So you need to charge more money. (I already mentioned charging more money in fact – but never explained how.)

It’s almost a given that people need to be willing to pay you more, as well. That much is obvious. And that’s the real question here: how to get your customers to pay you more – willingly.

It’s simple. Not easy, mind you – but simple. You need to do work that demands more money. Your finished work needs to say to the customer, “Hey man – I’m awesome. You know it. And I ain’t cheap.”

I know someone who embodies this. He’s a general contractor, and presently he’s not only very much in-demand in my city but he’s also not “cheap”. If you’re a penny-pincher, and you’re watching your budget, and you would do the work yourself if you only knew how…well, he’s not the guy to call. Because he charges more money than other contractors that purport to do the same work.

But remember: he has no shortage of work. And, you will not find him in the phone book or listed in the paper under “Handymen”. He hands out cards to his clients…and they tend to pass those on to their friends. (Their rich friends!)

My contractor friend can do this because he made a decision a few years after starting his business: he would only do top-notch work, and insist on using high-quality materials. He did that, and met resistance from customers. He had only a few jobs at first, but his attention to detail and pride in his work paid off, because he started getting business from people who saw his handiwork in their friends’ homes.

Now, years later, he’s built up a reputation as an honest contractor who does the best work in the city. And he can charge what he’s worth.

So how do you charge more? Do work that’s worth more and demand what you’re worth. It will come.

It was probably two years ago when something happened that taught me this lesson; I supposed I would have agreed with you (before that) had you told me: “Shawn, never do things that are under-handed. Playing dirty is unacceptable.” I would have said, “Yeah, you’re right; ok.” But I’d never had to experience what that really meant. Until one day, at my new job.

Someone, somewhere, a person who wouldn’t reveal themself, was harrasing my boss and the employees. We were receiving mocking, critical emails about our websites. We saw intrusion attempts on other sites we ran. We looked for evidence, and we found a suspect in a previous unhappy (“disgruntled” I think is the word most often used for these people) employee who was fired.

I won’t go into how we knew…but we knew. Too many things pointed to this specific person as the culprit. This person even emailed one of our people to ask how a website was doing, as if a website needed checking-up on. That website was the same one we found compromised a short time previously.

So naturally, I was incensed (“pissed” is a word often used for how I felt). I looked up this person, and found a blog entry that attacked my place of employment and, on a personal level, attacked my employer. So…I decided to go black hat on ‘em. I spammed the search engine results every which way, and knocked him out of the top ten for his own name.

I thought it was kinda funny. My coworkers couldn’t believe it. My office had no idea such a thing was even possible. And then I felt bad about doing it.

It turned out that the “victim” (depending on how you define or look at the situation) also noticed, and through some luck of his own found out who I was. I let it go, having pulled the brakes on the industrial-strength torrent of new search results I had introduced a few days previous, and the thing corrected itself.

He had his search results back for his name in a few days.

But all did not end well: I ended up pissing off (even further) someone who had shown evidence already that he was at least a bit unstable and/or vengeful, and I had sullied my own reputation. I had made an enemy, whereas I previously had zero enemies. I’d done something that made me feel awful – regardless of who knew or didn’t know about it.

It wasn’t worth it, from any angle.

Thinking about this recently, it came to me as a clear lesson: never play dirty. It’s a simple rule, but until you’ve learned it firsthand…you might not really understand it. In other words, there are reasons for this rule.

In business, this is abundantly evident. I saw how it played out in the eco-system of my city and its tiny website community and the people who are a part of it. And I learned why we shouldn’t do things like that. Good thing, too – because “business” is just a small version of life. The way we run our businesses and work with others is a microcosm – a small version – of the way we live. You can’t separate the “business you” from the “real” you by very much.

Are you a “dirty” person? Hopefully not. No one wants to be labeled that way. If you’re not, then do business in a clean fashion. It’s a reflection of who you really are.

Never play dirty.

I think that, in general, knowledge – that is, specialized knowledge about specific subjects – can give a person a certain measure of “power”, by which I mean they can sound smarter than the next guy. And it might give them an edge in some situations.

But if I was hiring someone to be my employee, I’d rather them have ability than knowledge.

Is knowledge power? Certainly. Is ability power? Definitely.

The wonderful book Rework mentions this. The authors talk about the accepted and traditional ways of running a business, and they contrast it with how they do it. And these guys are no lightweights – they run 37signals.

They say that when hiring, you should consider what a person can do as being of much more importance than where they got their diploma – if they got one at all. In fact, what the authors of Rework talk about in their book just verifies what I’ve seen for years working in various ecommerce businesses and websites: the best people are usually self-taught hackers.

The university-educated prospects? Sometimes not actually qualified to do the job.

Who do I want to work for me? The guy who knows what he’s doing. Period. I don’t care if he went to an Ivy League school, a community college, or if he even went to college at all – if he has the ability.

This concept also has application in the internet marketing world. I would guess that most self-titled affiliate marketers do little more than absorb knowledge, but actually “do” very little. The forums and members-only sites are full of “tactic-junkies” who are always trying to learn the latest ways to make money online. But I’ll tell you what: practice and just TRYING affiliate marketing on your own will be far better.

Sure, reading a couple of books and hanging out on some forums is O.K. for a total beginner – for a short time. But when you know the basics, you can’t keep hanging around the baby pool. There’s a time to get into the deeper waters and splash around. It’s the only way to really “get it”.

So is knowledge power? In a sense, it is. But only when it’s practical knowledge that’s made the transition to ability.

So the shop Fleurty Girl is abiding by the legal threat handed to them by the NFL. Too bad that the NFL has to pick on this shop (and I have to assume a few other retailers have received similar letters).

I would agree with the NFL’s action in protecting their trademark…if it was something they came up with. However, I remember seeing the phrase “Who Dat?” used for virtually my whole life. As far as I can remember, it began as a home-grown rallying cry – locally thought up by who-knows-who and hand-printed on posterboard and such, to be help up during games, or scrawled on the back on car windshields with shoe polish. So now the NFL claims it’s theirs?

[In fact, the phrase "Who Dat" has been around way before the NFL or even football...it was part of the vaudeville/minstrel tradition for many many years, and only LATER become incorporated into New Orleans' football culture. Again: it's something that organically grew out of New Orleans' unique way of doing things. It should NOT be allowed to be another opportunity for the NFL to make some extra dollars.]

Ridiculous. Some things need to be left alone. Especially something dear and special to local New Orleanians. Leave us what is ours, NFL.

PS – Buy whatever else FleurtyGirl is selling. Support them!

Does this sound familiar? Because if you’re in the same boat as most Americans, it should sound familiar. We aren’t exactly sure what vehicle brought us to our current destination, but we know we don’t want to be here any more. And Uncle Sam’s coming to rescue us. We just have to wait for him to come pick us up.

Only thing is…from past experience, we know we shouldn’t really trust Uncle Sam.

If you’re grounded in reality, you’ve learned to have a healthy distrust of government (in general) and you haven’t forgotten that these people are just people, and they’re fallible. They make some huge mistakes and do the wrong thing, often. They lie. And they do not want to look bad.

[And to make everyone out there happy, lest you think I'm about to bash the messiah Obama, I happen to have the same level of distrust for the Bush gang. So there. Now just listen for a minute, and consider what I have to say.]

I do not care what the major media and government is telling us about the financial crisis – it simply was not caused by the “free market” and cannot be blamed on corporations. When you hear blame being connected with artificially-low-interest mortgages, that’s closer to the real cause – but not quite “there” yet.

The blame should be leveled solely in one place, for just about everything: the Federal Reserve. Specifically, the system of worthless paper money the Fed controls. We’ve been living on borrowed time for years (even now!) and I don’t care how good of a speaker Obama is: injecting more worthless “money” into certain sectors of our economy can’t heal the patient. (Remember? It’s already dead.)

The real reason our economy is failing can be traced to the Fed. The Federal Reserve Bank is the originator of our miseries, and until we have “real” money again and actually allow such a thing as the “free market” to exist, we’ll continue to suffer.

Now, I’m not an authority. (Not that that means much, since the “authorities” don’t seem to know much, themselves.) But I make it my main interest to deal in common sense and wisdom wherever I can find it, and I’ve found quite a bit of actual truth being given out. There actually are some sane thinkers out there who care enough to explain how it all works, and what’s going on.

I just read the book Meltdown by Thomas E. Woods, for one – and I have to say it’s the best explanation of economics I’ve ever seen. (Chapter 6 – “Money” taught me more than I ever learned in school.) Just go get that book; I guarantee you will find it to be extremely eye-opening and valuable. You WILL have a clear understanding of the economy after reading this short book.

After you grab that book and read it (please read it – it’s packed with info, and not too long) just listen to some of the guys who’ve proven they know what they’re talking about. (No, not that Bernanke clown.) Guys like Jim Rogers for instance.

Sane economic practices will become obvious to the mainstream, one day. My only hope is that we don’t have to suffer enslavement, total ruin, or a one-world currency takeover before we get there – and we lament what “could have been”.