I follow a lot of people in the WordPress community from my @themelab account, a number of whom run their own businesses based around WordPress. If you run a business on Twitter, there’s a good chance your clients and other (potential) customers follow you.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Twitter postings from people which essentially mock their customers. Here’s some of the common ones I see from the commercial themer crowd:
- Wow, this clueless customer of mine just posted a total newbie question on my support forum. Check it out! (screenshot link here)
- Haha, someone who used a pirated version of my theme just got hacked and now their entire blog is ruined. Too bad for them.
- This site just switched away from my awesome SEO-optimized theme and now it looks like total crap, say bye-bye to search rankings.
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Yesterday I found a domain that I wanted to buy. The domain was a two-word .com domain. It was more of a brandable name, not one with much resale value, although I had a specific use for it.
I contacted the owner asking if it was for sale, and got the following response:
I still own it. I don’t recall my asking price. Make a reasonable offer, and you can own it.
Fair enough, I made a $50 starting offer, and here’s the response I got.
Obviously no way. What an insulting offer nowhere near my asking price. Good luck finding names that cheap.
Excuse me? First of all, this guy didn’t specify any price range at all, yet claims my offer was nowhere near his asking price.
Second of all, how does he know that was my final offer? I was willing to pay more, but who would want to deal such an abrasive individual? Not me.
There’s no reason for a rude response like that, and it may put off a potential sale. You never know who you might be dealing with, and how much they are actually willing to pay if you abruptly end negotiations like that after a single offer.
Here’s my advice to all you people who receive what you would consider a “lowball” offer. Politely decline and move on. It might even help if you specified an actual price range too.
How would you react in such a situation? From both the lowballer and seller standpoint. I’d be interested in hearing your views.
First it was the DiggBar, now it’s the “hijacking” of Digg shortened URLs. Here’s my opinion on this whole controversy, summed up into two words:
Who Cares?
To be fair, it seems a lot of people do, but I don’t. Here’s a few questions you should ask yourself before whining about Digg.
Is anyone forcing you to use Digg or their URL shortener? You can use tr.im, TinyURL, bit.ly, and many others for your URL shortening needs.
Did you notice there’s a little “X” button in the top right corner that users can click to remove the frame?
And to all the SEO people out there: do you realize there are other things you can do to improve your rankings besides getting a direct link from Digg?
I wonder what would happen if Digg decided to nofollow all their outgoing links. What a firestorm that would create in the SEO community.
SitePoint recently announced that they would be phasing out the website and domain sales sections of the SitePoint marketplace and move them over to a new site, Flippa.
The SitePoint marketplace is (or was) widely regarded as the premiere place to buy and sell websites on the internet. It is frequented by many big buyers, and subsequently, many big sellers.
So why does it seem like they’re shooting themselves in the foot by moving it over to a “brand spanking new” site? I don’t know, but here’s why it’s a bad idea…
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Cuil (pronounced “cool”) is supposed to be the hot new search engine on the block, created by ex-Google engineers. Let me tell you right now, it sucks – so far at least. Just search anything, anything at all, look at the results, and you’ll see what I mean. A search for “Leland.info” returns a bunch of old stale links, which by the way have nothing to do with this site. I honestly hope they can improve though. I like the idea of ranking pages based on content relevancy only, and not “superficial” factors like incoming links.
