I’ve personally broken most of these, and suffered the consequences.
I hope you learn from my mistakes.
1. Use your commonsense. Don’t believe everything you hear, read, or see.
2. Don’t authorise, buy, or sign up for ANYTHING unless you know what is, what it does, whether it works, and whether you need it.
3. FREE is usually not. Look for the downside or the tradeoff.
4. The most expensive way of doing something isn’t necessarily the best. Explore alternatives.
5. Don’t “switch off” when dealing with internet stuff. If you don’t understand what your technical people are doing – or why they are doing it – ask them questions. And keep asking until you get an answer that you can understand.
6. There’s no secret, quick, and easy way of making a fortune online. Regardless of how well the sales material is written.
7. Be very suspicious when you are told that something is “unlimited”.
8. Learn when Robert Cialdini’s 6 principles of persuasion are being used to influence you. Google him – buy his book. EVERYONE should read it.
9. Be very, very careful when you hear someone say “We’ll build a custom solution for you”.
10. Google is your friend. Use it extensively to search for solutions, alternatives, problems, scams, and success stories.
11. You will always get conflicting advice about things. One person will sing the praises of a product. Another person will say it’s totally useless. You need to resolve this by use of intelligent analysis, asking questions, and common sense.
12. Something that works perfectly in one situation can be a total disaster elsewhere. Make sure you consider the important operational factors when deciding on a product.
Hey Eric, good site and good advice here (clicked through on your signature from your ebook debate with Leela on flying solo).
Another small practical piece of advice I’d add there is to make use of free email accounts. When signing up to subscriptions and email lists etc, protect your main email, use a secondary free email account. Keep you main email clutter free for emails that you will reply to; clients/friends/family etc.
Specially for free email marketing type sites, you can easily get bombarded by daily messages from them and their friends if they sell their email lists. Plus sometimes they are hard to unsubscribe to continually flooding your email. Hence my hotmail email with over 900 emails in my inbox!!
There’s one thing that IS unlimited, and that is the imagination and persistence of scammers!! thanks again for such great common sense.