Yours Truly, Anonymous

By Joe Reinbold
Posted Monday, September 27, 2004

How many times today have you gotten an email message with an offer in it for a money making deal or some type of service? Probably many times! And, how many of those messages had no individuals name or contact information, just a web site URL? Again, probably many!

I received one a couple of hours ago that had a pretty good offer in it, one that I a least was willing to check out further. It was a network marketing program that was in Pre-Launch and I had not heard of it before, so it appeared to be pretty new. The email had no name on it either in the body or in the "From" line. All it had was a URL to the web site.

So off I went to the web site. The home page was well done and it described a typical network marketing program. There was no identification on the home page as to who the sponsor was nor was there any specific information about the company other than its name. I spotted a link entitled "About Us" and clicked on that.

Nothing there either in respect to the name of the individuals running the business, where it was located or how to contact them. You would think that on a page titled "About Us" you would see that type of information. But all this page had on it was a description of a network marketing company, in generic terms.

So I checked out the page "Terms of Membership" and that page was also void of any contact information. I did note that the company was probably in Texas since part of the agreement indicated that ......would be governed by the laws of the State of Texas.

I checked out every page and they were all void of any identification of the people running the program. Even the "Contact Us" page had a input form to send them a message rather than listing an actual email address.

One of the first things I want, and you should want, before doing business with a company is to know who they are, where they are and whether I would be able to contact them by email and telephone if necessary. I want to be able to have some trust in the people I do business with just as I want to create that trust with my customers. I want to know that there is a real live person there to talk to.

It worries me that some people doing business online are afraid to identify themselves fully or even partially in some cases. It worries me that some people will surf up to that site and other sites like it, read it, like it, charge a considerable amount of money to their credit card and they don't know anything about the company.

It also bothers me that people try to market products by email without identifying themselves (other than their email address and sometimes that is false) and expect to be successful. It reminds me of when I used to do a lot of snail mailings and the response mailings would be very similar. No return address, no name and address inside the envelope other than the promotion company's address and an ID number on a circular. I know a lot of you have gotten those! And in most cases they went right in the circular file. Well now you have a button that you can use to put them in the circular file!

The company you should want to deal with is the one that makes full disclosure of who they are, has a privacy statement that spells out what they are going to do or not do with your personal information, and provides accurate information about their products and services. You don't want to deal with someone who appears to be hiding behind a web page, they may be here today but gone tomorrow!

Do you use "Yours truly, Anonymous" as your signature file?

About the Author
Joe Reinbold, owner of The Entrepreneur's Home Business Link publishes a free weekly email newsletter "Home Income Quarterly E-dition" which is dedicated to assisting online marketers. For a free subscription just mailto:subscribe@homebizlink.com or visit his site at (http://www.homebizlink.com)