Yesterday, February 15th was a historic day for The Success Center with the launch of the Entrepreneur’s Guide to Twitter Success e-book. Hundreds of visits to the site, tons of downloads of the book, and plenty of good reviews buzzing around the net about it. What could possibly go wrong?

I made a mistake, a really, really, really, big mistake. I, Rod Kirby, sent out an unsolicited email announcing the launch of the book to over 300 people in my Gmail account. Yes, you heard me correctly, I sent out a spam mail.

Why?

I had been working into the “wee” hours of the morning trying to make sure I had everything ready for the e-book launch, only had around 6  hours of sleep from the night before, and I was having troubles with my Constant Contact account. I needed to send out a quick announcement email and my Gmail account was the only thing I had available – so I sent it.

This mail went out to my 300 contacts, most of which were not on my Success Tips email newsletter list. There were some concerns over privacy, spam, and some people flat-out asked me to remove them from my contacts.

As a result of this mass mail-out, my web host, Fused Network, suspended my account which took The Success Center offline for over 8 hours. This action hurt my traffic, spread of the e-book, and in the end punished those that enjoy this site on a regular basis. I have been in negotiations with them for the past couple of hours and needless to say, they will continue to host The Success Center and I have promised never to do that ever again.

What do I have to say for myself?

I definitely was tired, excited, and very anxious to spread the good news of the e-book, but there is no excuse to sacrificing people’s privacy for self promotion. I am very sorry to the deepest corners of my soul to those I emailed, people who weren’t able to download the e-book, and regular visitors to this site. It was never my intention to send anyone spam all I can say is that I got caught up in my own excitement and didn’t exercise good judgment.

I wanted to address this situation because everything I do here is not about me. I really have everyone’s best interest at heart. To my web host, Fused Network, thank you for giving me a second chance. You guys really are the best host in the world and it would have definitely hurt me to have to move elsewhere. To everyone reading this, you have my word that this incident will never occur again. I have definitely learned a lesson and will move forward with the wisdom close to the future work I do here.

If you have a question, comment, concern, or even a criticism, feel free to leave it in the comments below. I’m a big boy and I can handle it.

Thank you for your continued support.

Rod

Disclaimer: We will never share your email address with anyone, period.