Best Buy $1000 Gift Card Scam

Posted on April 6, 2012 by

I got a text message this afternoon, saying that the next 1000 people to follow this link and enter the code 1000 would win a $1000 gift card. I must have been half asleep, because I actually bought it and clicked the link.

Well that was a mistake…

It’s a scam!

I kept going because the sites and the url’s looked more or less legit and by the time I realized it wasn’t I’d already given most of my personal contact info. That should have been the red flag when they asked for that, but like I said, I was half asleep.

It turned out to be that scam where, in order to get the gift card, you have to first buy in to three of the “special offers” and then get three of your friends to do it too. THEN you get the gift card… maybe. I don’t know because as soon as I recognized the scam, I hung up.

Here comes the spam

Cans of SPAM inside a refrigerator.The worst part about this is, I know that an avalanche of spam is now headed my way. My email is relatively safe given I use Gmail, but that’s not going to help with text message spam. Mental note: next time give out my Google Voice number. Better spam protection than AT&T.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s not fair. Part of the reason I fell for this was, I almost never get spam texts. Maybe that’s something AT&T is actually doing right by me?

Well, consider yourself warned

I should have remembered the first rule of the Internet: if something looks too good to be true, it’s a trap!

I wrote this up because the most recent article on it was written a month or two ago and the structure of the spam message had changed. I figured a fresh warning wouldn’t hurt and, hey, maybe it would throw some traffic at this poor neglected site. :-)

Anyway, don’t click yes. End of story.

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How Does Google Analytics Change Now

Posted on March 1, 2012 by

My good friend and colleague, Sohini Baliga, got an email from Google today detailing all the latest changes to Google’s Analytics. In response, she posed this question to me:

How does Google Analytics change now that everyone I know has opted out of the web search history starting this morning?

To which, I had the following response,

To start by pointing out the obvious: you don’t know everyone. While there certainly is a segment of the population that’s still clinging to the belief, however naive, that their privacy on the Internet is something sacred, I would submit that a large percentage of the population not only accepts that their personal behaviors and associations are being tracked, but prefer it that way specifically because it makes them easier to market to.

I for example like the end results that come from my allowing Google to track my behavior. One of the direct benefits is that the ads Google shows me are based on my browsing habits because it means they aren’t wasting my time with stuff I’m not interested in and are, in fact, showing me things that I actually want to know about. Twice this week I’ve clicked on header ads in my email to things I was interested in. I also like the fact that when I search for service providers, Google is endeavoring to show me results that friends of mine, who are in large part like-minded, liked.

So, paranoid people aside, the vast majority of Google users, and especially power users like me, are not going to opt out.

The other side of the coin is that, while Google is no longer providing those metrics to Analytics end users, they are still tracking all that information for their own purposes.

Sohini then asked when I would be posting this point of view to my blog. Well, here it is and I invite anyone to comment here. Including her. :)

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“Dear Wikipedia…” Why I support the World’s Encyclopedia

Posted on November 21, 2011 by

Dear Wikipedia,

My grandfather holding me at his side on his death bed in March of 1978.

This was the only time my grandfather and I met. He died a few hours after this photo was taken.

My grandfather died in 1978, one month after I was born. He saw me exactly once, a few hours before dying in his sleep from the cancer he’d fought for almost a year. His dying wish was to see his namesake (me) so that he could, through me, touch the future he had worked his whole life to help build. (Grandfather was a chemist, with several patents to his name, many of which you may still be able to find in your home today.) Needless to say, I never knew him except through the stories that my mother has told me about him.

Months before his death, while sitting at his bedside in the hospital, my pregnant mother and he watched footage of the test flight of the prototype space shuttle, The Enterprise. My mother, a fan of science fiction (especially Star Trek), commented to my grandfather how marvelous the advances we’d made in the past few decade were in the field of space travel and asked if he thought I would live to travel among the stars as they did in Star Trek.

My grandfather, a career scientist, told her then that the advances of the next 100 years would not be in transportation, but in communication. The reason he knew this was because, even in 1978, my grandfather was among the few people in America who knew about the Internet in its infant form, ARPANET. Initially deployed across a network of just four routers in December of 1969, ARPANET had grown to nearly 200 routers by 1978, with new routers being added an average of every 20 days. (Click here to learn more about ARPANET.)  He knew this, and knew where it was going, which is why he told my mother that, one day soon, she would be able to access all the books in the Library of Congress from the comfort of her living room.

At the time, my mother says she thought the idea pure fantasy.

Today, Wikipedia, along with the Internet, smartphones, tablets and personal computers, is the realization of my grandfather’s dream: The sum of all human knowledge, compiled and shared is free to every human being on the planet.

I have and always will contribute to Wikipedia and its mission to help the human race share all that it knows with each other and I hope everyone else will too.

Posted in Internet News | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The Story of Panda

Posted on November 14, 2011 by

I need to get some good intel on here about the Panda update and what it has meant for SEO’s this year. The long and the short of it is, SEO has changed forever this year. And as much as it has made MY life more difficult, I have to give it to Google: they’ve proven once again that they are the rightful lords of the Internet.

Here’s a great video from SEOMoz on Panda.

Wistia

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World IPv6 Day | The Warning Shot Heard Round The World

Posted on June 7, 2011 by

Join the Test Flight, June 8th, 2011.
This morning I received a notice from Google that tomorrow, June 8th 2011, was World IPv6 Day. As I occupy that space between laymen and developers, (I watched Star Trek, but I never played Dungeons and Dragons) I did not immediately know what this was. When I read up on it, it actually turned out to be a real statement on just how fast the Internet has grown in the last 20 years, and on most people’s difficulty with keeping up.

The Problem: We’re running out of room!

In an interesting case of the virtual world mirroring the real world, the Internet, like Northern Virginia, is running out of room! Now there’s no shortage of servers, or companies to build them nor is there a global silicone shortage. No, the problem is that Internet is running out of IP addresses, the numbers that identify servers on the Internet. (Like this 174.121.162.130) While one would imagine twelve digits would certainly seem to supply us with an overwhelmingly vast supply of possible combinations, the reality is that the Internet has become that big. Google now reports that its crawlers index over 1 trillion websites. (And businesses wonder why they have to hire a guy like me to help them stand out in the crowd.)

The Solution: Create more virtual real estate.

Continue reading →

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SEO Professionals vs. Developers

Posted on February 15, 2011 by

An Appeal to Companies Looking For SEO Services

A friend of a friend asked me to help out with beta testing a new product for freelance Internet professionals, such as myself, that trolls the Internet each morning compiling a list of job postings for people like us and distributing them according to which kind of work you indicated you’re interested in. As I am an SEO professional who specializes in writing optimized content for local, small business websites, I asked for leads on SEO work. What I got were a bunch of listings for developers.

Now, this was less the fault of the software, though it is a beta and this is one of the kinks the developer knows he’ll have to work out, than it was the fault of the people posting the job listings. There is a fact that is well known amongst developers and SEO professionals that seems to be having trouble making its way into the knowledge base of many companies. That is that, developers and SEO professionals are not in the same business.

SEO professionals : Developers :: Salesmen : Contractors

When I sit at a table across from a potential client, the first hour is usually spent educating them about who I am and what exactly I do. To get people thinking in the right direction, I usually start with a simple analogy. A website is a business’s virtual storefront. Just like a brick-and-mortar store, to build and run a website requires several different professionals with different specialties.

  • Developers are contractors. They frame the walls, run the electricity and the plumbing. They install your cash register and setup your credit card machine.
  • Graphic Designers are painters and interior designers. They make sure you have a pleasant atmosphere that’ll appeal to your target customers.
  • SEO Professionals are marketing experts. They get you your listing in the yellow pages. They do press releases in the local papers. They hire some high school kid to go stand on the corner and twirl one of those signs shaped like a surfboard.

It’s like asking your plumber to do your advertising.

Today, I’m a marketing pro, but I still remember how to properly frame a wall and lay tile thanks to the jobs I had in high school and college. However, I can tell you that there are professionals out there who can redo your bathroom a lot faster and a lot better than I can. Asking an SEO professional to do a developer’s job, and vice versa, is not that different from asking your advertiser to do your plumbing. As as SEO professional, I understand html, but only enough to do what I need to do. I can evaluate a website and know if it needs to be done better, but I can’t do it. My real skill is that I’m a writer and a salesman and that’s exactly who you want me to be. Developers are contractors and that’s exactly who you want them to be. You wouldn’t want your plumber doing your advertising, and you don’t want your developer doing your SEO.

Posted in Optimization | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Burning In Dell

Posted on January 28, 2011 by

Buying a New Dell Laptop Was My Biggest Mistake for 2010

If you ask my wife, she will tell you that I am way too understanding when it comes to customer service. Being from Connecticut, she considers it a matter of pride that she can deftly bully a customer service rep into giving her additional benefits when she has been inconvenienced by a failure of their product or service. You should see her swell with pride when she tells the story of getting the VP of operations for the Northeast at Verizon Wireless on the phone. Conversely, I have always subscribed to the philosophy that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. I also understand the needs of business and where exactly I fall in the scale of things.
So you can imagine how frustrated I would have to be to feel it an absolute necessity to impart the following to anyone who listening: I SHOULD NEVER HAVE BOUGHT A DELL COMPUTER FOR MY SMALL BUSINESS. Doing so has cost me more in lost work time than I would have spent on a better, more reliable machine. Continue reading →

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The Dangers of Geotagging

Posted on January 14, 2011 by

A Public Safety Announcement

While doing some research on the latest employment of Geo Tags in SEO, I stumbled across this little snippet of information on Wikipedia. As a former Marine Corps physical security specialist and home security consultant, I know how dangerous the unintentional dissemination of information on the Internet has become. It is important, in our modern age, not to fall into the false sense of security the technology pushes us toward, and always be aware of what information we are making available to an adversary, whether they are an enemy combatant, or simply some kid looking to break into your home to steal your valuables.

Following a scientific study[11] and several demonstrative websites,[12][13] a discussion on the privacy implications of geotagging has raised public attention.[14][15][16] In particular, the automatic embedding of geotags in pictures taken with smartphones is often ignored by cell-phone users. As a result, people are often not aware that the photos they publish on the Internet have been geotagged. Many celebrities reportedly gave away their home location without knowing it. According to the study, a significant number of for-sale advertisements on Craigslist, that were otherwise anonymized, contained geotags, thereby revealing the location of high-valued goods—sometimes in combination with clear hints to the absence of the offerer at certain times. Publishing photos and other media tagged with exact geolocation on the Internet allows random people to track an individual’s location and correlate it with other information. Therefore, criminals could find out when homes are empty because their inhabitants posted geotagged and timestamped information both about their home address and their vacation residence. These dangers can be avoided by removing geotags with a metadata removal tool for photos before publishing them on the Internet.

Everyday I work with people for whom so much of the technology today is pure mystery. These are the kinds of things these people are at risk of and I think it behooves those of us who do understand just how much information is out there to help educate those who don’t know.

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The Power Of The Business Card

Posted on December 22, 2010 by

The business card is the single most powerful business tool–dollar for dollar–you can invest in to help you generate business through the people you meet.

It’s a compact, energy-efficient, low-cost, low-tech representation of your business that keeps working for you hours, weeks, sometimes even years after it leaves your hands!

At a minimum, it ensures a potential business partner has your contact information. At the very best, it leaves a powerful impression that makes people want to do business with you and refer you business from the people they meet.

That said, be sure to use your most powerful business tool effectively. Here are a couple of tips:

  1. Never leave home without them!
  2. Find opportunities to hand out your cards – conventions, trade shows, mixers, and other social events.
  3. Include them in all your mailings. Enclose several cards in every packet of sales material you mail out. Include one with a thank-you note you send to a business partner whose referral brought you a major contract, plus several more.
  4. Hand write something on a card you’re giving out (e.g., a useful website, the name of a good book, the name of someone else they should get in touch with). This is will make you more memorable and give the card a greater chance of being held on to.
  5. After receiving a card, jot down a few notes on the back of the card so that you’ll remember that person and what you talked about.

“Strategy is buying a bottle of fine wine for your date. Tactics is getting him or her to drink it.”

What tactics will you use to get the most impact from your business cards?

 

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Show No Fear Of The Competition

Posted on December 15, 2010 by

Source WINNING WITHOUT INTIMIDATION by Bob Berg

Most business people have been correctly taught never to speak ill of their competition. Doing so will only make the salesperson themselves look bad. Unfortunately (in my opinion), most salespeople have been taught not to say anything ‘good’ about their competition as well. I disagree with this and have found just the opposite to be true in my selling career.

Whenever I’m speaking to a prospect and they bring up my competitor, I go out of my way to say something nice about him or her. Why? Because I’m a nice guy? No, not at all (although I do hope I’m also a nice guy). The reason is, that by complimenting my competitor, I’m actually building myself in the mind of my prospect. If your prospect brings up the name of your competitor and you speak highly of him or her, what does that tell your prospect about you?

  1. You are Confident. You must have a lot of confidence to not only not speak ill, but actually speak highly of this person.
  2. You are Successful. If you are confident, you also must be successful. After all, unsuccessful people don’t have that type of confidence in themselves.
  3. You are Safe. Wow, thinks your prospect, ‘If he/she speaks that well of their competition, I never have to worry about negative things being said about me or any of my staff.’

Obviously, if you know for sure that your competitor is a thief, you can’t lie and speak well of them. But, that aside, if you can possibly say something nice about him or her, do so. It will only reflect well on you.

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