Many Bloggers and Website editors have received this “coupon” and signed up for the program. Why not? It’s free…NOT! They have realized the hard way that this is a scam by Google.
Just two weeks ago, on a flight home from California, I was fortunate to sit next to a Google employee, specifically, an AdWords consultant. He offered me tips on promoting my sites—I was grateful. Although the tips he offered were legitimate, and free, he did not mention this coupon scam.
The Google tools he recommended were:
*Google Insights
*Google Analytics
*Google Trends
*Google Webmaster
I also “squeezed” out of him the best tip for getting Google’s attention to your site (something he was not comfortable relaying due to confidentiality terms of his job at Google); inbound links from “related” Websites is the most effective way to get ranked by Google.
Back to the scam. Although I will not use the $100 coupon, and definitely DO NOT recommend my viewers do either, I do suggest Blog and Website editors utilize the tools listed above and provided free through Google.
Happy Blogging!
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10 comments:
Thank you for the tip, Carol! I will pass it along to my bloggy friends as well.
Hmm... needs to be reported to the authorities.
This is against the law,
You can't sell something to someone without that person knowing and agreeing.
Carol,
I did sign up for this but so far, nothing has even been deducted from the $100. I'm wondering now if I should cancel this or let it ride as it doesn't seem to be costing me anything. I have yet to figure out how to make the stupid program work for me.
Hey Patricia,
I would be VERY careful. They may show that credit in full until it runs out.
To Laane,
They sure shouldn't be able to. How they set this up is to convince you they need 1) $5 activation fee, then 2) check your account for authenticity (let us deposit 5 cents into your account to make sure its real).
Caution everyone!
I took the offer in December and got over 1.200 visitor to my blog.
You have to pay the 5$ activation fee but i think they add it now on top of the voucher amount of 100$.
You just have to monitor daily the amount spent by Adwords and then you can adjust the daily budget. In the beginning i had 15$ daily budget but this hasn't been reached in the first days.
because when you setup the Adwords-campaing with automatic bidding... Google starts with 1 cent/click and you won't be visible on top of the Google ads (there's mostly a 10 or 11 ranking system) with this offer.
As the days passed, my pay-per-click amount went up to 15 cents/click which meant i had to take care of my daily limit because now my ad would be shown more often on the 1 - 3 rank for specific keywords. From this time on i reduced to 5$ which was ok.
I would suggest for anyone, to take this offer and simply STOP your campaign at 90$, set your daily limit to 5$ and don't do the automatic bidding but set a maximum pay-per-click price of 5 - 10 cents (the higher this price the better would be the ranking, the more clicks you could get daily).
I had the invite -- as did some friends of minde. I thought why not - as would many... yeah, it was free.
The *minute* it aksed me for my debit card details I stopped right there. So should you! STOP!!! It may seem like a wonderful opp, but the minute you get your plastic out of your wallet you can guarantee it is not free anymore.
If you are ever told that something is free and they ask you for you credit or debit card details STOP AND GO NO FURTHER.
It may not be a scam because, after all, you have signed up for it and you have not read the small print.
If something is *genuinely* free, then they will not ask for your credit details! Why should they?
Big up here, Glynis! I had this in the post and - to be honest - whhile it is not a sam it will lead to many unpleasant surprises!
Crikey - I must try to stpo mu kyebrard frim stuckyng
I got this coupon also and noticed they wanted my Debit card. I stopped right there.
I too have recieved several coupons from Google but I haven't done anything with it and now I won't for sure. Thanks for the tips.
PS: I stumbled this to friends and note they have commented. I wanted folks to know more about this.
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