Crazy Start to the Week
Posted On: 2011-03-07
Well here we are back for another week of mayhem and madness ... at least that's the way it seems to be heading right now. I tried to be a good girl and work hard today. I even got an early start on today's work at 4am but somehow things have all gone pear-shaped and now all I seem to be doing is running around putting out spot fires on several clients' sites.
At the same time as I'm doing that I'm also looking at an interesting but rather unpleasant offer I've just received in my inbox. A well-known and reputable company here in Australia is claiming to be associated with Google and will build a free website for any business that wants one.
The catch is that the site is a really ugly one-page template and you have to allow this company to run your Google Adwords account.
Now where is all that going to take us? Well my crystal ball is a bit murky but when you combine a nasty little move like the one above with Google's attempt to clean up the search results with their latest update things start to look decidedly BAD. Maybe we're about to see a reduction in the number of organic results on the first search results page for most terms and an increase in the number of paid listings.
Of course that's just a possibility and it's not likely to have much impact on us here in adult online but it's certainly something to think about for anyone who is dabbling in mainstream web design. If you're doing some of that as well as working here then perhaps Google wants your business and it's got the might and power to take it.
Smarter or more gullible?
Well there was a time when I thought that Australians were pretty smart and street-wise people. There was also a time when I believed that people who surf the web and maybe even shop online where becoming more sophisticated and less likely to fall for a scam.
Those ideas got blown out of the water today with the publication of a report by a government body that monitors the number of people who are lodging complaints about getting ripped off online. Now these aren't the sort of claims you might see from a disgruntled consumer who wasn't happy about what they bought from an online shop ... or a trader on e-Bay.
The people mentioned in this report are those who really got scammed or cheated and lost mega-bucks in scams that were so obviously fake it's a wonder anyone actually fell for them. And the number of people who fell for those scams has more than doubled in just one year.
Sure there are more people out there ... including organized crime ... who want to separate people from their money but the number of new people coming online is diminishing. Add to that the fact that publicity regarding online scams is increasing and you would have thought that fewer people would be falling for all those scams that are out there.
Sadly that's not the case it it's not just the dumb people who are falling for them so when you see an offer that's too good to be true and you get the urge to snap it up ... don't ... just take a deep breathe and walk away. If you do that you may just miss out on a bargain but you're more likely to miss out on getting scammed for all the money you've worked so hard to earn.
Refresh button? What refresh button?
And right there was another long interlude in my scheduled work for today. I just spent over an hour with a client who really didn't know what the 'refresh' button on their browser was all about. They thought that we hadn't added a 'buy now' button to the front of their website simply because they couldn't see it and didn't understand that they needed to hit the 'refresh' button to see the latest version of their website.
Well I guess that just goes to disprove my theory that people using the Internet were becoming more sophisticated and goes a long way towards convincing me that most people are definitely not as smart as I thought they were.
I guess there are times when the fact that you and I manage to make money online from affiliate sales is more miraculous than we realise and we should be more thankful for each and every sale we make.
Well if this is Monday then I'm not sure I really want to see what the rest of the week is likely to bring but I can't turn the clock back so just bring it on. Sigh.