Take the case of Elsa whose eldest daughter Terrie was graduating from college. Like any good parent, Elsa was planning to give her daughter a good career start, and she thought getting her to manage her own business was the way to go. Problem was Elsa never had a background in business herself, so she did not really know where or how to start.

Elsa’s sister Brenda, on the other hand, married a local businessman and it just so happened that they had a small internet and arcade gaming business that they no longer had time to manage; or so they said. So they approached Elsa and suggested that it may be a good idea for her to purchase the business from them, with the eventual goal of getting Terrie to manage it after she graduates.

Elsa looked at this gesture as a benevolent offer from her sister and she gratefully accepted it without much thought. Meantime, Brenda offered for Terrie to work in the business part time to both learn how to run it, as well as have some idea of projected cash flows. The business was fairly simple to run, and cash flow was also reasonable.

What Elsa and Terrie did not know was patronage in the business was in fact declining, something that would have been readily apparent had they looked at historical revenue and profit records. They also did not know that a lot of the equipment used in the business needed constant replenishing, monitoring, and maintenance.

Elsa bought the business from Brenda in good faith, thinking that her sister was doing her a favor. But Brenda was in fact only disposing a business off that was already in its early stages of decline. It was only a year later that Elsa began to realize that she might have been taken advantage of by her own sister. Two more years later, she was forced to close the business down.

Roger is a slightly different case. He is Asian, and he comes from a fairly well off family of small business owners. He also just got married, and he and his wife Marcy are looking to start a business of their own.

But while the young couple has enough financial capital to start their own business, they could not really think of a good business idea. In the end, they decided to start small and low risk by buying a coffee shop franchise of a well known global brand. The only problem is despite the brand being popular globally it was fairly new in Roger and Marcy’s market.

However, instead of doing their own research to determine the feasibility of the franchise, Roger and Marcy relied heavily on information provided by the master franchise holder, which were all very positive. That and they also went to various religious temples and performed rituals asking gods and ancestors for blessings.

One ritual was to ask basic yes or no questions of the ancestors. To determine the answer, they will throw flat incense sticks in the air with labels on both sides. If the number of incense sticks landing with the right side up is more than those landing with the right side down, then the answer to the question is yes; otherwise, it’s a no.

The quirky thing about this process is if you are not satisfied with the answer, you can ask the ancestors again and again, like a child begging a parent for ice cream before dinner until the elder relents. Suffice it to say that Roger and Marcy did not leave the religious temples until they got all the blessings they wanted to start their own coffee shop business. The coffee shop business lasted less than two years.

Joining Twitter

We joined twitter last month. We joined merely because everybody seems to be talking about it, but over a month on, we’re still not quite sure how to use it most effectively. Our preliminary conclusion is twitter – social media in general, in fact – can potentially be a great business tool, but it may not be for everyone.

So while twitter can and should be included in marketing mix considerations, we probably won’t lose too much sleep if we can’t make it fit into our model. A possible folly is for people to just latch on to it because it seems to be what people are talking about these days and lose a lot of resources just getting it to work right for them.

Playing with site look and feel

We are still constantly playing with the look and feel of the site. We added, and then removed, a tags widget on the left sidebar as it looked too cluttered for our taste. We added Clustrmaps at the bottom of the right sidebar, mainly to give us a (free) indication of where our visitors are coming from. We did not expect visits from China and India to be so high, at least relative to the rest of the world; but thinking about it now, it probably makes sense just with their sheer volume of internet users.

We also added the new WordPress twitter widget on the right sidebar. This widget is fairly new and WordPress seems to still be working on some kinks here and there. But we trust Wordress to eventually get this right, so we’ll just leave it there. Last but not least, we’re experimenting with comment threading, another fairly new feature provided by WordPress.

“Sample Us” page

Just introduced this week is a new “Sample Us” page. The page contains links to seven previous posts, intended to give new visitors a feel of what this blog is about. The page is probably a bit unnecessary at this stage, considering that the blog is only a few months old.

But we received some feedback that the top menu bar looked a bit barren with just two items there, and we just could not think of anything else to add. We aim to update the page with different sample posts at least every two months so longer-term, we think it will prove good value for new visitors.

Dilbert

Finally, one of our workmates found out last year (by spying on our email) that we subscribe to the Dilbert daily strip, and she thoughtfully gave us a Dilbert desk calendar for Christmas. It was our first time to have a Dilbert desk calendar, so we really appreciated the gesture. And then we found that the strips in the calendar are two years old (we even read an exact same strip we have plastered on our wall)!

However, there are some project managers who not only tolerate, but sometimes even spearhead and encourage, scope creep. This typically happens when a project manager also wears the account management or business development hat. So while their project management side may want to complete the project on time, scope, and budget; their account management or business development side aims for more revenue and continuous work.

Take the case of Simon, who was enterprise applications manager of a large multinational firm. The company was implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system that was to be rolled out globally, and Simon was leading the pilot implementation. The pilot had a fairly generic scope, the aim being was to deliver the solution to all locations and customizations done at country level.

This was good enough as a starting point, but Simon kept introducing module after module of additional requirements that extended project timelines and bloated project budgets. Simon argued that the scope creep was necessary to ensure the quality of the finished product. In truth, Simon only wanted to ensure that his department’s budget and personnel are maintained, if not increased.

Simon’s initial attempts to expand the pilot’s functionality easily passed the change request process. But the module expansions not only extended timeline and budget requirements, these also introduced various layers of complexity that likewise introduced additional deployment risks that required mitigation. And often, Simon’s risk mitigating action was the introduction of yet more components to the pilot module.

The scope creeping exercise eventually got out of hand, as what was supposed to be a six to twelve month pilot project had entered its third year with no clear end in sight. Alarmingly, Simon was still introducing additional, “risk mitigating” requirements. Not only that, he grew to become more and more adamant and insistent on these change requests. Ultimately, management decided that the only way for the project to be completed was if Simon was let go.

Simon was quite well known in the industry, so he did not find it difficult to find a new job after his dismissal. His next assignment was as a contract project manager with a national electricity distributor. The company was looking at building its own custom CRM solution, as most of the products offered in the market looked too expensive and complex for its requirements.

Even before Simon joined, the project had already been budgeted and scoped, with the charter and statement of work already approved. Simon arrived at the commencement of business blueprint, and his initial task, aside from slowly taking over the management of the project, was to facilitate the workshops with subject matter experts (SMEs) and key users.

A mere four weeks after joining the project, Simon started questioning the project’s scope and pointing out what to him were big gaps between the proposed solution and the business’s requirements. His points were initially taken on board, and he was given significant leeway in re-scoping the project.

But then, two months later, Simon was still documenting requirements and conducting workshops, with no clear end in sight. This frustrated the project sponsor, as it became apparent that Simon was not only allowing the SMEs to introduce additional requirements, he was actually encouraging them to, without regard to the limited resources allocated to the project. Another month of yet more workshops later, Simon was advised that his services were no longer required.

On the surface, project managers like Simon either hold scope restrictions in contempt, or have a high level of customer orientation; it’s likely that neither of these is true. Rather, it’s more plausible that the likes of Simon just want to ensure their indispensability by continuously churning out work requirements. As with Simon’s case, this can sometimes backfire badly and can lead to them being dismissed rather quickly.

Take Rachel for example. She is a lead developer for an offshore outsourcing company and often finds herself involved in multiple projects at the same time. She is both very knowledgeable and efficient, and has an established reputation of being able to deliver solutions in very short timeframes. Rachel’s problem is she sometimes over-commits herself, and when faced with challenging situations and she is found to have some shortcomings with her delivery, she is often very quick to make excuses.

Once, she was required to deliver a fairly simple automated batch update program for an offshore client. The client’s lead business analyst came from a development background, and while they estimated the work to be completed within two to three days, they generously gave Rachel a week to complete the job. Unfortunately, because of Rachel’s conflicting commitments, two weeks had passed and Rachel still was not able to deliver the piece. The client took her to task for this, and she made an elaborate web of excuses about how the development was not so simple as initially outlined and how there was no functional specification given. The client’s view was the development was so simple that it did not even require a detailed specification.

Another time, again because of conflicting commitments, Rachel rushed the release of a small change request to a development through a productive environment without properly testing it. It turned out that while the update addressed the change required, it also caused some other functionality to be lost. The client took Rachel to task for this, and rather than just admitting that she did not do proper regression testing, she blamed the client for not having any test scripts and not providing a functional resource to help her. The client’s expectation of people at her level is they can do their own test scripts.

Charlie is a slightly different case. He is an in-house senior business analyst for a global manufacturer. He has been with the company for over ten years and for most of the time, he has been involved in turnkey organizational change projects. So Charlie’s expertise cuts across the organization, and he is often called upon to work on projects requiring complex process changes.

Like Rachel, Charlie often finds his time and attention divided between multiple projects. And while Charlie is a proven doer, he is known to hog all of the work and is not very good at delegating. So more often than not, Charlie finds himself spending anywhere between 12 to 16 hours a day working. The company understands this and is generally understanding of Charlie’s shortcomings. In fact, it is common for team members to shield Charlie from criticism and make excuses on his behalf.

In situations when his teammates can no longer make excuses for him and his mistakes are pointed out, Charlie is known to have a very short fuse and is quick to throw a tantrum. He engages in emotional blackmail and will promptly point out all of the hard work that he has done and the long hours that he has spent working. Without saying it outright, Charlie is communicating that because of his workload, no one should be faulting him, even when he is at fault.

Technically, Rachel and Charlie are right and are entitled to the excuses that they make, as they should not be expected to work the ridiculous hours that they are doing. However, it is also Rachel and Charlie’s responsibility to make sure that they only accept work that they can handle. Once they accept the responsibility for a piece of work, they should also accept the level of scrutiny that goes with it.

Experts who are wont to making excuses are generally the high maintenance types in organizations. They know that they are a valuable commodity, and they take advantage of, sometimes even exploit, this knowledge. They are both an asset and a liability. They crave for and embrace recognition, but they find it hard to accept accountability.

Two common themes you will find from the samples: (1) these bloggers appear to have already established reputations in their offline lives and their blogs just serve as extension channels; and (2) they provide a lot of free, useful content for their readers. We also deliberately picked blog authors who provide at least some content downloads without the opt-in requirement to their mailing lists or newsletters.

Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine. He is the author of “The Long Tail”, which is also the title of his personal blog. You can download a book extract that includes the full introduction and a chapter titled “The New Tastemakers” for free. The Long Tail Manifesto is also freely downloadable.

Tom Asacker

Tom Asacker is a popular marketer and speaker, and is author of “A Little Less Conversation” and “A Clear Eye for Branding”, His blog contains over 20 freely downloadable and thought provoking thought pieces that go all the way back to 2005. Be sure to also visit the video collage of some of his speaking engagements in his “About Page”; they’re gems.

Seth Godin

Seth Godin writes one of the most popular marketing blogs in the world. He is author of numerous business books including “All Marketers are Liars”, “Permission Marketing”, and “Tribes”. It is claimed that his “Unleashing the Idea Virus” (free download!), is the most popular ebook ever written. You can access more free downloads from Seth Godin through his Squidoo lens.

Scott Ginsberg

Scott Ginsberg is the nametag guy. He is a renowned author, speaker, and blogger; and his sites (according to him) get as many as 35,000 hits a day! A couple of his ebooks worth checking out: “Great Questions To Ask Someone You Just Met”, and “37 Exercises to Help You Be More Approachable…”. You can find more free stuff through his Squidoo lens; be sure to also check out his videos.

John Moore

John Moore is the author of “Tribal Knowledge”. He calls himself a “marketing medic”, and his blog is mainly devoted to – you guessed it – marketing (expect posts about Starbucks and coffee). Download “What Must Starbucks Do?” and “Tribal Knowledge: Business Wisdom Brewed from the Grounds of Starbucks Corporate Culture” for a taste of what he has to offer.

Tom Peters

Tom Peters is an American business and management writer best known for the best-selling “In Search of Excellence”. His blog contains a wealth of free material a lot of monetizing bloggers can only dream of producing. Last we checked, the site offered 25 freely downloadable ebooks and freely downloadable presentation decks that go as far back as 1999.

David Meerman Scott

David Meerman Scott (the middle name use is to distinguish from other well known David Scott’s) is an online marketer, strategist, and bestselling author. His blog provides a link to some freely downloadable ebooks that you can sample. We like “The New Rules of Viral Marketing” and “The Gobbledygook Manifesto”.

Rajesh Setty

Rajesh Setty is an entrepreneur and author, and blogger. Of the bloggers that we have listed here, he is our favorite. For no reason other than his messages resonate to us the most. Rajesh provides a lot of freely downloadable resources, including his book, “Beyond Code”, in its entirety.

Bob Sutton

Bob Sutton is a Stanford professor, published author, and a must read management blogger. Download “Management Advice: Which 90% is Crap?” and “The Upside of Assholes: Is there Virtue in Bad Workplace Behavior?” (both are free ebooks), and click through the links on his blog’s right sidebar to have a taste of what he is about.

There are other notable business blogs and bloggers out there. Our purpose of citing the above nine is not so much to provide a definitive list, but to present a starting point, and perhaps a benchmark. And of course, if there is a business blog or blogger you have a particularly high regard for, please leave a comment and let us know.

We have had two ladies serving us alternately depending on the time and day, and the way they have gone about their business has been an interesting case study on good customer service and taking personal responsibility for us.

The first appears to be no more than 18 years old and is most likely a full time student waitressing part-time for extra pocket money. We observed that she is a very efficient worker and seems to know her way around the café very well. We actually half expected to confuse her with our order as it was not in the menu, but we were pleasantly surprised when she got our order right first time.

She made a mistake the second time we placed the same order with her: she took our money and order right, but she failed to tell the chef that we requested for the eggs to be scrambled. The scrambled eggs were really just a preference, so we let this pass without even mentioning the oversight.

We got her again around two weeks later, and we placed our usual order. To our surprise, and without our prompting, she said that she felt really bad about getting our order wrong the previous time. The mistake was not really a big deal to us, but it obviously was to her. Not only that, she remembered us, and she remembered to apologize. We were suitably impressed.

The second lady is more mature, probably in her early 40s, and she appears like she’s a career waitress. In contrast to the young girl, this one seems unsure of herself, and she totally got lost the first time we placed our “special” order with her: she actually had to ask around whether the order was possible, and we had to even tell her how much it cost (she charged us a dollar less).

As with the younger lady, we did not really mind the small inconvenience. This was after all a small neighborhood café, and it might have been possible that our request was not so common. We did not even mind when she repeated exactly the same mistake on two other occasions.

However, just last weekend, she stumbled again. This time, she actually got our order wrong, and instead of giving us the bacon and eggs on toast, she only gave us scrambled eggs on toast, a different item on their menu. We brought this to her attention, and she promptly took our order back to the kitchen. She returned a few minutes later, with our correct order. Then she said: “Apologies for that, it was the chef’s mistake.”

It was clearly her mistake. She took our order, so she knew exactly what it was. She would have given the order to the chef, and even if the chef got it wrong, she would have had the opportunity to immediately correct this before taking the food to us. She did not do this, and instead of just unreservedly apologizing, she decided to put somebody else in trouble to cover her own inadequacy.

The two girls are a contrast of each other. The former is a quick learner, is customer focused, and takes personal responsibility. The latter does not seem to learn from her mistakes, does not remember her customers, and is quick to blame others for her own shortcomings.

This story also shows that good customer service and taking personal responsibility knows no age boundaries. These can be learned at a very young age on the one hand, but can also be totally missed by more mature aged persons despite their years of industry experience on the other.

Good performance in an existing role should not mean an automatic promotion into a new role, especially if the new role requires someone who does not want to become a boss to be the boss. In our experience, the selection process for leadership promotion continues to be wrongly heavily weighted against current performance.

While current performance should continue to be part of the criteria, we believe the identification of leadership attributes should have a heavier weighting. Provided below is a list of early signs of leadership potential that we believe should figure prominently in any leadership consideration.

1. Future leaders have initiative. They are quick to identify things that need to be done, and proceed to just do these, with minimal prompting and supervision. Should they be stuck with not a lot of productive things to do, they ask for more work. They do not wait around and are not contented to just be fed work and instructions.

2. Future leaders take ownership. They run with the tasks given to them and take responsibility for their completion. They do not go around asking how things should be done every five minutes, they just do. They are not afraid of making mistakes.

3. Future leaders listen to others and seek advice. This should not be confused with the pest asking questions every five minutes because they are afraid of making mistakes and taking ownership, and wants to be guided every step of the way in completing their tasks. Future leaders understand that there is so much that they need to learn, and they act like sponges to new insights and ideas. Future leaders seek role models and mentors; they are thirsty and hungry for knowledge.

4. Future leaders have an independent mind. They may not know everything and may ask around for people’s insights, but they have their own mind and draw their own conclusions. When mentoring a future leader, a good sign that you are in the right track is when you have regular “agree to disagree” sessions.

5. Future leaders are passionate and opinionated. They have views and causes that they feel strongly about, and they do not shy away from sharing these (bonus points if these are contrary to a mentor’s); these do not even have to be work related. This shows that they are not fence sitters or brown nosers; and they are strong decision makers.

6. Future leaders share their knowledge. They understand that the more they share, the more they get back, and the better it is for everyone. Knowledge hoarders are generally the types who are insecure of themselves or their position in organizations; they should not be leading.

7. Future leaders recognize their limitations. They know that they cannot possibly know and do everything. They are not loath to revealing their weaknesses, and even strive to ensure that these are addressed by surrounding themselves with people who have strengths in their problem areas.

8. Future leaders seek help. This is very closely related to the previous two items. Future leaders seek help because they lack the skills and competency, because there are others who can perform better, or because it is an opportunity to share knowledge around. Future leaders do not seek help to palm off tasks they do not want.

9. Future leaders accept mistakes. People who take task ownership will invariably make mistakes – lots, even. Future leaders readily admit the mistakes they make, learn from these, and move on. They do not make excuses.

10. Future leaders avoid putting blame on others. While future leaders readily admit mistakes that are theirs, they are often protective of others. What this means is while a mistake is acknowledged, finger-pointing is generally avoided. Future leaders are quick to claim the mistake as “ours” or “the team’s” rather than singling an individual out.

11. Future leaders assume informal leadership roles. They do not need to be formally assigned a leadership role or title; they just naturally assume the role. We should stress naturally: they do not do it to score extra points or gain an advantage over their peers. They assume the role for its own sake, not because of some implied reward.

12. Future leaders inspire performance. A future leader’s passion, drive, and commitment are contagious. They inspire others around them to perform, and they often bring out the best in everyone included in their sphere of influence.

If you are managing someone who exhibits more than half of the above traits, you have under your wing a potential leader. Nurture them, keep them, challenge them.

And if there are other potential leadership attributes you know about or look for in a candidate, please leave a comment and let us know.

A very important consideration to make is the framework is most useful for the individual leadership aspirant, and should thus be applied out of their own initiative. The individual should ideally try to get this framework to fit in the formal development models their organization may have for them (if any), but this is not a requirement (and the lack of one should not be made an excuse).

Ethan is a programmer in his late 20s who aspires to take on more leadership and management roles in his company, a boutique IT services provider. Ethan’s concern is he believes he lacks the soft skills required for a management or leadership position, even as he is readily recognized as a technical expert. Adding to Ethan’s worry is, as is typical of small firms, his company lacks a formal development plan for its employees.

Rather than wait for his company to provide the management and leadership exposure and training that might not eventuate, Ethan decided to be more proactive about his situation and sought his own learning avenues using our personal leadership development framework. Provided below are some of the main points that Ethan took out of this process (applied during a one year period).

Know and understand yourself

Ethan knew that he is a very good programmer and can continue to develop further technical expertise if he so wanted. This was the easiest pursuit for him as the development requirements would be closely related to his job description. However, Ethan wanted to slowly move into a management or leadership role. He understood that he is still lacking in both soft skills and business nous, so he determined that this is the main area of development that he was going to pursue.

On a personal level, Ethan recognized that, perhaps typical of a lot of programmers, he is not the most social of people. Ethan decided that it was time for him to go out of his comfort zone and try to be more social. Ethan thought that whatever social skills he can develop can also be good for him professionally.

Study leadership

Ethan was only starting out in his leadership and management journey, so he did not really know how and where to start in this area. As a starting point, Ethan decided that he was going to buy a leadership or personal development book that provides a good balance of theoretical and practical advice. After consulting some friends and colleagues, Ethan decided on Primal Leadership.

Ethan further decided that he was going to include the study of leadership and management as one of his major objectives for the year.

Find mentors and role models

Ethan had always wanted to have someone mentor him, but he had not really found anyone suitable. Ethan decided that it was going to be hard for him to find one in his workplace as for starters, they did not have a formal mentoring or development program. Ethan does recognize the importance of having a mentor or role model, and he made the conscious decision of finding one, even if it was going to be outside work.

Map out a personal development plan

Considering what Ethan felt were his immediate development needs (i.e. learning leadership and management theory and skills; and finding mentors and role models), he decided on the following three objectives for the year:

Pursue a postgraduate management degree – the most logical development initiative given his goals; the timing was also good, as he anticipated business to slow down as a natural result of current economic conditions

Become an active member of business related professional association – to help him both develop additional social skills and expand his professional network

Join a local tennis club – mainly for development of interpersonal skills

Involve others

Ethan had to involve his manager in the decision to pursue further studies as he needed to make sure that this does not conflict with his work commitments. To his surprise, his manager offered partial subsidy; it turned out that the company had a budget for employees who wish to pursue further studies.

In school, Ethan was required to do a lot of group work. He found this exciting, especially because of the great diversity of his classmates. One of his group mates with whom he quickly developed a strong relationship with recommended him for membership to a professional management association.

Objectively assess outcomes

By the end of the year, Ethan saw that while he continued to do more of the same at work, he had grown tremendously from his out of work activities. He especially enjoyed the progressive interaction he had with his schoolmates, and his newfound acquaintances from both the management association and the tennis club that he joined. Ethan did not learn anything new from a technical perspective, but this is adequately compensated by the “soft skills” and the management and leadership knowledge he is starting to develop.

Critically analyze outcomes

Looking at the results of the year, it was clear to Ethan that, sooner or later, he will have to choose a particular path: technical competence, or leadership and management development. He could not have it both ways.

Reassess yourself

The year’s experience showed Ethan that while he has the established reputation for technical competence and can “safely” pursue this as a career, he is more interested in pursuing leadership and management roles. He is not sure if it is just a passing fancy, but he certainly wants to give it a shot.

– o –

The above is just a very high level view of how our proposed model can be applied. We would like to note two things: as per our example, the framework is not very difficult to implement; and it is best for this application to be an ongoing process.

In Ethan’s case for example, immediately continuing from the above, he slowly moved into a pre-sales and business development role in his company; and also became more involved as a volunteer in the professional organization that he joined. Directly related to this, he found a couple of good mentors: the managing director of his company with whom he is now working more closely with, and the president of the above mentioned professional organization.

Please note that this post is not about your garden variety online scammer. Neither is this about those who do affiliate marketing, network marketing, or pay per post blogging: these are legitimate online ventures that people from all walks of life undertake. Rather, this post is about those who purport to be experts in their niche areas but their supposed expertise are hardly visible in their online activity; and thus, the product or service they offer is often not worth the time and money that they are asking from you.

1. Their love of writing does not translate to lovely writing

A lot of monetized blogs that we have visited, regardless of their topic niche, claim their love of writing, communicating, and helping others as one of their primary reasons for starting the blog; never mind that half of their pages are percolated with advertisements and/or paid links. The first sign to look out for that your online guru might not be the real deal is if their proclaimed love of writing does not seem to flow through their content.

Bloggers often write posts in a hurry and click the publish button even more quickly, so it is harsh to always expect perfectly written articles. Not to mention that there are genuine bloggers out there who learned English as their second or third language. It should, however be expected of monetized blogs that their posts have at least had some thought before writing and publication. Astute blog readers can easily spot haphazardly written material and monetized bloggers who produce second rate articles too regularly are not worth paying.

2. Contents of their free e-book are freely available elsewhere

A common approach monetized blogs take these days is inviting readers to subscribe to free newsletters. Often, to entice the reader to subscribe, these bloggers offer a free e-book related to their niche. This free e-book is the subscribers’ first feel of what the blogger’s other premium services are going to be like, so one can be sure that a lot of care has been undertaken in producing the e-book, even if it is provided for free.

A telltale sign that a blogger’s premium service is not worth subscribing to is if the free e-book they provide contains nothing new. The web is so full of free information that anyone with an internet browser and a modicum of patience can find information on almost anything. A premium service, regardless of whether it costs $2 or $20, is only really worth paying if it offers something one can’t get freely.

3. Too much content filler

Bloggers have creative ways of churning out mindless posts when their minds blank out of post ideas. Some of these include posting an interesting photo or video they supposedly accidentally ran into (they may add a line or two of text to make it appear they exerted some effort); writing a list of top blog posts or related news stories of the week or month and providing nothing more than links to external sites and a couple of sentences (sometimes straight out of search engine results) for each link; running semi-relevant reader polls; and publishing best of articles that do nothing but rehash old posts.

These strategies are all right and acceptable if used sparingly. But some blogs – monetized ones at that – do these too regularly. So imagine a blogger doing Monday Mayhem (quirky videos), Wordless Wednesday (photos), Friday Feedback (reader polls), Saturday Sweep (weekly news aggregation), and Sunday Syndication (best of the blogosphere) posts: five blog posts a week, zero original content.

4. Too much affiliate marketing material

So you were interested enough in the blog and were seduced by the spiffy looking subscriber only free e-book (you only saw the glossy cover, but hey) that you decided to sign up for the blogger’s “totally free” subscription service. Unfortunately, in quite a number of cases, a lot of the good stuff ends with the submission of your e-mail address.

Some bloggers only aim to get you to subscribe and then go with the weight of numbers to hard-sell their product or service. One good way of measuring the quality of these types of subscription services is the volume of true free content that they provide.

Ideally, all the required content should already be in the newsletter. There may be occasional hyperlinks to related information, but the astute reader should determine how many of these lead to affiliate programs. Affiliate marketing can be quite lucrative for a blogger, generating the affiliate as much as 75% of revenue per sale. It is okay to sparingly do this, as there are some genuinely good products and services out there that may be related to a blogger’s niche. But if this is essentially all your guru provides, then you have to wonder where the “premium” service is.

5. Too many product and service endorsements

Another income generator bloggers may use is product and/or service endorsements, and the most common way of doing this is through pay per post or other similar programs. This alone can be a good revenue source for stay at home bloggers, and there are in fact blogs that provide nothing else other than paid posts.

Still, bloggers who profess to be experts and sell products and services related to their field should not be doing this, or at least not so blatantly. A sure sign that your guru may not be worth your time and money is when they all too regularly write posts singing praises of random products and services. It is likely that they already had their fill and you do not need to “donate” further through premium subscriptions.

6. Extravagant claims of success

The most telling sign that your online guru may be a sham is when they try to bamboozle you with extravagant claims of success – but only if you buy or subscribe to their product or service. Extravagant claims are a very common internet marketing strategy, but often by multi level and affiliate marketers.

“Expert” bloggers who resort to similar tactics either know very little about effective marketing strategies, or know clearly that their product or service provides very little value that they hope to gloss this over with an overwhelming sales pitch. Regardless, our view is they are not really worth your time of day, or your money.

As we stated at the beginning of this post, affiliate marketing, network marketing, and pay per post blogging are legitimate ventures people from all walks of life do online. But people who profess subject matter expertise should not be doing this. If you all too often see two or more of the above six signs in your online guru, it is probably a sign that you should walk away.

This was more or less the case with Sandra when she ventured online. Sandra had a blossoming career as a project manager with over ten years in the industry under her belt. She was not burned out at all, and was in fact enjoying her work. But she and her partner were also planning to start a family, and one of them had to significantly cut down their workload to attend to growing family commitments. Both decided that this had to be Sandra.

For a short while, Sandra worked part-time utilizing her network of professional contacts, and this worked out quite well. But then they “discovered” the potential of making money online (a lot, if they hit the jackpot). This, and the possibility of further reducing Sandra’s working time, was too good to pass up.

So Sandra educated herself; first by purchasing and reading a couple of books on making money online, then by subscribing to and following online money making blogs. After some period of discernment, Sandra decided that she would create a monetized blog on project management and related topics. She thought that this was going to be a natural progression for her, having had the industry experience to back her up.

Sandra decided to invest $1,000 for this venture, most of which was envisioned to go to once off costs: purchasing a proper domain name, paying for website hosting, buying a custom template for her blog, and the rest for initial marketing and promotion. Of course Sandra, like us, could have just gone for one of the many free blog hosting services on the internet, but because she was looking at a longer-term business prospect, she thought it was a good idea to initially invest some money into it. Besides, $1,000 was not a lot: it was less than her daily rate as a contract project manager.

Sandra planned a phased rollout of six months’ worth of content to start with (she had mapped out the topics in her mind). She projected that it would take about three months for the blog to start gaining some serious following. Her promotions plan was to just initially submit to blog directories and search engines, and regularly participate in related online forums and social networks in the first three months. She planned her online “marketing blitz” (mainly through Google AdWords) to only commence after the third month, to run for three months, and she planned the posting of some of her best content during this period.

Problems came up as early as the second month of Sandra’s online venture. Foremost is Sandra realized that writing original content was not as easy as she initially thought. Sure, she knew her topics very well, but writing about these was a totally different kettle of fish, especially since she was not a natural writer. Her number of real visitors was way down on initial projections, and her blog was still buried in (at best) page five for search results of her targeted keywords.

To fast-track readership growth, Sandra decided that she needed to advertise online two months earlier than she initially planned. This meant that she also needed to spruce up her content and produce a subscriber-only free e-book meant to entice subscription sign-ups (she planned to do this at the start of her marketing campaign) more quickly. The need to write a big volume of material at such a short period of time required Sandra to temporarily hire a ghost writer, something that she had not originally planned.

The advertising campaign worked, and Sandra saw an immediate spike in site visits and newsletter subscriptions; and she even started seeing her site landing in the first few search results of her targeted keywords. Unfortunately, all these did not automatically translate to financial returns. Sandra initially intended pay per click advertising to be her main source of revenue, but she quickly realized that only a small proportion of her visitors clicked on ads, and the monthly revenue she was getting from these was barely enough to cover for her site’s hosting.

Sandra’s operational costs had also increased. She realized that, despite her subject matter expertise, she could not keep writing good original content, both for her blog and her newsletters. So she found it necessary to permanently hire a part-time writing assistant, costing an additional $100 a month. She also noticed that traffic to her site immediately dropped when she stopped advertising, so she decided to keep a fixed monthly advertising budget. To make up for these, Sandra selectively signed up for various online affiliate programs and started a premium newsletter service.

Sandra’s blog is now close to two years old and it is popular enough to have a decent number of regular readers and subscribers. Despite its popularity, the blog is not making Sandra the money that she envisioned. By the end of the first year, the blog was only making around $200 a month from advertising, affiliate programs, and premium subscription; it is now up to around $550 per month. The blog is only costing Sandra approximately $200 a month to keep (for hosting, advertising, and paying a part-time writer), but she is spending close to six hours a day for work related to it. A simple cost-benefit analysis, considering how much Sandra could have earned as a part-time project manager, would show that the blogging venture is a failure.

Sandra’s case may be more common than we think. The good thing about Sandra is she tries to provide quality content for her readers and subscribers. A simple search of the blogosphere and the wider internet will show a lot of online money making schemes that promise a lot but provide very little tangible value for the internet consumer. We will give our $0.02 on these in our next post.