An Update on Those Time-Wasters

Stop Wasting my Time sign

So, what rubbish emails and calls have there been to Brooklands Radio station in the last few days?

An email titled “‘How to Photoshop your food and drinks to make them look stunning webinar” –What? You must be kidding.

An email about an APP for employee engagement – Any business that wants to interact with its staff through an APP doesn’t sound to me to be worth working for.

The Hottest Weight Loss Solution. Get your free bottle today – Yeah right! Another sad scam. This one from the Ukraine.

An email asking for volunteers supposedly from the Volunteer Centre in Surrey – but no content in the email after the title. Just a link to click on that is labelled Unsubscribe, but clearly is a scam.

A message from Barclays Bank wanting to pay us $1.2 million from the United Nations- but the real email address it’s from is [email protected]. Not exactly Barclays Bank. Just another pathetic scammer.

These people just waste our time and clog up the Internet with rubbish.

A Magic Phone Number and Call Blocking

old style telephone

The Magic Phone Number
When buying something online or registering online there is usually a form to fill in of your details and quite often this insists on your telephone number even though you know it’s not needed.
This is annoying, plus, you wonder what they will do with your phone number. Will they sell it or give it to third parties?, resulting in phone calls you don’t want.

As the forms usually check the number is in the correct format, you need a real phone number to input.

You can use 0333 88 88 88 88 (the last 8 doesn’t matter if the form only allows 11 digits.)
When, they call, those cold call culprits will hear a short recorded message:-

“trueCall38 is handling my calls. I prefer not to be contacted by phone, so please contact me via my email address.  Goodbye!”
Problem solved.

Do companies block this number from being entered in the form?   No, but if they do then Trucall38 have a display page “Wall of Shame” but none has done so thus far.
Q. Why do companies ask for your phone number?
They rarely really need it, and you don’t know what they are going to do with it. Interestingly, experts say that asking for a phone number can reduce the number of people who complete an online form by 25%. That’s a big loss.

Of course, some companies sell their customers phone numbers on to other companies, so you don’t know who’ll get your number.
Call Blocking
The business behind the website trucall38.com have developed a call blocking device called Trucall that is reported to have been 95% successful in blocking nuisance calls. The technology has been licensed to BT and is incorporated in their BT8500 phone.
Trucall claim that half a million people in the UK are now protected from nuisance phone calls by their technology.

The guys behind Truecall say “We thought that everyone should have the opportunity to opt out of handing over their phone number unless they wanted to, so we launched the trueCall38 number – a completely free service”.
If you don’t want someone to have your phone number – tell them 0333 88 88 88 88

Fake Watches Are Big Business

wrist-watch-183143_640

Over the past few weeks, Brooklands Radio station has received hundreds of emails trying to sell fake watches. These are harmless as they are so obvious.

But it is odd that specific scams and spams  appear and become very common very quickly then disappear for a period only to reappear in a different guise later on. This is a very common one currently.

Marketing people tell you to vary your sales pitch and try different versions to see what works and these scammers seem to have read those Marketing books.

We received similar emails selling fake watches but with a variety of titles – some nothing to do with watches – just something to make the recipient open the email message.

Titles such as

Impress your co-workers with a fine new watch

Or Rolex doesn’t want you to see our prices

Or Economy uncertain – copy watches are the way to go

Or Diamonds at a steal

Or Green dial submariner at a steal

Or No-one will believe its fake

Or Cheapest luxury items

Or Start off with a new hobby

Or Its dream time for those who cannot afford

 

Selling fake watches is of course illegal even if you tell people the watches are copies or fakes it’s but presumably big business based on the number of emails being sent out about the watches. Remember that such sales may fund more serious illegal activities.

SEO Pay by Performance

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All businesses get endless emails offering SEO services.

SEO services is Search Engine Optimisation which just means tweaking your website to try to get a higher ranking on Google and other search engines.

At the radio station we get more than a hundred of these emails each month.

But the SEO people have a difficulty in that Google keep changing the rules for how they determine the ranking of a website and hence where it appears in the search engine results. Google do this to try to stop SEO people cheating the system. Google want the best websites to appear top of the list – not the ones that try to cheat the system.

A recent email from an American Online Marketing business says SEO is dead!

But they have a solution to that – you pay for results rather than the work involved.

At first sight, this might sound like a good deal – you only pay if they get your website high up on Google’s rankings.

But the devil is in the detail.

For example, suppose you sell sofas. If you type Buy a sofa in Google you get about 42 million results. To get to the top of that list on Google for the search phrase “buy a sofa” would cost a fortune.

But if you make your search phrase more specific then it gets easier.

Maybe your sofas are handmade and covered with leather. Now if you optimise your website to attract people searching for ‘buy a sofa handmade leather’ then Google only finds 500,000 results and that would still cost a lot to get to the top of that results set but hugely cheaper than the previous one.

And so on – the more detail in the phrases you’re trying to be the top result for – the easier and hence cheaper it becomes.

Ultimately you can find specific phrases where it is practical to get to the top of the list – but the more specific the search query the less people are going to make that search and hence the fewer actual customers you could possibly get from this.

But the point is that although the SEO business could find phrases that get you to the top of the results –  you’re unlikely to get much business from it – hence you pay them for nothing.