growing I am sure you’ll start receiving all sorts of crazy emails. There will be people claiming you are dumb and that your content sucks. People asking really stupid questions that could be solved with a quick Google search. People confusing you with someone else and so on.

What should you do in those situations?

If you listen to your ego, you’ll certainly want to answer. That is what I used to do as well. For example, I often get emails from people confusing my company (called Online Profits) with some other companies and courses (e.g., “Quick Online Profits”, “30 Days to Online Profits” and so on). Here’s one of such emails I got recently:

To whom it may concern.

I have 2 charges on my credit card ending with the numbers 2719, one charge for 2.97 usd from online profits and another charge from quick-support.com.

I have already investigated and know that you are sister companies. I have already sent an email and a phone call to someone who did not appear to want to speak with me.

I am asking you to immediately refund any charges to my credit card and please remove all data and information you may have of me including my email address. I have already stated and am doing so again. Your company, companies are a scam and I’ll go to any length to insure that you stop charging my credit card as requested.

My bank and visa is supporting me on this matter and I urge you to immediately contact me to verify that you will stop charging my credit card for any membership charges, or for any charges at all. I honestly do not know what the charges are for and furthermore I did not sign up for anything that asked me or told me I would incur monthly charges.

My answer was the following:

Hi,

I have no clue regarding what you are talking about. If you visit our website you’ll realize we have no products for sale right now. All we offer is a free ebook and a free course. So how on earth would we be able to put a charge on your credit card?

Second, we never heard about that other company you are talking about.

Third, if you keep making false allegations about our company we might require you to prove them in court. So please check your facts before emailing random companies.

The guy obviously didn’t reply, as he must have realized his confusion.

Did I gain anything by replying, though? Nope.

Did I lose anything? Yep, my time.

Sure, it took 5 minutes to write that email. But what if you start replying to every single stupid email you receive? It will add up.

The solution? Tell your ego to shut up and simply ignore stuff that will not help your business.

Sign-up to the Daily Blog Tips newsletter and you will be able to download the "Make Money Blogging" eBook for free (worth $47).
You will also receive tips to improve your blog, strategies to make money and useful resources from around the web.

5 Responses to “Don’t Put Your Ego Above Your Productivity”

Stephanie on July 21, 2011 4:16 pm

I’m like anyone and hate it when people get my company mixed up with others. My least favorite was when someone was claiming on RipoffReport that I owned some site I don’t own and have never been associated with, and posted my name, address and phone number in their complaint. I was happy that it was my previous contact information, but still steamed to be incorrectly associated with the company they were having trouble with. That I did because it’s visible, even if not associated with a site of mine.
doug_eike on July 21, 2011 4:55 pm

Excellent suggestion. I think this applies to making comments on blogs, as well. If you don’t like what the blogger writes, the best thing is to stop visiting the blog. Contradicting and correcting other bloggers is mostly about ego and is a waste of time. Thanks for the tip!
Elle on July 21, 2011 5:41 pm

I don’t really get this type of email, but I do agree that its a waste of time replying.

However, you could set up some canned responses in Gmail pretty easily, and I think you can even automate them for certain filters. For example, you could filter any that mention credit card charges and automatically send them that email you wrote.

I think this would be particularly useful for bloggers that receive a lot of complimentary emails, because as a reader, it takes extra effort to send the email and not getting any response from a “favorite blogger” can be disheartening.
Megan on July 22, 2011 3:28 am

yes, I just woke up this morning to 40 spam comments on my blog. Drives me mad. your immediate thought is “wow that ‘s a lot of comments” and are just as quickly put right back in your place when you realise each one tells you how great your blog is but doesn’t explain why…

Still, visitors to my blog are thin on the ground so at least someone (even an automated system!) is looking.
kumo on July 22, 2011 4:33 am

I think it is best to just ignore such email because it might just be a scam to trick for a reply. In some cases, they just spam every emails or website they can find just for a response. Base on the response or reply, they will try to check if any of them worth follow up for a scam. I normally categorize these email together with the scam emails which asking for verification of bank account, PayPal, ebay and any accusation they proclaim.