Degree Forgers Switch to Fake High School Diplomas

High schools students who failed to graduate are being offered a sneaky and dishonest way out the chance to buy a fake high school diploma.

This is the latest trick in the booming diploma mills business, where all sorts of dubious accreditations are offered, usually for a couple hundred dollars.

We’ve previously explained in a past issue, Old School Standards – How To Spot a Distance Learning Scam, how some of these shady “colleges” and “universities” work, often with respectable sounding names and promoting themselves in respected publications.

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©Copyright Audri and Jim Lanford. All rights reserved.

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NEED MORE CLIENTS? REBOOT YOUR MARKETING

In the press of day-to-day business, it's easy to fall into a pattern of reaction about marketing and sales. Email and phone calls arrive and you answer them. Opportunities are presented to you, and you act on them. A marketing project occurs to you, and you begin working on it. Does this sound familiar? Is operating in this reactive way producing the results you want in your business?

If not, it's time to stop and intentionally break the pattern. Set aside half a day, or at least a couple of hours first thing in the morning, to review how your marketing and sales are going. Because we typically spend more time looking at what's wrong than at what's right, break that pattern, too. Start by looking at what is working for you in marketing.

Ask yourself questions like these:

• Where are most of my clients coming from?
• What marketing activities do I enjoy engaging in?
• Which of my clients or client projects are my favorites?
• Where in marketing and sales am I using my personal strengths?
• When my sales or marketing is successful, what makes that possible?

When you have a list of eight to ten items that seem to be working for you, use them as a guide to diagnose what isn't working as well as it could. Here are some of the discoveries you might make:

• Where clients come from — Many of my clients discover that the majority of their business comes from personal referrals. Meanwhile, they are putting a great deal of effort into social media, tweaking their website, or attending large networking events with minimal follow-up. When they change how they use their marketing time to better match what brings the most clients, business improves.
• What you enjoy — A colleague of mine loves producing events. It gives her a feeling of affinity and connection when people show up at her invitation and she can provide them with knowledge and inspiration. Before she realized how much she enjoyed this, she struggled with marketing. Now her entire marketing plan is based on hosting events, and her business is thriving.
• Which clients/projects are favorites — We all have a certain type of client or a specific sort of project that makes us feel good about ourselves and our business. Changing the direction of our marketing to attract only more clients and projects like those can motivate us to new levels of energy while simultaneously streamlining our marketing.
• Where you're using strengths — Tactics like writing, public speaking, and one-to-one conversations make use of my own strengths and talents. When doing these things to market my business, I can shine. I'm much more effective when engaged in these activities than when pushing myself to attend networking mixers or make cold calls, areas where I'm not as strong.
• What helps you succeed — One of my clients learned that she can be much more successful at marketing when she has a three-item to-do list in front of her each day. It keeps her focused on the most important tasks, and brings her back to her own agenda when she gets distracted.

Use what you discover from this exploration to make a new, proactive, focused marketing plan. (My books Get Clients Now! and The One-Person Marketing Plan Workbook can help.) Then restart your marketing with your mind cleared and resources refreshed, just like your computer after you reboot.

You've no doubt heard people say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. So... don't keep following the same marketing and sales pattern if it isn't producing the results you want.
Copyright © 2014, C.J. Hayden

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Identity Theft: How to Freeze Your Credit

2014 has turned out to be a disastrous year for identity theft, especially with the theft of credit card details and numerous security breaches at retailers and card companies.

In fact, most of us will probably be lucky if at least one of our credit card details failed to end up in the hands of crooks.

The only consolation is that, in many cases, these data thieves end up with incomplete information. For example, they may have your card number but not the three-digit security code on the back. Or they may be short of other critical identifying information.

Click here to read the full article. 



©Copyright Audri and Jim Lanford. All rights reserved.

Reprinted with permission.

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7 Long-Term Care Insurance Scams

The cost of increased longevity is a growing need for long-term care (LTC) for our aging population.

Insurance coverage may be one solution but the LTC marketplace is peppered with crooks selling dud policies or charging victims for protection they either don’t need or will never get.

In this week’s issue, we explain the main LTC scams and how you can avoid being duped — plus we have a warning about a new and unusual lottery scam.

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©Copyright Audri and Jim Lanford. All rights reserved.

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Bogus Casting Calls Lead Straight to Your Wallet

The surge in popularity of TV and local talent shows is feeding the dreams of many performers into carefully choreographed casting call scams.

The unprecedented number of amateur talent shows that just might lead participants to the big time has given this particular scam a major boost, often with dubious organizations describing themselves as “casting agencies.”

Local auditions for genuine shows are now held across the country, followed by regional and, finally, national selection processes — a huge scope for the tricksters.

Click here to read the full article. 


©Copyright Audri and Jim Lanford. All rights reserved.

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GET CLIENTS FROM SPEAKING: BE THE GUEST, NOT THE HOST

"I don't recommend you host your own teleclass," I told my client.

"Why not?" she asked. "I thought public speaking was a great way to get clients."

"It is," I replied. "But hosting your own free teleclass isn't public speaking; it's a promotional event."

Yep, there's a big difference between a self-employed professional putting on his/her own show, and being invited as a guest presenter for someone else's. When you consider the level of effort to make it happen, the cost of putting it together, and the amount of new business you can expect to get, public speaking — live or virtual — wins out over a promotional event almost every time. Here's why.

1. Who's on the invitation list — The reason you see high-profile professionals offering free teleclasses, webinars, and free or low cost local workshops is that they have a substantial number of prospects already in their database. With 10,000 targeted prospects on your email list, you might get 100 to register for a free teleclass or webinar, especially if you also promote it on social media. But if your list has 500 people on it, you'll be lucky to get 5.
   
   When you speak for an established organization, they use THEIR list of members, students, customers, or employees to promote your event. And it's not just the size of their list that can be significant. When you speak for a regular gathering, as opposed to offering a one-time event, a higher percentage of the invitation list will register. That's because they will have the gathering already on their calendars, and will have often paid a fee to even be invited.
   
   If you offer the event audience a free gift or door prize, most of them will happily give you their contact information. Then you can add them to YOUR list (with appropriate permission, of course), allowing you to follow up with them.
   
   
2. Time and money to promote — Promoting an event requires a considerable amount of effort over a substantial period of time. To do it well, you'll need to invite people in multiple ways, and do so multiple times. You may have to send emails, post on social media, mail postcards, make phone calls, ask colleagues to invite friends, and more, just to fill the room.
   
   But hosts for your speaking events do all this work for you. They have a mailing list, social media channels, a budget, and a promotion plan already in place, because they host speakers like you all the time. When you show up to speak, the room is already full.
   
   
3. Impact on your credibility — When an organization hosts you as a speaker, you get an implied endorsement from that group. The audience automatically thinks of you as an expert, which colors everything you say, including your offer to do business with those who attend. Hosting your own event doesn't carry that level of credibility. It can even detract from how credible you are if your event attracts only a few people.
   
   
4. Potential of new business — In the Get Clients Now! hierarchy of marketing strategies, public speaking is rated the third most effective, while promotional events are rated as only fifth of six. The reasoning behind this includes all the factors stated above. Being a guest speaker makes you instantly credible, takes considerably less effort to achieve, and provides you with a new, larger, and more responsive potential audience, compared to producing your own speaking event.

If this is so, why do so many self-employed professionals try to host their own events? Here's my guess:

• They're copying what they think they see modeled by higher-profile professionals, not considering that those folks may have much larger followings, experience with filling events, and probably some paid staff.
• It seems easier to set up a bridge line, webinar platform, or conference room and invite some folks than it does to position themselves as experts so organizations will find them desirable as speakers.
• Landing speaking engagements requires making requests that may be denied or ignored, exposing them to rejection. This brings up fear, resistance, and the inner critic.

"Ah hah!" said my client, when I explained this to her. "It's the same as when you advised me not to buy a booth at that expo. I wanted to take the easy way out and just write a check instead of working on building my referral network."

Smart client. You can be this smart, too. Design an attractive speaking topic, write a credible bio, and start reaching out to some potential hosts. Getting booked as a no-fee speaker can be easier than you think. Hosting your own free speaking events may seem like a shortcut to getting clients, but for too many professionals, it has instead been a dead end.
Copyright © 2014, C.J. Hayden

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Protect Yourself from Latest Job Scams

Any day of the week, you can do a quick Google news search on the term “Craigslist jobs scam” and you’ll see scores of reports from just the recent past.

Over the course of a year, they multiply into the hundreds or even thousands of phony employment ads as scammers cast their nets to haul in their job-hunting victims.

Craigslist, probably the biggest and best-known online classified ad service, goes to quite a bit of trouble itself to spot fake job ads as well as issuing a warning to its users about the risks of scams.

Click here to read the full article.


©Copyright Audri and Jim Lanford. All rights reserved.

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