Please Help!

[She's Got a Plan]

[americanwahm]

How frustrating for her. Has she tried writing a letter to the competitor asking her nicely to not use her business name in ads? I don't know if it will work but she could try it.

[alice]

I had a similar problem on AdWords and they didn't seem to want to help me because I didn't have a registered trademark. But, I was able to bully the advertiser away by posting my own ad in rebuttal. Not sure if this will work for your friend.

The person was running paid survey ads with the headline "Internet Based Moms" --- so I wrote an ad that said something like:

"Internet Based Moms
Don't waste your time with surveys.
Learn to run a real online business
InternetBasedMoms.com"

or something like that. The ad disappeared soon after. Normally, I wouldn't have taken issue with it, but I really didn't want to be associated with online surveys. In my opinion, it was totally irrelevant and a little distasteful.

But outside of that, your friend has to learn to deal with competition and there will be people using her ideas...ideas cannot be protected. It's frustrating, but if you get bogged down in what other people are doing to you...you won't grow in your own business. There's lots of room for success on the net. She should just focus her efforts on getting her share of the pie.

If she just rechannels this frustration into something positive, she'll do great!

Alice

[She's Got a Plan]