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dealing with vicious hate mail on today's episode of Serve No Master. Today's episode is brought to you by Seo Pro Lap, the company that I trust to keep serving a master at the top of Google to save 10%. Use the coupon code. Serve No, master it. Check out. Go to serve. No master dot com Backslash CEO today. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. One of my first experiences online as I began to build a little bit of a following when I just had between one and 10 visitors my block today, I wasn't making any money yet. I was making about 30 cents a month from advertising. I started to notice a trend of negative comments on my block and some scary emails, and I didn't understand what was happening. It got me very worried, and I began to track back where the traffic was coming from. And I discovered that someone had written a post about me on a website. At the time I was blogging about my dating life. I was beginning to write my first book for women about dating. There was a whole form for men who hated everything about dating, hated everything about creating prosper, dating, hated everything about self improvement in this website was very scary. They'd written a post about me. They talk about how it was a weakling and I was a coward because I was a vegan. I don't really know where they're getting. Their information is a not a vegan. I've never been a vegan. I've never been a vegetarian, but they decided that this is what they hated about me. I have no idea where the information started from, but it started to get scary. From there. They began to talk about how fat I was. They were finding pictures of me online. They began to post comments on my block about being fat, and even when I started working on other projects. They would send e mails to my other addresses by tracking down how had registered my websites and started sending e mails to my other email addresses for my regular jobs and for business about how fat and gross that was. They were very vicious and very hurtful. It began to feel like the people on this website. We're falling me chasing me, stalking me, and it made me very uncomfortable. Very nervous, because what do you do when people are anonymous? And it got to the point where they began to post addresses? They posted the address of my parent's house. They post the address of one of my sisters houses and started talking about some pretty scary things. Now the owner of this website, Total Monster, allowing this type of content pianos website where people are getting threatened people's addresses, they're getting posted and it turns out I had a right to be worried because several years later, a spree killer in California was actually one of the top posters. A member of this website actually eventually went out and killed people. Now you notice if you go online, the Web site's gone now, as soon as this guy started killing people, the owner, the website deleted everything. He deleted all the evidence like a real class act. This was my first experience off online harassment and weirdness, and it was very confusing because the things they hated about me weren't true. They hate me for being a vegan. They hated me for other things. They thought I'd written products I hadn't written. It was very confusing. So it was a combination of bad information, angry people and then posting information about my family. When I found their post, I found this forum. I thought about responding in some way. I was tempted to write something and say, Leave me alone or this information's wrong What's wrong with you guys? And I realized that when you respond to any type of online troll, you only make the situation worse. I don't want the same type of thing to happen to you. People online are weird. People find random things to be scary about. And it turns out I had every right to be scared because someone from that site went out and actually murdered people. You can't depend on other people to protect your safety. The things that people do on social media these days are pretty crazy. People post pictures of their houses. People post pictures of their dress, KidsPost pictures of where they go to school, post a picture of their car. They never think about the fact they post a picture, their car, and it shows the license plate. People can look at the car, see where the kid goes to school. Then they know which car that kid is driving, and you create all this vulnerability we want to a special as we become professional as we start, bloods have a layer of protection between us and our audience. This is for security. Even before deal with hate mail, We want to make sure that you're safe and that bad things don't happen to you. And this is important because I went through this and I went through a time where I was worried because people were doing things that were very malicious. It starts by creating a business entity. Everything you do online should be under the guise of a business. A lot of people make the mistake of calling themselves of sole proprietor and using their Social Security number home address For all their business decisions, this leaves you massively vulnerable to anyone finding your home address. And in fact, if you search me hard enough, you can still find my parents home address online. Fortunately, they moved away, so that address is no longer valid. But it's almost impossible to remove that type of information once it's out into the Internet. And I learned this the hard way, so I'm trying to help you out. This is why, from the beginning, I say set up a business entity, set up a business entity. It's not just about the financial. Now we're talking about protecting you a little bit. Once you have your business identity and you can get this for free, you can get a business tax. I d. From the federal government doesn't cost anything. You don't even need to do the state registration until you're a little more active or making actual money, and you really want to protect your name. You could just do Step one register and get a number from the federal government, a tax I. D number, and that allows you to open a business bank account, open a business mailbox when you're setting up a mailbox at the post office. If you get a mailbox, it will give you one of those P O boxes, and a lot of entities will allow that they won't allow you to use that as your home address or use that as your business address. Some of my vendors sent me a check once a month. They would never mailed to a P O box. They always say You have to have a physical address, so it's much better to use the UPS store. This is what I use if you look for my business address and actually try to drive by. All of my Web sites are now registered with this business address. You could drive by and all you see is UPS store. It's a layer of protection. It protects me, and it protects my identity and also helps me isolate my business and separated from my personal. I actually needed to switch to a P o box when I started traveling. I have a business address in America. That's where my business is based. That's why I filed my taxes out of. That's where everything's organized out of because I want to maintain my American present. This allows me to do all of that. It's a very simple process, and again, it just depends what kind of money you have to work with. But it really helps By Post office Box is something like $30 a month, which is worth every penny, because it allows me to travel. I don't have to worry about anyone finding my address online, and it protects me when you register your website and I use name cheap, they give you for the first year free some identity protection. Then you have to pay extra every time you re register to hide your address. If you make a mistake or when you re up, you don't collect that check box. They'll re publish your listing and then show whatever dress you registered with. If you're very fastidious, you can just trust that I can mask. But one little mistake in your dress could pop up online. This is why I like to have a business address. So even if there's a mistake, then only my business address gets revealed to the world. Thes airways and layers air. Protecting yourself and protecting your family from weirdos out there the odds of you encountering anything weird or very small, like one in a 1,000,000. But forewarned is forearmed, and I want you to have the information advance before anything weird happens before you get that piece of hate mail that scares you because it happens to everyone. It comes from nowhere, and it's always gonna be weird. And there's nothing scarier than getting a weird letter at your home address. I don't want that to ever happen to you, And that's why I'm sharing my story today to make sure you can be secure with social media. Your personal profile is not your business profile. Don't mix those two things together. It's a little confusing on Facebook to set up a Facebook page or set up a Facebook group. If you've never done it before, it feels a little confusing. What am I doing? You want to firewall between your personal page that has connections, all of your friends, all of your relatives, all of your kids or people who went to school with people. You work with all of those connections. You don't want your fans to get access to that. I don't do friend requests with people that. Follow me. If you were to find me on Facebook, you would find my business page. Now you could be a friend with my business page. You can message me personally. I respond to every message you could post on my business page wall. You could write messages that provides a firewall between my business friendships and my real friendship to my personal connections. Some people on their Facebook profiles have their cell phone number. They provide lots of photos of personal addresses and all that stuff. And maybe a picture you took five years ago you forgot about has some personal stuff. It's better to have that firewall. And in fact, if you're even more worried if you want to be really secure, you can create a brand new entire Facebook profile account to put a wall between your personal and business stuff. I used to have one of those for a while. Now I don't do that anymore because I have good fire well, with my business pages. But it's a great way to add that level security, the same thing for Twitter. Anything else? I prefer to have a separate social media account for my business actions. This allows me to have a higher level of security, and this is a great way to protect yourself, especially if you're a lady and you're worried about weirdness in your audience. I've noticed that most romance authors have a drawing for their picture rather than a real photo. I've seen a trend where people firewall their personal lives from their business lives, and that's something that you can d'oh and the value there is nothing weird happening down the line. Even if someone sends a piece of hate mail now, it's only gonna go to a P o box at the UPS store. My bookkeeper, who checks mail once a month, would find it would open the letter and then we probably throw it away. I don't even know if she would tell me about it. I physically wouldn't even ever touched the letter if it was really important letter, she'll skin and email it to me. Otherwise I never see it. Having these layers of protection ensures that nothing weird happens. You can't be intimidated. You can't have anything scary happen because it really feels bad when people write mean things about you. Planning in advance will help prevent you from hurting your feelings really stinks when someone writes something mean and it can make you wanna cry and hurt your feelings. I recently got a very negative review about my book. I have one really bad review on Amazon for my book, and they wrote some really weird things. One of the things they wrote about was that I don't know the difference between homemade clothes and a professional Taylor. In the book, I write about how I buy a pair of shorts from the mall when I'm on the mainland, away from my island. I bring them back here, show them to the local seamstress, and then she makes a copy, the pair of shorts using fabric. I bring her for each pair of shorts she charges about a dollar. I give her as much work as I can. I was tipper nicely. That's the going rate around here now, In this review, this person wrote that I'm going to professional Taylor and she said, I don't know the difference between homemade and high end tailored goods. She basically thinks that paying a dollar for a pair of shorts is the same thing is going to salvar O and fending $8000 for a custom suit. I have this review. And if you got Amazon, you can look at and talk about how I'm a jerk. I'm an idiot. I don't know anything. I'm so rich and so fancy because I have custom clothes. What I'm talking about a pair of shorts that I pay someone a dollar to make very hurtful, very personal attack. There was some other words in it that I thought quite unpleasant and inaccurate. Maybe you think I'm wrong as well. Maybe you think if someone else makes the shorts, it doesn't count is homemade. But if you saw this lady's location, you'd see it's homemade. She just lives across the street from me. It's simply wait for me to put more money in the local economy. I hired local people in as many ways as they can to support the island I live on. I'm trying to help the community, so I always buy stuff locally as much as I can. Rather than going through large businesses. They might hurt my feelings, and I can tell you right now that the person who wrote that review does not have their own identity protected. I found out who the person waas. I found their website and then I found two or three books they'd actually published on Amazon themselves took me 30 seconds. My first thought was to figure out who this person was and why they were writing something so mean. I initially thought it must be a competitive er. It must be someone with a similar book was trying to push down the rankings on my book and push away traffic. People do that. Sometimes I've seen in other areas where I've done business where competitors will write negative reviews just to mess with your ranking. But then I discovered they have two books. Neither book has ever received a review their two of the lowest ranked books on Amazon, and they're in totally different markets. I'm not sure why this individual chose to write such a negative review, especially when they're review profile links to the other books they've written and takes a few seconds to find everything. You just search by name, and suddenly you can see this is another author. Why would you write such a mean review if you don't want someone to do that to you. I wouldn't mind if they said I don't like this part, the book or that of that. But it was about me. It was very personal, and it's tempting to be emotionally damaged. It hurt my feelings for a few seconds, but you don't want to get drawn into troll battles. You don't want to get drawn into interacting. I didn't do anything else. I first check to see if it was a competitor or see if it was someone messing with me. And when I realize it's just a random person who's trying to do their own thing on Amazon, I let go of it. There's no need for me to write negative reviews about their books or paying any attention their books. And I certainly don't want you to do any of that stuff either. This is a story to educate you, not to incite you to do anything crazy. Read their book reviewer book and it's I don't do that. Please don't become part of the problem. You're going to get messages like these. You're gonna get naked reviews that you're feeling sometimes. Occasionally you're gonna get an email that hurts your feelings separate as much as you can. Feelings from action and let it go. Don't get drawn into replying to people that write negative reviews. Don't get drawn into posting on forums. When I saw that message on a form a few years ago, Fight started replying. It would have gotten a lot more exciting for those people. Didn't know that they'd hurt my feelings. I have a friend who's material appeared on the same Web site they were posting about him, calling him a loser. All these things he engaged. He started posting pictures on their website, joining the Forum, posting back, explaining, He's awesome, They're insane. Now he's probably the biggest person I've ever met. And when I say biggest, I mean unbelievably muscular. Total nice guy. But you're talking 282 £300 of raw muscle, 2% body fat. This guy's crazy. Shredded worked as a bodyguard for a long time, working security for a long time. He's really tough. So for him, there's no worry about posting and all those things. But he started posting back and getting involved. Those comments, and he ended up getting tons and tons of comments more more threads about him. The problem got worse, not better. I didn't do anything, and after a couple weeks, interest disappeared. My experience is that when you don't reply to the haters were applied to the bad messages. The problem goes away. Sometimes people get into these weird things on Twitter, where a random person posts a message to a celebrity and the celebrity replies, and it turns into a whole thing. It becomes a hashtag. Everyone starts making fun of the celebrity and the slippers. Feelings. All those things I saw this recently happened with one of the girls and Ghostbusters. Whether you think what was going on was OK or not OK, someone posted that they didn't like the movie, which is fine. Plenty people didn't like the movie. That's fine. Who cares? Plenty. People like or don't like my book. That doesn't matter. What matters is that she responded to a professional review of her movie. Someone wrote a review for a rather large newspaper website, not just a movie website. One of the top 10 newspapers in the world, they wrote a review about how they didn't like the movie, how they didn't like the special effects and other things. If you look at the numbers, the movies lost a great deal of money. So it's not like this reviewer was on his own. Plenty people didn't like the movie, but people did. Maybe you liked it. That's fine. The movie has plenty of negative use and some positive use. Those things don't matter. But one person in particular, she didn't like the person who wrote the review. They got into a Twitter thing. Then hundreds of other people started posting message to her into winter, too, and the messages got negative. The measures got me and her feelings got hurt. She kept pretending She's gonna quit Twitter than she didn't like. Everyone does people pretend to quit Twitter all the time. They get caught up into these like silly debates because they let it affect them emotionally. You have to disconnect your professional identity from your personal identity and Twitter. If someone writes in your message, you can click a button that says Block, and you'll never see a message from the person ever again. It's so easy to make the problem disappear. Do that. Don't get drawn into a debate, don't get drawn in emotionally and simply blocked the person. If someone writes me mean email, I add them to a block list inside of my email software, and I'll never seen email from them ever again. The male disappears forever. I very rarely have to do that with email. Haven't blocked an email in probably five or six years. Please don't get inspired to start writing the mean emails Just even get me to block you. Most people won't take the time to write anything mean in a private place. That's why most of my experiences were on a public forum. People have problems on Twitter. That's where everyone else can see the message. You very rarely get negative hate mail one on one anymore. When it's on social media or anything else. Just ignore. Just be ready because it's gonna happen. It's not gonna happen you very much. It doesn't happen to most people very much. Even at the top of the game. Don't get caught emotionally. Don't get connected, blocked the person. Delete the message, and that's it. I don't even know if it's worth going to the process of filing an abuse complaint or any of that stuff because then you're caught up. Maura, Maura. You have to deal with the problem or more. My experience is that once you block someone, the problem just goes away. It's not fun to pick on someone if they can't see your messages and they never reply. I don't check my Twitter that much. I'm not very good at Twitter. I'll be honest with you. It's the one social media platform that I've never really got into because you have to tweet 50 times a day and do all these things and seems very complicated to me to really stand up enough. It's basically like texting, but you're texting the world instead of yourself. You have to check every message I might have. People that are writing really mean stuff about me on Twitter, but I don't see it. So what's the point? They're wasting their time, and that's exactly my point. Let the person feel like you never even saw it, and then they'll get bored of it. It'll disappear. That's how you make things go away. Protect yourself a little bit by being smart, setting up your business like a business, isolate your business and personal identities, addresses business accounts all of that. It's not very expensive. It's worth doing right when you start out and then you'll be secure into the future. Take these small steps to protect yourself from dealing with the kind of stuff that I had to deal with. I know a lot of people that I work with a lot of authors. I worked with another people. They never use their real name. They never use their real photos for a lot of my projects. I don't use my real name or photo. I happen to do it on, sir, No, master, because I think it's important to really connect with you in a real way. But I did think about creating a new pen name, and I had some ideas, like Rock Blackstone. But my friend told me that sounds like a hard boiled private detective, which is where I got the idea. I like that kind of name, but it was just too much work and I didn't feel is necessary. I'm very secure in my business now, and I know what I'm doing. But I do isolate all my social media presence. I isolate. My mailing address is I don't post pictures of my family very often. I certainly don't post pictures of where I live or my dress and things like that. There's no reason to be silly with your security. Just take a few basic precautions, and you should be fine. If you do get one of those pieces of hate mail or whatever, don't worry about it. The last piece of ice I want to give you is protecting your phone number. It's very overwhelming. The thought of getting a business phone number. Most people think an 800 number cost thousands of dollars and 800 numbers about $4 a month cost nothing. It's so cheap to 1 800 number these days. Very, very cheap. You don't need one. You can get remote numbers in so many different ways. You can get a number through Google with Google Voice. I use an app on my phone called Hushed. I think it's an app designed to help you cheat on your boyfriend or girlfriend or wife or whatever, but I use it to give me an American phone number so I tax from within a nap. If you go through in my projects or we have a phone call together with my coaching calls. The number you see isn't my actual phone number. It's the fun. I'm inside the app. So if I ever run into a problem, I just changed the number and it takes one second. The number my parents call is not the number other people call, but if you call the act number right now, my phone will ring. It's a really good way of firewall in yourself. It costs $30 a year for the phone number right now, and that's because I order with 1500 text messages 600 minutes. I just renewed one of my numbers. I have two numbers inside this little app on my phone. Easy peasy. It's a great way to create a firewall without having to buy a second phone without having to deal with complicated 800 numbers. Those air two easy ways to isolate your phone number, and it's worth doing. You don't want to post a business address everywhere and then have your personal cell phone number. Nothing worse than getting phone calls that are weird. Recently, ever in the Democratic Party got their phone numbers posted online from a hacker. What a nightmare nobody got from the phone calls and texts. But if you just had an app inside of your phone that you knew was your business number, you just deleted. And none of those messages make it to you. Really good way to isolate yourself. Really easy way to protect yourself. It's worth taking these small steps now to ensure that you don't get hate mail that people don't get to scare you and intimidate you. And weird ways don't have to run into any scary problems like I dealt with. And when you do get hate mail, don't engage. Let it disappear, deleted Whatever. Once it's gone, once you don't reply, the person will lose interest. And this is how you could ensure that you deal with hate mail the right way, and you don't have to deal with any scary security concerns. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race Hit over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's bestseller. Serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. So you just listened to another amazing episode of the serve? No master podcast. Make sure to subscribe, and we're back tomorrow with another amazing episode.