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We’re all used to the Viagra, Nigerian scams, make money fast and the other clearly recognizable spam we receive in the hundreds each day. It’s a fact of life – we’ve all learned to deal with it. But it seriously offends me when such recognizable brands as Little Chef start spamming me.

This morning I got unsolicited mail from Little Chef. The particular address that was used has not been used on a daily basis for a number of years. It has clearly been gathered from a website – there’s no doubt in my mind.

Is the Little Chef marketing department that inept that they are prepared to risk the reputation of the brand in this way? Are they stupid enough to employ third party providers to market them illegally? If they are, do they have any idea how these people are denigrating their name or are they leaving one of the ‘Johnny Come Lately’ internet marketing ‘experts’ (sic) to it without proper control?

Why the hell should I expend my energy clicking an unsubcribe link to a list I haven’t subscribed to! I know it takes a lot more energy but I’d rather spend my time writing this and reporting the abuse to their hosting company. I’m not one to just passively accept this kind of crap from such a brand.

At this point I have to admit though, I was quite partial to the occasional Little Chef breakfast when on the road back in the UK, though it’s very unlikely on any of my rare visits there I would avail myself of one now. Good advertising and marketing does not persuade me to buy, but, bad marketing like this does persuade me not to buy. For heavens sake Little Chef marketing department – pull your socks up!

And, just a little note on targeting for you…

“Kids Eat Free” is of little interest to me;

1. My kids are adults

2. I live in Spain

And finally, the Facebook page link on your website (which doesn’t appear to have been updated since July last year) doesn’t work. I wonder why that might be? Open complaints perhaps?

If you want some proper professional advice on how to market yourself effectively, and legally do give me a call. I’ll give you a couple of hours for free!

“You cannot transmit, or instigate the transmission of, unsolicited marketing material by electronic mail to an individual subscriber unless they have previously notified you, the sender, that they consent, for the time being, to receiving such communications. There is an exception to this rule which has been widely referred to as the soft opt in (Regulation 22(2) refers).” Excerpt from Electronic mail (Regulations 22 and 23) of the Information Commissioner’s Office website.

I’m a big fan of Facebook – I conduct much of my social life through it. However just lately I’ve noticed a  couple of trends that really irritate me. It genuinely is a social thing for me – and the constant spam is beginning to really get on my nerves.

There’s plenty of people right now touting Social Networking as the next big thing in marketing – what happens every idiot takes the total shotgun approach and blasts their friends list with spam? The vast majority of these people do not have the faintest idea what they are doing. Used badly Social Network Marketing will damage your reputation rather than enhance it.

Let me just make it clear – and this is to my friends too… I will not ever add an inanimate object, business, entity or organization as a ‘friend’. For your information – setting up profiles that do not relate to ‘real people’ are a breach of Facebook’s terms and conditions. So, you’re going to be wasting your time building up a list of friends on these profiles as sooner or later Facebook is going to have a sort out. If it continues I am going to make it my mission to make sure they do!

Also, I don’t mind getting invites to events – but please don’t waste my time sending multiple invites to the same event with different titles – I will delete them…

I’m happy to ´like´the pages and groups (which are intended for commercial use) of friends , clients and local businesses to support them. But don’t be offended if I don’t. Facebook to me is a purely social thing and promoting other peoples businesses to my friends is a long way off being the main reason I use the site.

From this point forward, without exception I have decided to report every fake profile, and every status update spam. Enough is enough. Perhaps its time to start binning those friends on my list who serve no social value to me and whose only use of the site is self promotion.

If you want to keep up with what we are doing – voluntarily – without being hassled or having it rammed down your throat here are the links to the pages for Gandy-Draper, Lanzarote Relocation and my own blog. All of which adhere to Facebook rules!

It’s not very often we get excited about domain names – but I bought a fantastic domain yesterday. Nope, I’m not saying what it is (and you won’t find it via whois), as we haven’t actually decided what do do with it. Suffice it is to say that it is once of those names that just screams ‘use me!‘

The right domain counts for a lot both in terms of SEO and memorability – this is a simple ‘does what it says on the tin’ name. So good it could even mean an additional direction to our business. All we need to do now is to figure out how best to exploit it… Watch this space! Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago, I wrote about how people fake site stats to deceive potential advertisers.

Here’s another misleading tactic that you should also be aware of. All too often you’ll see boasts about how successful sites are, demonstrated by illustrations of how much money they are making from Google Adsense. Don’t take the screen grabs at face value when someone is trying to sell you something, or convince you that with their help you can achieve the same. There’s a very good possibility you are being misled.

Fake Adsense screen grabs are incredibly easy to produce.

Click to enlarge

In the immortal words of ‘Blue Peter’, here’s one I made earlier…

How? Using – googleadsensegenerator.com (which has since been taken down, but you can find a similar tool at hacktrix.com/google-adsense-money-generator – these things come and go for obvious reasons)

Though it may seem that it has been taken out for confidentiality the blur hides the detail information too. Surely, if someone wanted to boast in this way they would at least make a recognizable email address visible to offer some form of proof that it at least might be them…

Be on your guard, there’s a lot of people out there ready to mislead you for their own personal gain or vanity.

It’s a completely dishonest tactic…

Perhaps its just me… But I get really hacked off when people use my name in what is, to all intents and purposes, a fake testimonial!

This is exactly what Facebook are doing with their ‘friend finder’ !

No doubt you’ve seen it as you’ve been around on Facebook – it’s been showing up regularly near the top right of the screen for quite some time now. It sits their saying “X and Y have found friends using…”

I’d never really given it much thought until last week when I accidentally loged into someone else’s account on a shared PC, only to see my name there telling them I’d used ‘friend finder’ to successfully locate friends on Facebook… Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m no fan of Twitter. It’s a pointless mass of white noise in my opinion.

But – if you’re the kind of sad individual who values quantity above quality – here’s a tip for you…

I play with Twitter – (only because I hate it so much, and as research for posts like this). Overnight I got 200+ new followers on one of my accounts, and they are still coming in at the rate of around ten to twenty an hour.

How? Very simple, just add the ‘big name’ Internet Marketers to your Twitter account.

If you don’t know who they are – they aren’t hard to find. You probably already have mails from the likes of Eban Pagan and Yaro Starak in your spam folder, having been ‘tempted’ into subscribing to their mailing list to download some free useless information in the past…

Your new followers will for the most part be generated by bots, and be of no use whatsoever – and are only from sad ‘get rich quick on the Internet’ types – but it’ll up your numbers.

A few days ago Elle posted a piece on our Lanzarote Relocation site about missing Frenchman Vincent Bosq. We spoke with Vincent’s sister earlier today – and Vincent is still missing.

It seems that Vincent was able to contact his sister via the Policia Local in Arrecife, so there is a little more information. She tells us that Vincent has had his identification papers stolen and has no money. The family tried to send him money via Western Union, but having no papers or passport he was unable to collect it.

The family think that Vincent has been living on the streets of Arrecife somewhere around the Police station or El Charco de San Gines. If anyone sees him can you please let us know on 663 603 345. Obviously after several months on the streets Vincent may look somewhat different.

Also, if you have shop premises, or friends in Arrecife can you please help by circulating this missing poster throughout the city. Perhaps if Vincent sees it he will then make contact with so we can help his family get the assistance to him he needs to get home safely. Obviously the family are very concerned and they are also worried that Vincent has an ongoing medical problem that might need some attention.

Click here to download the PDF

Please feel free to pass this poster around as widely as possible!

…or is everyone else tired of all the ‘get rich quick’ nonsense scattered about the Internet nowadays?

As anyone who has visited this site, or who knows me will be aware, we run this site mostly for fun (you can visit Gandy-Draper if you want to see the more commercial face of our Lanzarote web design services). So, here’s something put here purely for my own, and maybe your, amusement.

I guess with to much time on my hands the other day (it was my birthday coming the day after, so I was winding down a bit) I decided to have a little play and threw together this little number. When you spend as much time as I do working on and trawling around the Internet you can’t help but stumble on sites – no matter how much you try to avoid them – all promising to make you rich with absolutely no effort whatsoever on your part. This could be described as my reaction.

Click here to see the site (but not if you might be offended by bad language).

The simple answer if you do a bit off digging is yes!

I sometimes use this site as a way to alert the readers of scams. Having stumbled on a business card promoting the TVI scheme in Playa Blanca here in Lanzarote very recently and having previously been asked by a friend to check out its credibility this seemed as good a place as any to put this. I won’t embarrass anyone with the name on the card – they’ve just got sucked into a pyramid scam and have lost $275-

What claims do they make?

• they claim it’s a legitimate travel business
• that you can make $10,000 a week from recruiting others

What is it in reality?

It’s a classic pyramid sales scam, (A pyramid scheme is a non-sustainable business model that involves the exchange of money primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, without any product or service being delivered. Pyramid schemes are a form of fraud – Wikipedia)

• the ‘ business’ consists only of recruiting others
• has been banned by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, with no doubt more to follow and their offices in London have been vacated and moved to India

If  you’re the person who’s name is on the card (nobody I know), I’m very sorry you got ripped off.

Anyone else, please be on your guard. I know times are hard for many here on our little island, as they are elsewhere, it’s a perfect time for the unscrupulous to prey on hopes and dreams. Make no doubt these people will take your last penny off you.  Don’t buy dreams – if it looks to good to be true, it probably is. We all know that – but sometimes even good people get caught out when times are tough.

A warning to both residents and tourists – it’s been reported all over the news today that an email claiming to be able to help those caught up in the recent chaos cased by the Icelandic volcano ash cloud is a scam.

To anyone who was unfortunate to be involved either here in Lanzarote or elsewhere – here’s a link to the full story on the BBC website.