Saturday, 20 September 2014

Marketing Strategies – It’s NOT Google Calling!


It’s my goal to teach entrepreneurs marketing strategies and how to navigate the Internet so they can benefit from all the opportunities it brings. However, many people are still reluctant and I can’t say that I blame them especially when there are so many scams going on. It truly outrages me that these things happen but as I constantly say, we must get educated. Education is key to being able to enjoy benefits of the Internet’s fruits and not have to worry about being a victim of a scam. 

Just a couple of days ago someone called one of my clients that by the way does use Google’s advertising and said this, “Your listings have been flagged for non-compliance and will be removed if aren’t fixed.”  This person claimed to be from Google. Well of course my client was alarmed and emailed me immediately.

Marketing Strategies – How to Know it’s Not Google Calling


  1.  If you’re a Google adword advertiser then you are familiar with your Google dashboard. 99% of the time that is how Google will communicate with you – through your dashboard. So if you have an ad that hasn’t been approved or there is any sort of problem with your account you will find an alert or red flag in your dashboard.
  2. If you get calls on your phone that says. “You need to update your Google listing”, that is also a scam. Newsflash, Google doesn’t care if you update your listing or not and doesn’t waste time on stuff like that. It’s simply a scare tactic to first get your attention, then come to the rescue so they sell you something. Google says in black and white on their website, “Google does not place robocalls asking you to update your listing“.
  3. If you get calls on your mobile phone there should be an opt-out feature listen for that and click the number to opt-out, hopefully you won’t hear from that particular scammer again – but more will follow.
Unfortunately there’s not a whole lot we can do about this especially since FTC gets over 200,000 calls a month about these types of issues. If you click here Google has set up a great page warning you of various types of scam alerts and what to do about them.

Marketing Strategies- Google Isn’t The Only Prey

 

Just this week I was scammed – I didn’t really fall for it but I have to admit at first glance it got me and I’m a pretty tough cookie to pull a hoax on! :-)

I got an email that said this:

Dear Valued GoDaddy Customer.

Your account contains more than 6043 directories and may pose a potential performance risk to the server. Please reduce the number of directories for your account to prevent possible account deactivation. In order to prevent your account from being locked out we recommend that you create special tmp directory.

Or use the link below:

mya.godaddy.com - (I broke this link for your safety because I didn’t want you to click on it, but notice the mya before go daddy – that’s a clue that it isn’t their website.)

Sincerely,

GoDaddy technical support.

Copyright (C) 1999-2014 GoDaddy.com, LLC. All rights reserved.

Admittedly I knew this was a scam but was too scared to not call GoDaddy and make sure – I don’t want to risk my website going down. See this is how they get you – with fear.

The Internet brings tremendous opportunity to all of us to market and grow our businesses in ways like never before! Please don’t let fear keep you from benefiting from it. Just get educated and use great common sense. Visit my website often as it’s my goal to be an education resource for you!

No comments:

Post a Comment