Hire Service Providers Using CraigsList the Smart Way

There’s no doubt that there are people advertising on CraigsList that will work for cheap. There are hundreds of classified ads on the local CL from people offering services like painting, landscaping, handyman help, building websites, bookkeeping and a million other services.

The only problem with that is, well it’s CraigsList. By that I mean there is no vetting process or requirement of qualifications to place an ad on sites like CL. The problem with that is, these kinds of sites attract people that may be scammers, or really just aren’t qualified to do the services they are offering.

Now there are two ways to approach hiring a service providers off CraigsList:

Wrong way: You can browse or search ads in the relevant services category and reply to these ads blindly. Which opens you up to any person you reply to. Not smart.

Right way: Place an anonymous services wanted ad and let the providers that reply open themselves up to you instead. Isn’t that the way it should be? Why put yourself out there by replying to unknown people who place ads on CraigsList?

By following the tips below you can begin to protect yourself from scammers and unqualified service providers.

1. Place a services wanted ad in the appropriate section.

2. Use the anonymous email feature and do not put your real email address or your phone number anywhere in the ad.

3. Describe exactly what you are looking for and if applicable include a budget for your service needs.

4. Submit the ad and wait for replies.

By having the service providers reply to you, you are putting the shoe on the other foot which gives you the upper hand. Any professional service provider should reply with their contact information which should include their name or business name and phone numbers.

Now you can research them anonymously before you decide to reply back to them. Start by giving them a good Googleing. Search for the business name and person’s name. Search the phone number and even the email address. If there is something you need to know about that person or business, Google should find it for you. Make sure to search for each piece of information independently, this will give you the most thorough results.

Things you might find through researching

Reviews about the business or service provider, both good and bad. Any complaints or other business or personal associations should show up as well.

You might find other classified ads this person has posted. Things like stuff for sale ads and other things may or may not be an indicator of their character or financial situation.

Use the information you gather from your research to perform your own vetting process and narrow your list of who to respond back to. This will ensure you have the upper hand when hiring a service provider off CraigsList or any other classified website.

The bottom line is, do not tip your hand until you have to…

The inspiration for this post came from Cape Cod Home Improvement’s Consumer Guide to Hiring. If you need to hire someone on Cape Cod for home related services, check it out.

August 15th, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: Other Stuff | Leave a comment

A Hyperlocal Adwords Targeting Example

Online advertising can be big money, but it doesn’t have to be. If your business is targeting the right customers in the right areas you can be extremely effective with a small budget. Below is part of a simple example Adwords advertising campaign for a fictitious widget rental company located in the Mid Cape Cod area.

A very simple hyperlocal Google Adwords example

Let’s say we own a widget rental business in the Mid Cape Cod area and want to run paid advertising on Google Adwords. Here’s one part of a campaign we might use:

We would setup the campaign to run with very long list of “exact match keywords” like:

sample Mid Cape Cod widget rental ad

Mid Cape Cod widget rental ad

  • “widget rental”
  • “widget rentals”
  • “where can i rent a widget”
  • “where can we rent widgets”
  • “rent widgets”
  • “cape cod widget rental”
  • “widget rentals cape cod”
  • and many, many, many more …

Now since we are only renting widgets to people in the Mid Cape area, we use the geotargeting settings to target people that search for the above keywords within 10 miles of our business location.

Hyperlocal Adwords ad targeting

Hyperlocal Online Ad Targeting

Notice how we also specified in the ad copy above that we rent widgets in the Mid Cape Cod area only?

This will discourage clicks from people who might be inside the target area, but want the widget delivered outside of our service area.

This ad copy strategy also gives the people who are in our service area a sense of exclusivity and let’s them know that we are the place to call for widgets in the Mid Cape area.

In addition, we would also use negative keywords to eliminate showing up for non relevant searches.

We would also run an additional campaign that had no geotargeting but included only exact match location based searches in our service area  like “widget rental yarmouth ma”, “dennis ma widget rentals”, etc…

Misspellings would be added to all campaign keyword lists along with a few other tactics to round out a complete widget rental Adwords campaign.

Since the targeting is extremely tight (a 10 mile area) and widgets are not super popular rental items, the budget here is going to be relatively low. However, this ad campaign should convert extremely well for us which means more of the right widget rental customers.

July 5th, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: Marketing | Leave a comment

Like Share Combo for Facebook Landing Pages

facebook like share combo button

Like/Share Combo

Here’s a quick tip to get some more mileage out of your Facebook advertising dollars.

If you are advertising on Facebook and sending people to a custom landing page use a Like/Share Combo on the landing page.

Place it above the fold right where people coming from your FB ads will see it.
Put it right in their face.

This has converted really well on landing pages for me. The image above is from the landing page for the campaign stats below. If you take away “my like” I got 33 likes/shares out of 312 clicks which means better than 10% of those 312 people liked or shared the landing page with all their friends. Plus, since this landing page was part of an actual website, I did see the like/shares increase on some of the other pages on that site as well.

Facebook Ad Stats

This brings lots of residual traffic during and after the campaign and will stretch your FB ad dollars.

No Faces

I don’t use the code that shows people’s “faces”. I think it creeps people out off of Facebook and I think the likes/shares convert alot better without showing faces. Without the people’s faces, it seems more anonymous to me and I think the average FB user thinks so as well.

Here’s the code for a simple Like/Share combo:
<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=THE_LANDING_PAGE_URL&amp;layout=button&amp;show_faces=false&amp;width=250&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:250px; height:30px"></iframe>
<br />
<a name="fb_share" type="button_count" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php">Share</a><script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share" type="text/javascript"></script>

The only catch is that you must be advertising something that people will want to share with their Facebook friends.

If you are advertising colon cleanse, this tactic may not work out so well for you.

June 28th, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: Marketing | 2 comments

Fighting Member Registration Spam in ExpressionEngine

Member registration spam has become an issue in running ExpressionEngine websites. I have been using EE since it was called pMachine and up until a few months ago, member spam was not really a widespread problem.

ExpressionEngine has grown in popularity over the last few years (especially since the release of the free core version) and now that enough people are using it, EE has become a target for spammers.

There have been many solutions to combat member registration spam posted in the EE forums and most recently in the ExpressionEngine blog.

These methods include changing the member profile trigger word, advanced captcha, etc…

First, changing the profile trigger word is not going to work for long, unless you change it every few days. All changing the trigger word is going to do is cause a failed registration in the automated spamming software which is run off a list of sites that is fed into it. As soon as the list of urls to spam is updated (usually via a Google search – see below), you will start getting spam registrations again.

While this may throw off the spammers temporarily, it is not a very good long term solution. Why?

It’s the footprint stupid

The best way to combat member registration spam is to remove the footprint. This means you need to remove any reference to ExpressionEngine in all your templates, especially in your forum and member registration templates.

Spammers target sites to spam by using searches to extract lists of sites to target. Take this simple search for example:

inurl:register “expressionengine” registration About 15,600 results at this time

Even if you changed the member profile trigger word, your site would still bear the telltale footprint “ExpressionEngine” and show up in searches similar to the above example.

The phrase ExpressionEngine itself is not the only footprint that can be targeted by spammers. There are many other advanced “footprint” searches that can turn up EE and other cms sites to add to spam targeting lists.

Most of these relate to the default text for registration fields, comment fields, footer, etc…

Footprints like:

  • “Password Confirm”
  • “Screen Name”
  • “notify me of follow-up comments” –>About 156,000,000 results
  • “Remember my personal information” –> About 1,640,000 results

Unfortunately removing these footprints is the only long term strategy for stopping or at least minimizing the impact of spam on your EE website.

Human spammers

There is no doubt that most of the spamming is done by bots or software, but there are several overseas outfits that employ actual humans to do this.

This means that advanced captcha and reCaptcha tricks are only going to maybe stop some of the automated spam. Human influence has been apparent from some of the EE member profile spam I have seen.

At the very least deny the benefit

You should stop your member list pages from being indexed by turning off the Guest Member Group’s ability to view Public Profiles. Plus, you can block search engine spiders from member profiles via robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /member/
Disallow: /forums/member/

This will make the spammers attempts at gaining backlinks fail, because the member profiles will not be indexed by search engines and will not count as backlinks for the spam websites.

While you’re at it, add the member registration forms to the robots.txt as well. This may keep your registration forms out of the search index and make them harder for spammers to find:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /member/register/
Disallow: /forums/member/register/

Member registration, comment and other spam is quite an annoyance, but by following the tips above, you may be able to reduce it’s impact on your ExpressionEngine website.

Good luck!

May 11th, 2010 | Tags: | Category: Web Development | 3 comments

Local State Rep. Domain Name Follies

This past week a domain name dispute of sorts involving Representative Cleon Turner and his opponent Patrick Foran showed up in the Yarmouth Register and on Cape Cod Today whose parent company is also coincidentally Mr. Turner’s web design firm.

Apparently Turner had let his domain name (cleonturner.com) expire and Foran picked it at some point a few months ago according to reports.

MA State Capitol

I have been involved in domain names for over a decade, so I couldn’t leave this story alone.

Both politicians got what I would consider an equal beating according to the public comments that were left on the various blogs. They both had to eat a bowl of blog chowder on this one.

This should also turn out to be a good lesson in online reputation management for both the politicians and whoever may be reading this.

I am not going to get into the ethics of this incident, because this is politics, and unfortunately ethics aren’t really an issue in politics. Plus, I don’t really care and actually find the whole thing including the interests and “wordplay” of some of the “news” outlets rather comical.

Here’s why this was an epic fail on the part of both politicians

Mr. Turner:

Letting your domain name expire in an election year is a massive fail on your part. It basically means that you do not have your sh1t together and does not portray you as an “on the ball” 21st century politician.

You are actually lucky that Foran picked up the name and not some russian p0rn spammer, so you may want to thank him for that…

Mr. Foran:

I don’t think you did anything illegal as was alleged and you apparently transferred the name back to Turner without incident, but at any rate here are a few tips for next time:

Apparently you used private registration which was kinda smart, but you were supposedly backtracked by your email address via a phone call to the registrar.

Next time get an anonymous email address (whatever@gmail.com) and make it look foreign, really foreign.

Something like (deepash_shanzil2336@whatever.com) should suffice.

You could also save yourself the $8 for private registration by using an address and a phone number in a foreign country, like Thailand or Russia for instance. You could use the address and phone number for a hotel in one of these countries which could be had in 2 seconds via a Google search.

The whois info would be false and would likely lead to you not being able to renew the domain, but who cares, at least it would screw up your opponent for quite some time while they chase the boogieman in some foreign country.

Also buy the domain on a prepaid credit card for a one off transaction on a brand new Godaddy account just for this purchase. This way you could effectively give the domain away to whoever. Like maybe post the whole Godaddy account login info on Craigslist or some foreign equivalent with the title “Free Domain Name”.

If you are really paranoid, you could even use an open wifi connection at one of the local libraries, or a coffee shop to register the name via a proxy, that way it could not be traced back to you by an IP address.

All is fair in love and politics… lol

May 10th, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: Reputation Management | Leave a comment
 
  Older Entries »