Surely a Facebook ad that promises that I can get money from the government to buy a house, pay bills, or start a business as part of “billions of dollars” of bailout money must be legit, right? Oh wait, it’s yet another fake blog, but this time its sending us to the good ole “get government grants for free!” trick. What’s next? How about a blog about someone’s incredible winning streak on an online casino, or the adult video web site that is absolutely free? When will consumers … Continue reading →

Technology has democratized learning. Think about life in the middle ages – only nobles and priests could read, in part because books were so expensive to produce. The printing press changed this and enabled the masses to get access to reading material. Similarly, higher education was once a privilege for the elite. But the spread of land-grant public universities opened college to millions. And now we have Internet, which has created online universities that enable students to take classes in their spare time, without quitting their day job … Continue reading →

I’ve written several times about my experiences launching and growing a networking group (Online Lead Generation) on LinkedIn. What started with 60 friends in the lead gen industry in March 2008 is now a 4500 member, worldwide group, apparently one of the 1% largest LinkedIn groups on the planet. My assumption about the growth of this group has been that it would see “hockey-stick” growth. In other words, membership would grow slowly at first until there was a critical mass of members, at which point the virality (network … Continue reading →

It’s been a strange week for PPCAdBuying, my up-and-coming paid search consulting juggernaut. To be specific, I had several meetings with potential clients and I managed to persuade all of them that they should absolutely, positively . . . not hire me! So how did this happen? Well, let me give you a little background on each of these potential clients and why I steered them away from hiring me. Client #1 is a hot young start-up poised for success. They’ve got great funders, a super-smart founding team, … Continue reading →

A few weeks back I pointed out an egregiously fake blog claiming to be an individual’s story of amazing weight loss through an Acai berry diet. It turns out that this blog was one of about 100 that are currently flooding contextual advertising online. Almost all of them recommend the exact same affiliate products, with the same pictures, ‘testimonials’ and fake comments. As I noted then, I think this is really fraudulent marketing and I think it is only a matter of time before either the ad networks … Continue reading →