Why am I collecting your e-mail information in the first place?
I’m happy to contribute to the community, and I have some free resources available for people who wish to remain anonymous, but there’s got to be a bit of a reward for the people who actually engage with me. And, of course, if you actually buy stuff, I want to be sure to send you freebies etc to express my appreciation. To do that, I have to have at least your email address and a name so I know who I am talking to (or at least who you say you are!). If you actually buy stuff then I need more information to complete the transaction, and to maintain a record — for your protection — that you did actually buy it., Since Amazon and other web platforms see you as their customer, even though it’s my books and services they’re selling, they don’t tell me who bought them, so I have to collect your contact information from here.
Your information (name, email address etc.) is collected only in response to a request from you, either via an e-mail from you, or if you opt in for an offer, or if you join a sponsored online community.
Yes, but then you’re concerned that you’ll be hearing from me all the time.
You will not be spammed: I’m not going to bombard you with offers of sales on bogus stuff or shrill demands that you buy stuff before the world ends on Thursday.
I will periodically send you information that I think you’ll find useful; that will happen at most once a week except for very rare circumstances like a new book launch or something. In reality, I’m lucky if I can get a mailing out more than once every few weeks.
You don’t want your name ending up on other people’s lists.
In a way, it would be nice if that were possible. My first book has done pretty well, by self-published standards, but even so my list would have to be about 1000 times bigger for anyone to want to buy it. I wouldn’t do it anyway. I’m a professional person with professional ethics. I write books and do training and consulting with the objective of helping professional clients do things better. Getting you involved in spam campaigns isn’t going to do my reputation any good, and when you get down to it, reputation is about all a consultant has to trade on.
If you like my material so far it’s because I write about things the way I see them, and you know I’m not afraid to buck the tide of “everybody’s doing it”. So I wouldn’t do it even if I could, which I can’t.
Your name and contact information will not be sold to any entity for any reason. No, I won’t give it to anyone for free either.
If and when I notify you via e-mail that a partnering organization is hosting a webinar or providing some other benefit that might be of interest to you, that entity does not get access to your e-mail address. You decide whether to sign up for their show. If you find their material interesting and decide to sign up for one of their programs, then they will almost certainly ask you to provide them with some contact information; that’s between you and them.
How do you know your information is secure?
Thanks for asking. Most people don’t, but there’s a ton of bad stuff going on in cyberspace and you have every right to be concerned.
Books don’t make much money, but I’m not relying on my own securing of information on some server I built in my basement. The one area where I spend what I need to is in IT security. My website is hosted by an industry leader and my auto-responder (where the list lives) is also an industry leader, and I’m using the paid version instead of the no-frills freebie version precisely in order to get those protections in place for you.
The money transactions happen on Paypal or via Amazon and other retailers where you actually purchase items; I don’t have any of your financial information. So to get to your financial information, it doesn’t do any good for those bad guys to get through the web host’s security to crack my site; they have to get into outfits like PayPal and Amazon.
You don’t want to be on the list
You can always let me know that you want off the list. When they come from the auto-mailings (yes, I do have a few of those, like a periodic newsletter) there will be an embedded “unsubscribe” option. Where it comes from me personally, then just reply to let me know how I can do things better (there’s no shortage of those topics!) or if you prefer I can just take you off the list.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming
You probably came here from the landing page for one of my short e-books. I hope you feel better about getting it: click away! If you got here some other way, perhaps you’d be interested in “Seven Ways Organizations Resist Change, and How To Deal With It”. Here’s a link: Get Your Free e-book! I look forward to providing you with other insights as I am able to publish them.