Newsletter ArchiveSUBJECTs:Collecting Credit Card Numbers - Someone Must Pay-Feedback The Internet 800 Directory - http://www.inter800.com The Internet 800 Directory Newsletter This issue is for Friday, January 18, 2002 Table of Contents 01. Collecting Credit Card Numbers 02. Someone Must Pay-Feedback *01 Collecting Credit Card Numbers People have been using e-mail to mass market now for several years. It’s no surprise that the bad guys are using e-mail to try and separate you from your money. Most are easy to spot, like the guy from Nigeria who wants to give you a couple of million for transferring his ill gotten gains out of his country. However this week I got a couple of scam e-mails that I’m afraid might catch a few people off guard. The wording below is from an e-mail I received this week addressed from eBayCustomerHELP@eBay.com (the headers show it actually came from internetx.de): Subject: Confirmation email Dear eBay Customer: We at eBay services would like to take the time to thank you for making your purchase with us. Your purchase '#88h3vv-2n,' will be shipped to your current billing address within the next 2-3 business day's. If you feel that you have received this email in error and did not purchase any items, go to our Order Cancellation page and fill out the proper information to cancel the order. Order Cancellation page: http://www.eBay.com-CancelOrder.fw.nu Customer Services, eBay Sales. Because you didn’t place this order, your next action might be to follow the instruction in the e-mail and visit the well-constructed address http://www.eBay.com-CancelOrder.fw.nu This address doesn’t go to ebay.com, it’s just made to look like it does. If you visit this address, you will find an exact copy of an eBay webpage waiting to collect your credit card number and the information needed to use it. Please don’t be fooled by this scam or one similar. Be aware and enjoy the net. Chuck Arning at chuck@inter800.com We’re Talkin’ Serious” Bone Suckin’ Sauce ! Winner: “Battle Of The Sauces.” Created in true western North Carolina style. Tomato based all-natural, sweetened with honey and molasses. Order your Box of six today for $39.99 +s/h. Toll-Free 1-800-446-0947 or online http://www.BoneSuckin.com *02 Giving back I received a great deal of feedback on last week's article and I'd like to share some of it with you this week. For the most part, the emails I received had pretty much the same tone. Many fear that the original enticement of having a web site (low publishing costs) has been supplanted by the ever-growing costs of getting the site noticed. ---------------------- Antonia Teixeira, of Beyond2000 Office Technologies (www.beyond2000officetech.com): "If the small business can't afford to be listed with the major search engines, we lose recognition even though our services may be equal to and sometimes better than the large corporations who have lost the individual service touch. The small fish in the pond are about to be eaten up by the bigger fish and are going to have to swim harder and faster." ---------------------- On the subject of Yahoo charging for a site review, I received these: Grace Ligo: "My company is small and cannot afford $299 for each search engine, which seems to be the trend. Especially when they even refuse to guarantee that the site will be listed, and the fee is non-refundable. My prediction is that they are shooting themselves in the foot." ---------------------- Clint Schultz: "For many of us who own and operate small one person businesses trying to eeek out a few dollars to live on, this changing trend toward charging may well be the death knoll to E-business for us." ---------------------- Judy Cheney, of The Rosemary Company (www.rosemarycompany.com): "I really appreciated the information you provided and I agree totally. As a small company who has been on the web longer than most, we have had experience with the arrogance of Yahoo. We tried to submit a new site, paid for it and were told no because we had some of the same items on another site. Others found a way around their system, but we were honest. They took our money and wouldn't even discuss it." ---------------------- On the subject of paid listings vs. non-paid listings: Lisa Mueller of Celebrity Entertainment Corp. (www.supercon.org): "I will begin by pointing out a few facts about my local (printed) telephone books. I receive 2 kinds of books to my home and office. One is a gigantic comprehensive book of the entire county, which seems to be quite complete, for the most part. The other is a small "community" directory covering a few towns within a few miles distance. Apparently it costs additional money for businesses to be included in this smaller version of the directory, since some that are listed in the big book are not in the smaller one. Subsequently, the smaller book, in my home, is used as a doorstop, a shim for a broken chair leg, or anything else creative we can come up with. But, it is NEVER used as the reference that it was intended for. To me, it is quite USELESS, if it is incomplete! Now, as for the big book, EVERY company is listed (in a tiny little line) with their name, address, and phone#. Interspersed in there are also display ads, which are (of course) paid for by the companies. But, if I am looking specifically for Sam's Grocery Store, at least I can still find it, along with its address and telephone#. In a nutshell, I guess what I am getting at is, if the search engines cease to be search engines and become the "ad circulars" of the Internet, I (for one) will have no further use for them, at all." ---------------------- The consensus of the feedback I received is, people don't mind paid listings. Folks realize that someone must provide sponsorship for the service or it cannot exist. Further, paid listings returned on a specific key word or product search usually match that search extremely well. Non-paid listings are also desired, especially when a specific entity or company is sought. A few paid listings, coupled with a near-limitless supply of non-paid listings seem ideal. Last, I received an email from Paul Davis, of The Davis Company (http://davis-company.com). Paul has been an advertiser in the Internet 800 Directory since 1996. I found his tale to be extremely informative and potentially useful to anyone trying to promote their web site: "I accidentally discovered something recently: you can draw a lot of traffic to a site without even trying very hard if you have something unique to offer. After implementing a real-time monitor for my site traffic, I quickly discovered that most of the traffic to my site was to an obscure page I hadn't even thought about in months! At one point several years ago during the process of trying to enhance my site's content, I came across a list of all the long distance carriers and their associated "PIC" codes. You know, the "ten-ten-la-la-la" numbers they advertise on TV. So I did some massaging and beautification, posted it, and then pretty much forgot about it. Well, it turned out that over the course of a year or two, a number of spiders had crawled it and, lo and behold, when you entered "PIC" in most of them, my page came out on top! Followed, interesting enough, by two or three others who had obviously lifted my whole page, narrative word-for-word and listings together, and reposted it on their own sites! The second thing it turns out is that ... and here's how little homework I had done on it in the first place ... these PIC lists get out of date really, really fast. Like every few weeks they revise them as new carriers start, old ones go bankrupt, etc. So here I was with this crappy old list, hopelessly out of date, missing probably more than half of the carriers on the current list and full of dead ones, and it was still generating more than half the overall traffic on my site! So I thought, gee, maybe if I'd do this seriously I could get even more serious traffic. So that's what I did. All in all, the total cost for this "advertising" is approximately $20 a month. For this I get about 100,000 page views per month on my site, every one of them carrying a link box to the rest of my site and a special teaser link for those who have just completed a search. Somehow I think this is a better deal than paying $20 for one click on Overture. I don't care how "targeted" those Overture clicks are, out of those 100,000 non-targeted visitors that come by for the same money I'm pretty sure I'm going to get more than one who's interested in and ready to buy what else I have. Especially because he's going to know already that my company is a serious operation from having used the database. Anyway, that's my story. OK, OK, here's the link to that search page on my site, to save you looking it up in a search engine: http://davis-company.com/pic/search.html" ---------------------- Bravo Paul! To me, this has always been the strategy for success on the web. Provide something useful! Be a resource or a reference that people need and they will visit your site again and again. Establish a trust with these people and when they need your particular service, whom do you think they'll go to first? IMO, far too many commercial web sites are nothing more than flyers or glorified business cards. What is the impetus to buy from YOU? How do you distinguish your site from the myriad of other sites offering the same products/services? Back in 96, when the Internet was still a toddler, there was more of an attitude of community. Those that enjoyed the wonders of the web often returned the favor by giving something back to this community. For instance, early web sites often featured a list of links to the web sites the publisher found most useful (like ours). In contrast, most of today's links pages exist solely as a place to provide a reciprocal link to the site you'd like to have a link on. The bottom-line is, the search engines aren't the only ones getting all capitalist. Web site publishers are also guilty of building sites that do nothing more than promote their company and/or sell their products. It's rather ironic that things have changed like this. At a time when there are soooo many web sites competing for viewers, the publishers of those sites are doing less to attract their attention. I would like to know what YOU are doing to attract people to your site. What does your site offer, besides a chance to buy your product? Send an email directly to me describing the resource/reference/other that your site provides, along with the URL. I'll give the best one a FREE ad in the 800 Directory for a month and a mention in this newsletter. George Paul The Internet 800 Directory 800-299-1879 george@gotollfree.com Vegas Vacation has the best rates on Las Vegas Hotel Rooms. Don't make a reservation without calling us first! Call 800-637-6442 or visit our ad in the Internet 800 Directory: http://inter800.com/02281174.htm Banners? Pay-per-click? Why not target your market with links or information placed in relevant content? The Internet 800 Directory Newsletter offers direct access to business people who are interested buyers. Advertising: Information on how to sponsor this publication: Call 800-299-1879 Thanks for taking to time to review our newsletter for this week. If you know of anyone that might benefit from receiving this newsletter, send them to (http://www.inter800.com/news800/ ) where they can subscribe. All Contents Copyright ©1995-2001 The Internet 800 Directory Subscribe To The Newsletter: |