Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts.
(sub-title: captcha, gotcha, betcha.)
Free contest giveaways. Free products just for entering. Free eBook downloads.
You no doubt have seen all of these phrases and many more that are similar. Are they a scam? Will you get ripped off?
Well sometimes, but not always. Chances are pretty good in the Blogging world, especially in; Make Money Online (MMO,) Search Engine Optimization (SEO,) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM,) fields. Why not?
The reason they are not usually scams is because the professional writers in these fields would be screaming out about them being phoney baloney!
That said, there is certainly power in numbers. RSS subscribers are important to Bloggers and website publishers, as they show the advertising world that their particular site has a good following and is a worthy place to spend some of their oh so valuable advertising dollars at. Traffic is King. Subscribers mean revenue.
But what they REALLY WANT, is your email address. Now we’re talking real power. You have answered one of the giveaway contest announcements. You signed up and used the captcha tool to prove that you are not a robot, and then you clicked on the confirmation email link that the contest website told you to. (Math equation,) captcha = gotcha!
It wasn’t very long ago that marketers didn’t have to worry about SPAM mailings and you would get inundated with a few good offers mixed in with myriad listings of Junk Mail. Thanks to current American law it is illegal to send unsolicited email, and thanks to various email software programs, most of those junkie offers go into your spam folder. There you can review and delete forever, or through attrition they will simply just go off your system after a certain time period that you have set.
Once you have subscribed, used captcha, and confirmed, you are now Fair Game! If the contest promoter is smart, and most are, they still will not send you SPAM, because you are now a valuable commodity and they would not want to risk losing you.
You have gone through various gyrations to tell the conference promoter that you exist, you are real, and YOU DO respond to offers on the Internet!
These marketers build email lists of people that are known to respond to Internet advertising. Chances are the marketer will explain in their Privacy Policy that they Will never give your email address to anyone! Hmm… Did they guarantee that, or better yet, did they guarantee that they will never SELL your email list? Not likely. These mail lists are worth their weight in gold.
All of the above is to just call your attention to the fact that marketers want your email address. You may choose to give it to them or not.
Now do I enter contests and download free eBooks, and give up my email address for what appear to be pretty good deals? You betcha! Some of these deals are very helpful. The information given is extremely valuable.
My writings on the Internet for about ten or so years have not been in any of these Make Money Online fields. Programming has never been anything that I ever cared to learn. I marveled at the ability of these digital poets and hired them as employees to convert my wants and wishes into personal computer tools and utilities that could be used for every little thing my heart desired.
Well I am retired from the business world and I discovered that I could make some extra income by creating websites and Blogs in subject fields that I knew something about, gain readers and followers, and then do some advertising on my sites.
Starting with free templates and free hosting on freewebs.com, then Googles’ Blogger, it started to become a natural thing.
The money trickled in.
Then it seemed as all the Big Kids used WordPress! So I got a free account on WordPress.com and built a couple of sites, then realized I would not be allowed to monetize them, so I downloaded the WordPress program, bought some domains from GoDaddy, and then tried to wiggle this software into submission to do what ever I wanted. Halt!
It isn’t exactly easy, unless you are already a Geek and understand programming.
So, after subscribing to many different RSS feeds, mmo Blogs, and dozens of Internet marketing sites, I realized I was just going to HAVE to learn how to do this stuff myself.
The best thing I did was to download Caroline Middlebrook’s eBook, How to Develop Money-Making Niche sites with WordPress.
It is free at http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/
After reading many WordPress articles, blogs, how-tos’, and listening to all of the WordPress podcasts that I could find, it all still was gobble-de-gook, until Caroline Middlebrook took me step by step and explained the simple facts along the way, as to just how to get this software installed and running.
By learning the steps of each installation and plugin implementation it gives you confidence to be able to seek out new themes, new plugins, and it all starts to come together quite easily. Programming is still a mystery to me, but it was rather thrilling to figure out how to make a line of text appear as BOLD. That should explain my level of programming expertise.
Well here’s the deal. You do not have to be a programmer. If you are, it will be much easier for you and you will be able to tweak things into shape for each project you are working on. Do not let programming inexperience stop you from putting up some websites and Blogs. Follow Caroline’s instructions and it is easy!
Now as for me, I’m off to some Geek sites to register for some Free Gifts!
