Internet entrepreneurs are a dime a dozen these days. I find that most of them, like most people, are well meaning folks, working hard, trying to carve out their niche and make their dreams a reality. I put myself in this category and I put many friends of mine in this category (Chris, Brandon and others).

But, as with the general population, there is a group of so called “entrepreneurs,” whose idea of entrepreneurship is stealing from others. It’s important that you have integrity in everything that you do. Having ethics, having integrity allows you to be truly successful and truly happy. It allows you to be a true entrepreneur. I want to get rich, sure. Who doesn’t? However, I also want to feel good about doing it, feel proud of what I am doing and be able to talk about what I am doing. If you steal, you can’t really do that.

Of course, there is a type of person who steals from others and sees nothing wrong with it. To the contrary, they consider themselves to be successful, even happy and proud of themselves. These people are the reason we have laws and prisons, though. These people are not entrepreneurs.

When you do the right thing now, you are assuring your future, as well. You can steal and maybe you can get away with that for a while. But, you definitely should watch your back and be afraid of what tomorrow will bring because one day, eventually, maybe soon – maybe not so soon – the rug will come out from under you. You’ll be exposed. You’re credibility, if you even have any, will be in the tank and you’re little operation will suffer in all aspects.

Dictionary.com gives the top definition of entrepreneur as “a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, esp. a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk.” Then, the difference between a thief and an entrepreneur is: both take risks, but only one takes initiative.

No big shock or anything, but a couple days ago, I had a piece of spam posted at the PhotoshopForums.com, the phpBBHacks.com Support Forums and CommunityAdmins.com. Violated all of their guidelines, removed at all three, user banned.

The person was spamming a “forum promotion” service. Basically, they will post your message to thousands and thousands of sites. They’ll post them in “advertising” forums on communities where advertising is allowed and it is less likely to be deleted, etc. Now, if that were true, if it were posted in advertising sections as appropriate, that’d be fine, as far as I am concerned. The problem is that the message he posted was in the PhotoshopForums.com Market Place forum, the phpBBHacks.com Support Forums Install Stuff for Me forum and the CommunityAdmins.com General Chat forum…

I don’t know about you, but when I get blocked from Google, it’s because of things like purchasing an expired domain name and using it. I don’t try to cheat anybody and I don’t do anything devious. So, basically, I know I’ll be unblocked. I usually wait 3 months and if I am still not being listed, I e-mail a re-inclusion request to Google. This has never failed. It’s only happened 3 times. 2 of which was expiring domains and the 3rd time, I am not sure what happened. I think it might been because I had the site accessible for a few days, but then took it offline for a while. Not sure. But, all 3 times, my sites have been re-listed. So, my assumption is that you are not evil.

If that is the case, my point is that, during this time, don’t sit around wallowing in self pity. Keep improving that content because when Google finally adds you, you will probably reap the rewards of that content. I have a great example to show. Bad Boy Blog launched at the latter portion of March. Up until a couple days ago, it had not been listed in Google’s search results. I waited my 3 months and then e-mailed Google at the end of June or whatever. Second week of August, it’s listed. During that time, I treated it like any other site. I posted a ton, made contacts, visited daily, came up with cool features and unique ideas and I finally got to the point where I was doing about 350-400 pageviews per day without Google. Generating some AdSense revenue, as well.

So, what happened when it finally got listed? Here are the numbers (pageviews):

It was finally listed on August 7 and you can see the affect. 4x the traffic. Why? Because I’ve got good content. For Bad Boy news, there is really no better source and Bad Boy has had a couple of huge hits this year, so people are doing a lot of searches related to those as well as the Danity Kane album and, of course, Diddy is about as big as it gets.

Oh and my AdSense revenue has gone up comparatively. I’m very happy with it.

So, if Google blocks you and you haven’t done anything wrong, don’t get frustrated. Give it time and keep working and you’ll reap the rewards of good content production later.

I was reading an entry over at Jason Calacanis’ blog and I noticed 3 comments (by 2 “different” people, supposedly) where they both personally attacked him for his spelling and grammar. This brings me to this:

One of the quickest ways to lose virtually all credibility in an online discussion, as far as I am concerned, is to attack the person’s spelling or grammar. It all goes back to the common “attack the point, not the person” mantra that I repeat so many times to the users of my communities, but to attack spelling, to me, really gives away that you don’t know what you are talking about or you simply have no good, useful (counter) viewpoint, so you resort to a personal attack. At that moment, my interest in what you have to say shrinks…

The comments in question were deleted and I would have done the very same thing, without hesitation. They were the typical “anonymous” comments, one word names, no URLs, no e-mails, etc. So many “stalkers” out there. If you don’t have any, you need to get to work! :)

Today, I signed the contract for my first dedicated server. It’s a fully managed server from HostMySite.com. Some specs: Intel Xeon 3.2 GHZ (1066 MHz FSB), DDR 2048 MB (2 GB), 3 x SCSI 73 GB (10k RPM), SCSI Raid Card, Linux RedHat Enterprise and 2000 GB monthly transfer. I’m splitting it with my buddy Brandon. We’ve been talking about it for a couple months, I think, with the last few weeks being “busy” getting quotes, recommendations, etc. In the end, the way we found HostMySite.com was simply by Googling for managed dedicated servers, funnily enough.

Kind of a big deal, really. To me, anyway. It also means I’m on the hook for another $300 a month… so, I’ll be working hard to fill the server. :)