The thing is ... the harmful emails are never really from paying customers. They are almost always from freetards who remind you that... - you are expected to

The thing is ... the harmful emails are never really from paying customers. They are almost always from freetards who remind you that... - you are expected to provide phone support to them (even though they are not a paying customer & have no intent of being one!) - you are wrong to set up any type of conversion funnel for the 1% of people who will convert (but which costs the freetard type as much as 30 seconds of their time as well) - accuses you of selling their email information (when you have not), curses at you, is shocked when you dish them back any of their own cooking, and then calls you non-professional - they sign up for your free autoresponder series (which is more valuable than most paid courses on SEO) then takes the time to send you a nasty email rather than clicking the unsubscribe link in the emails ---- I didn't have to deal with tons of this stuff when I set up our paid membership site. I mean some...but a fairly small amount. Where the entitled freetard type became enraged was when I set up a conversion funnel and required registering a free account to get our firefox extensions. And in our support software the contrast between paid customers and freetards is almost unbelievable. As an extreme comparison, the paid person could have an issue like being locked out of their account (which they are paying for) and label it as an issue of low or medium concern and write a polite "please help" type message ... whereas the freetard who is not a paying customer (and will never be one) typically labels their issues as urgent or critical. ------- The other thing freetards try to do is try to bully you on social networks and stuff and threaten to destroy your brand if you don't self-implode your business model to support their rude behavior. Some of our posts about freetard culture... http://www.seobook.com/are-you-fighting-human-nature-measuring-opportunity-cost http://www.seobook.com/are-you-fighting-human-nature-measuri... http://www.seobook.com/i-stopped-caring-about-links-well-almost http://www.seobook.com/i-stopped-caring-about-links-well-alm... http://www.seobook.com/professionalism http://www.seobook.com/professionalism http://www.seobook.com/why-many-successful-people-become-jerks http://www.seobook.com/why-many-successful-people-become-jer... and people far smarter than I have noticed the freetard culture phenomena being harmful to business http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12tier.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12tier.html "The basic idea of this contract," he writes, "is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising." and, as a sharp contrast to freetard behavior, this post mentions how private paid communities have mechanisms in place that prevent the above types of abuses amongst customers (namely people who pay are of higher quality, and people won't make absurd demands in front of others) http://www.seobook.com/why-private-communities-work-so-well http://www.seobook.com/why-private-communities-work-so-well