Is this a scam?

It’s generally not a scam in the strictest sense. They aren’t lying, but they do leave out a lot of important facts. Most of these places are using Adwords to promote your business. Adwords allows you to bid on a keyword (choose an amount are willing to pay per person who clicks through to your site) and therefore is called Pay Per Click advertising. Using this system, you can be at the top of Google (the sponsored listings show at the top and on the right), by just paying enough money.

They usually leave out one or two different pieces of the puzzle. What keywords will I come up # 1 for. As you may imagine, it’s much cheaper to come up #1 for a long very specific keyword phrase like, “Beaverton Oregon Commercial Carpet Cleaning” than for a more general phrase like “Carpet Cleaning.”  The fewer people competing for a keyword phrase the less money it costs as it’s priced in auction style. Secondly, how long will it be #1. If you bid $4/click on Carpet Cleaning, and you have a monthly budget of $100, after the first 25 people have clicked on your ad, it will come down for the rest of the month.

These folks charge more than you would need to pay if you went directly to Google and signed up for adwords (they are marking up the keyword phrases). Additionally, they may not be creating the most optimized campaigns. Google takes the quality of the ad as well as the quality of page it’s being sent to, into consideration when determining the bid. In other words if your ads aren’t setup correctly, you will pay more for each click.

Hopefully this can save you some serious money when you are approached by these folks.

In researching this I found a few people online, saying this is against the terms and conditions of FaceBook. I looked up the terms, and don’t find a reference to this being against the rules. You’ll find one statement that says, “You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.” I believe this is basically saying that you can create multiple accounts as long as they are all for you. This said, you need to make your own decisions and be aware that FaceBook could delete both/all accounts if you are found breaking the rules.

**** UPDATE ****
Alert reader, Brad Schrock, Beaverton Attorney, found where FaceBook specifically states that they see it as a violation of their terms to create multiple accounts. Here’s the link.

If they catch you doing this, they may take down both accounts. Also, I suppose they could blacklist you. I betting on a more likely risk of losing the “duplicate” account, and I’m leaving mine up. If they take one or both down, I’m going to ask for clarification on what part of their terms they are talking about.

Put up a second FaceBook account at your own peril!

Another way to have a business presence separate from your personal, is to use pages. You can find much information online about pages, or if you’re subscribed to SocialNetworkingProfessor.com you can see how to set them up. These lack many of the connection tools that a normal account has, so I don’t find it to be as useful. I suggest you have one, but an account is good too.

Steps for creating a new FaceBook account, and adding people from my existing account to a new one.

Note: I chose to make my new account the personal one, because I have far fewer personal contacts as business ones. If the ratio was the other way around, I’d create a new profile for business. Additionally, I needed to use a new email address for this new account. If you don’t have multiple email addresses, you can create a free one at Gmail.com and you can even set up a “filter” on there to forward messages to your main email account.

Step 1: Create new account
Go to the home page of facebook. If you are logged in, logout and go to the home page again. You can create a new account directly from that page.

Step 2: Add Yourself as a Friend
From the home page, when you’re logged in, you can search for people to add as friends. Search for the name on your original profile and find your original profile. Click add friend.

Step 3: Log out of your new account and into your old one

(optional) Step 4: Create a friends list or lists and send a message
If you’d like to tell your friends that you’ll be requesting them to be friends from a new account, you can create a list or more. You click on Friends>All Friends>Create List at top and then select the people to be in the list. Put at most 20 in a list, so you’ll be able to email them. To email them, you click on inbox and then compose.

Step 5: Accept Friend Request and Suggest Friends
The whole reason we sent a send request from your new account to your old one, was so you could use your old account to suggest friends to the new one. When you accept the friend request, FaceBook will ask you if you’d like to suggest friends. This is where you can select the appropriate people who you want to add to your new account.

Step 6: Log out of your old account and into your new one

Step 7: Look at your Suggested Friends
Now you should have good suggestions. You need to click on see all, and send invites to all of the people you want to connect to this account.

Now you have your new FaceBook page setup and you are on the way to having the people connected to it.

Ready to learn more about FaceBook, Linkedin, and Twitter?
Take a look at SocialNetworkingProfessor.com

This got me thinking. Why does it seem like some people just instantly buy? Here’s my BFO (Blinding Flash of the Obvious). The repetition has already taken place before you get there. In other words, through various sources that prospect has already heard many times how much they need what you’re offering.

The trick is tapping into an internal dialog that someone is having. Let me give you a totally self-serving example:

Fred the business owner knows he needs a website. His clients keep asking him if he has one, and everywhere he turns he sees evidence that this is a must. At the same time, he keeps having the same discussion in his head, “Yeah I know I need a website, but I can’t afford it.” Now I come along with a simple marketing message, “Basic Websites Under $500” This instantly presents a potential solution (a scratch for an itch) that he has had for a long time.

If you can craft the right marketing message, the repetition has already been done. You only need to delve into what your customers really need and want, and tap into that inner dialog.

To make a long story short, I had to process 10’s of thousands of emails. During this exciting work, I figured out something. When you are processing email it’s much easier if you sort by “from” instead of the default of sorting by date. This puts all of the messages from the same people together. This makes it easy to delete a block of spam all from one person (click on the first message, hold down shift, click on the last message, press delete). Additionally, it makes it much easier for reply’s because if someone has sent you multiple questions, you can read all and reply to all in one email.

To sort by from you simply click on the Column Name (in Thunderbird that’s ’sender’, but I believe in Outlook Express it’s ‘from’).

Using this method I’m often able to process a couple hundred emails within 20-30 minutes, including answering several.

I’ve had several people tell me one of two things. Either social networking takes too long, or it’s two confusing. In SNP,  you’ll learn how to get past both of these potential hurdles.

[youtube nQbUG0YGAww]

I created a new Gmail account just for backups. I forward a copy of all of my email to this account. If I was ever to have a problem, even if I just accidently deleted an email, I can go back and search for it at that Gmail account.

Many hosting companies give you the ability to forward copies of your email to a secondary address. If you’re not sure how to do it, you’ll need to contact your hosting company.

Needless to say, if you host with me, you can ask me.