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Welcome!   Today's show is a repeat of the Show aired on February 15, 2020. There is a ton of stuff going on in the world of Technology, and this show will hit several topics today. If you are on my email list, it has current articles that you need to read.  If you are not on my email list, sign up at Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. There are some scams that are getting more and more prevalent with Airbnb and VRBO that we will talk about. Also, phishing scams using the Coronavirus as a way to trick you into clicking.  The ACLU is filing suit against DHS. China is stealing our Intellectual Property.  Shadow IT becoming more and more of a problem and even more on Tech Talk With Craig Peterson today on WGAN.  It is a busy show -- so stay tuned. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Is it possible to secure our Elections using Technology The security mistakes made by the Iowa Democratic Party in creating their App Coronavirus bringing out opportunistic Hackers   Extensive US Intellectual Property theft by Chinese being investigated by FBI  Scammers have found a fertile field in Airbnb DHS wants to track illegal aliens using available cell-phone location data. ACLU says Whoa!  Shadow-IT: Employees putting Business at Risk Ransomware rings adapt to business declarations by Revealing Stolen Data --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Hey everybody, welcome, welcome. Craig Peterson here on, WGIR, you can also hear me every Monday morning at 737 with Jack Heath, where we discuss some of the latest topics in technology. Of course, nowadays, you can't talk about technology without security, which is what I've been doing in my business now for about 30 years. I was coerced into it. Maybe one of these days, I'll share that whole story with you. It can get to be kind of a long one. But today we are going through some of the problems that I've seen out there lately. I have on my podcast this week that you can get at Craig peterson.com slash Iheart, Craig peterson.com slash Iheart. I spent quite a bit of time talking about recent problems people have been finding with Airbnb with VRBO, and I go through some of the problems I recently have had with both of those services. And I think it's well worth listening to because I've gotten to the point right now where I will not use either Airbnb or VRBO, I don't think ever again. My experiences with them have just been so overwhelmingly negative, anyhow you'll find that online, and you can subscribe there as well at Craig peterson.com slash I heart. That like is going to take you to the I heart app. You might be listening to me right now, in fact, on Iheart streaming on these AM and FM stations. If you are, kudos to you, but you can also get all of my content by going and subscribing, Craig peterson.com slash I heart, and I'm also on every other major podcast streaming platform that's out there. But first, I just want to make mention of this other article that came out last month in January. It's talking about computer literate millennials and Generation Z. These are the people that grew up with the internet. They've had the internet pretty much their whole lives. They've found meaning the Federal Trade Commission found that people ages 39 and under are more likely to report fraud than the 40 plus crowd. Now, here's the thinking here. It isn't that the younger kids millennials and Generation Z, it isn't as though they are less afraid to report that money stolen from them. It appears that they are more likely to fall victim to fraud. 25% more likely. Now the millennials are less likely to fall for a scam over the phone and people over 40, but 77% More likely, Millennials are 77% more likely to get duped by email scams and 90% more likely to lose money on a fake check scam. Now, the thinking behind this is that those of us who are a little bit older, we hold the whole internet thing with a little bit more skepticism than our children and grandchildren do. Because we know that there are scammers out there and we've heard all the horror stories, whereas the younger kids are looking at it as well. It's the internet, and they just give their stuff away. We already know that there are studies that show that the millennials will give their email address or weigh in trade for a single donut. Okay. They don't value a lot of this stuff. And, you know, to me, well, it's a little bit concerning, and it should be to you. But let's get into the latest scam that's out there right now. It isn't the Airbnb scam, which has been out there for a few years now. As I said, hey, I've been burned, what, four or five times by this overall personally. I am jaded, and I just don't use it anymore period. It's a real shame because there are some good people out there. But this has to do with what's been happening with the Coronavirus. It is a huge deal. We had one day this week, where 15,000 new cases were reported. The Chinese changed how they tracked and diagnosed cases. So they're saying hey, listen, it's you know, it's Change. Don't expect this to indicate that more viruses are spreading out there. And frankly, I look at it and say, Well, maybe there are there aren't. But what we're seeing are some rather sophisticated phishing scams going on. Phishing, of course, this is the one spelled with a Ph. It is where an attacker tricks you into doing something. It might be clicking a link. It might be responding to an email. It might also be a phishing scam over the phone or, you know, SMS a text one which is called smishing. A whole new type of phishing this going on right now. Well, last week, IBM and Kaspersky now Kaspersky is an anti-virus company. They are also trying to stop the general spread of malware. They are a Russian firm, and the State Department and FBI have warned us about using their software, but they do have good information. When I see Kaspersky combined with IBM, a company I do respect, then that does kind of make my ears stand up, if you will. IBM and Kaspersky caught hackers in Japan, trying to spread malware through emails. And the emails had links about the coronavirus outbreak that started Of course and won China last month in January. And now adding cell phones to the list. Of course, Cisco, to the list, they have found phishing emails from cybercriminals, purporting to be from the Center for Disease Control, as well as the World Health Organization and what they're trying to do the bad guys his deal your email credentials and other information. The emails are coming from several domains, including CDC dash gov.org, which, of course, is not the real CDC website. So be very careful if you are trying to find out information about the CDC, or about the spread of Coronavirus about flu in general. For instance, in my home state of New Hampshire, we have I think it's seven deaths so far this year reported g attributed to the flu in general, not the Coronavirus. Every year about 12 to 16,000 people in the United States die from the flu. So far we've only got 14 cases reported of Coronavirus So, at this stage everybody, this is nothing to get all freaky worried about. Okay, so calm down. If you want more, go to CDC.gov. CDC Centers for Disease Control cdc.gov. And it tells you what to do now this Coronavirus has an official name now it's called Covin-19, co vi d dash 19 because there are multiple versions of Coronaviruses and viruses. And we have had a report in the past about Coronaviruses, and they have killed people previously. So you'll see right at the top of the CDC, gov website, information about the Coronavirus and it spread. It is a respiratory disease. It is potentially fatal. It doesn't seem to be any more fatal than some of the other viruses that we've had. So let's put all of this in context. And when you get an email from someone saying hey, Look at this, click on this link, it's going to get you information about the Coronavirus, it's going to let you track the spread of, etc. don't respond. And you, if you get a text message, don't respond. I got one because I'm a member of the Great and Powerful media, right. I got one last week that was sent out to members of the media saying, Hey, we got this new tracking site. You just can't be cautious enough when it comes to this. So if you go to CDC Gov at the top, you'll see the description here about the Covin-19. And you can click on that, and it'll show you a global map about where it has been reported what is happening. I'm looking at one. It's about one day behind it looks like right now for Covin-19. But you can see all of the countries that have been reporting it and then you can also So look at the hard statistics. People under investigation in the United States exactly how many 14 positives you'll see that there. Of course, it changes daily. How many negative how many pending? The people are under investigation. Remember, the airplane full of workers from the State Department that came back from China. They have now been under quarantine for more than 14 days. They released them all from quarantine because it turns out that nobody had that virus, so just because you have the flow doesn't mean it's Coronavirus. More cases over on the left coast and the Midwest, which is kind of surprising to me than there are on the East Coast or the Mid Atlantic, etc., etc. So have a look there. Do not respond to emails or texts or phone calls. Okay. Just be very, very careful. Hackers are imitating this sort of thing. Then the other side of this is they are sending out messages, seeking donations, and they're asking for Bitcoin donations to the World Health Organization. I can tell you right now, the World Health Organization, the CDC, they are not taking Bitcoin donations, okay? Don't go and donate, right. Again the CDC gov.org is the bad guys cdc.gov is the good guys. The scam page is elementary. it might have taken the scammers just a few minutes to put together. It's very effective. It looks legit. And the FBI and, of course, also Homeland Security are taking down these pages as soon as they can, but they can't always get rid of them right away. And companies we got to be proud. We've got a chain, train our employees not to follow up on these scams. So again, that's part of why I publish my newsletters. I report on the biggest scams that are going on. I try and keep it down to just a few a week. You can share them with your employees, share them with your family, but you have to get them to share them. Go to Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. Now, we're going to talk a little bit about this whole thing with the ACLU and their current fight. I spoke about something similar to this a couple of years ago, man, maybe actually the first time was probably about ten years ago. There are companies out there, and they gather information about us. They're called Data brokers. And I have visited some of these data brokers sites themselves. I mean physical site, where the company operates where they have their data collections, to help them with security problems that they have. And to help prevent problems from occurring, right. That's what I do for a living full time. And it was probably ten years ago, the radio show that I talked with some of these companies. But what they do is they take what's called open source information that's used a lot by government or investigations. And you can use open-source information yourself. All you do is go to Google, for instance, and do a search. That's the open-source information. It's anything that anyone can gain access to, without having to be a police officer without having to go and really kind of, you know, get a court order kind of be surreptitious and how you gather that's open source. So the data break brokers will take all of that, and that can include depending on States your living driver's license information. It can include information about the mortgage for your home. It can include you know the ownership of your home, and it can include just all kinds of stuff. And that becomes very, very difficult to control. Because all of your information is out there. It's available for free or for cheap on the internet. So these data brokers, they might buy it from the county, they might get it an open-source. Some of these documents are going to contain like your mortgage is going to contain your signature. The deed to your home is going to contain the signature, the automobiles that you own. There's going to be UCC filings with the Secretary of State's office, detailing what cars you own, who the lien holders are, and how much money is involved, all of this stuff. So it all gets pulled into these days. databases I mentioned on the show a few months ago, a couple of months ago that we were out in Las Vegas at a wedding. And of course, you know, doing work while I'm out there sitting on the couch, doing work for some of our Las Vegas clients when there was a knock at the door. Who's there? Well, it's an insurance investigator investigating an accident that had a fatality. And of course, the insurance company had been asked to payout. They came to this home because they had information that the person involved had contact with someone at this address, which indeed she did. It was her sister, and the driver had been responsible for this fake fatal death. The driver listed was one of my sisters in law, who had died six months before the accident. It was all fake. The insurance investigator showed my wife all of this information she had that they had purchased from one of these data brokers. It had listed my deceased sister in law's relatives, everybody every address she had ever had. It had names and contact information for some of my kids as well. Now, it was not all correct or organized. When I've looked at the data brokers' information about me, only about half of it is right, but the other half is entirely incorrect. That's still the case because they had a lot of utterly false information. People that they said were relatives that weren't. People we'd never heard of before, they identified as direct relatives of hers. The insurance company purchased all of this information from a Data Broker, in collections, this is called a skip trace. It's called a skip trace for people who jumped bail, etc. Man, we should talk about this whole bail thing, and the idiocy and New York state that is spreading countrywide dog, the bounty hunter and his wife Beth had been fighting this for a long time because it's making us much, much less safe. But anyhow, that's not a topic for today's show. It's not a political topic, because it's undeniable what's already happening with the increase in the crime rate, New York anyways. What the government is doing now and this is part of what I was warning about a decade ago, is the federal government, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, of the IRS, you name it. They are limited in how they can collect information, we kind of already knew that, right? They knew that they had to get a search warrant for certain things, right? They can follow you around if you do not expect privacy, etc., etc. So obviously, federal government agencies can use open-source information to see what you're doing online. But how about the closed source stuff? How about this information that the data brokers are collecting? Some of it comes from the people who lent you money. Some of it they're getting from places where you have to pay to get that information. What's happened here now is that the ACLU has filed a suit, according to The Wall Street Journal, against Homeland Security and Homeland Security through its Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. As well as Customs and Border Protection, is buying Gilo geolocation data from these data brokers. It's using it to investigate suspects who have allegedly committed immigration violations. So let me boil all that down into plain English. You might be using games on your smartphone, and you might be using all kinds of apps on your smartphone. If you have a smartphone, you probably are, frankly, not using 90-95% of those apps that you have downloaded. But many of those apps are tracking you. And that information is being sold to data brokers. So think about that for a minute. Remember that free app and how you've heard me and many others for so many years. Say, hey, you're not the customer. You are the product. But what's happening here now is that the ACLU is saying to the federal government, hey, you cannot, you cannot buy this information that you are not allowed to collect yourself. You cannot buy it from data brokers or these app developers who are selling it. Interesting question, interesting problem, isn't it? What should they do? What should you do? What can you do? It is going to play out in court. I suspect it's going to come down on the side of the Department of Homeland Security because this information is generally available to anyone willing to pay for it. So now the government stepped forward, saying we are will pay for it. By the way, it's down to local law enforcement as well, who, in many cases, are also buying information from the data brokers. Have you ever set up a company Amazon account? Have you ever set up an account for a company account for Uber? Maybe it's not a company account. Perhaps it's your account that you're using for Uber or something else? How about using something like Constant Contact to send out emails to your customers? How about salesforce.com, where we've seen a shift over the years from what used to be kind of the glass castle, where you had a central computer room in that computer room was a mainframe. And those mainframes were astounding. They still are. And that mainframe in that glass room was controlled by professional Information Technology people, people that knew what they were doing at least at the time, right? Then we started seeing some changes. You remember the apple two and VisiCalc Visicalc was kind of the killer application. And if you wanted to do numbers, then you bought an apple, you purchased a little apple two. And you then pulled data and people were asking that glass house, they were asking it, Hey, can you give us data because we want to put together some spreadsheet. People put together spreadsheets without really understanding the implications of the numbers they were using without understanding how to audit a spreadsheet to make sure that the figures included were correct. They didn't understand the double journaling. They didn't understand the cross-referencing of the information. They started a bit of a movement away from that glass house from that glass castle from it. They said hey, we could figure this out, why are we going to pay it all of this fake budget money to do something for us and we can do it for ourselves and do it cheaper. Frankly, that's a problem I still face with many organizations, if you can believe it, who think they can do security themselves, which is impossible for almost any organization. In this day and age, any small-medium business must have full-time external professionals who are helping your internal IT people. The internal IT should be doing what they do best, which is helping your business use information technology, to its best use, assisting people to be more efficient, finding new ways of doing things, etc. Instead of that, what most businesses do is they have these various silos, like sales and marketing and accounting. And each one of those silos, those lines company does things their way. So the sales guys, they're out, and they said, Hey, we're going to use Salesforce. And we're going to tie that into Constant Contact. And then you have your accounting people saying, well, we're going to use QuickBooks Online. Or maybe they're going to use one of Oracle's accounting systems. And then the manufacturing people say, Well, we are going to use this particular era p program, which is going to be great for manufacturing. And we've decided that we're going to use Survey Monkey to collect information from our customers from our vendors. You see where I'm going, each one of these lines of business is going out there and making what are in actuality, information technology decisions. They're making decisions about what type of technology to use, which is one level, but then the next Next Level is they're using it. And they're putting the business's information at risk. It is a huge, huge problem. It's something that I'm going to be addressing with some of this training that I have coming up with a couple of these tutorials correctly tackle these problems. And so if you're on my email list at Craig Peterson comm slash subscribe, you're going to find out about these, and I'm going to give you some great cheat sheets and other things. But all of those again, Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. All of those different lines of business, all of those different functional responsibilities within an organization larger small, are adding up and adding up hugely. And there is a massive problem behind this. Now you know, that I use one password, and I recommend it, and we typically Use one password in conjunction with Duo to help secure login information. But because one password is used so frequently by companies to keep track of logins, they have kind of a unique view into the risks of all these different accounts. And what we're talking about where these lines of business are making Information Technology decisions that they're not qualified to make, and frankly, in most small-medium companies, there's probably no one in the organization that's fully qualified. Still, at least it has a better idea, but then a marketing person or an accounting person would have. So this is called shadow it and it's absolutely something that we have to be careful of and we have to watch for and if you are one of these people who is using one of these third-party services, and you have not informed your IT person. Do it right now. All right, thanks. Okay, hey, we have a lot more content that you can get online. Just go to Craig Peters on.com. You'll find it right there in my weekly newsletter that you can use to help educate other people inside your company. Maybe family, maybe friends, and indeed, educate yourself and the things that you need to know security-related or just the newest and latest greatest technology. Now I got an email here just while was Facebook a couple of weeks ago a message about a story that I had reported on about Tesla before, and I try and answer those I dig them up I get them for you. But I want to make sure you are subscribed at Craig Peterson comm slash subscribe, so you get all of that. Thanks for being with me here, WGIR, and we'll be back Monday morning with Jack Heath at 737. Hey, welcome back Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online Of course, Craig peterson.com. If you want to, you can subscribe to my email list you'll find out about the free tutorials that pop up training, courses, everything that I do to help make you and your business more secure. So again, Craig Peterson, dot com slash subscribe. I got to read this to you right now. I decided to cancel through Airbnb and tell them about what had happened. He went off at me, berated me for not handling in it privately, and told me I was acting in my self-interest, and belittled me. I ended up having to pay the first full month even though I stayed one night. His listing is still up, and a review posted after my state also mentioned the silverfish. Isn't that something? Now, this is from a report that came out from vice. Now you might be familiar with vice.com. There's a lot of decent stuff up there. But I want to tell you a little bit about my own experience I've had with Airbnb and VR Bo now VR Bo is vacation rentals. It's it has been used more, I think, by businesses from what the stuff I've read than it is by individuals. But I have had bad experiences with both of them. Every time I have had an Airbnb, I have had a bad experience. So let me tell you what I mean by a bad experience. For instance, I was out of Vegas at a conference, and we thought, you know what, let's try Airbnb. I'm the tech guy, right? I need to understand this. Why wouldn't I go ahead and use Airbnb in make sense, right? So here the tech guy goes, and we poke around read reviews we read ratings. We found an apartment, not far at all, I mean like half a mile from the convention center. We thought, okay, this is going to be perfect. It says it's right by the strip we could walk over there, hop a cab or, or grab a ride and enjoy The Strip, and then the morning we can just walk over the convention center. We're not going to have any problems parking because it said it is an apartment. Let me start with parking. By the way, parking is another thing in the second Airbnb story. There was no parking. You had to park a half a mile away sometimes because people were just parking in the parking lot of the apartment building. There were no reserved parking slots for the apartment. So there's number one — number two. When we go into the apartment, and it's quite nice. We find out that it has two bedrooms. We had only booked one bedroom because that's all the listing talked about the one-bedroom. We get there, and we find, okay, so this is our bedroom over here. Well, the bedroom did not have an ensuite bathroom. The bathroom for the bedroom was across the hall. So there we go, we get in there and okay, fine. So our bathrooms across the hall, and we end up going to bed. We enjoyed it was a nice place relatively clean, quite old. It was probably a 40-50-year-old apartment. In the layout that you would expect there in the southwest where there's kind of a courtyard in the middle, and it's a little two-story thing and, you know, kind of reminded me when I lived in LA back in about 1980 late 70s early 80s. You know it's that part was quite nice. You know brand new shag rug in there, well you know not brand-new but quite new and clean. That part result was good. We go to bed and then we there we hear just tons of commotion because somebody else who didn't speak English very well had come to stay at the apartment as well. We hear them going into our bathroom, using our towels. They are very, very loud talking on the phone, and they get a hold of the owner right of this Airbnb. They got the same impression we did, which is there's one-bedroom in this place. So they had an ensuite bathroom. We did not, but they were using our bathroom the whole time and our towels, there's only one set of towels. It wasn't a great experience at all. They kept us up for quite a while because they were just so loud. Now you know me, I'm not an outgoing guy. You might not believe that, but I'm a little bit of an introvert. And as an introvert, I didn't want to go out and confront these people who were I'm guessing, or you know, from Asia, they were speaking Chinese or Korean or Japanese, I have no idea. I just didn't want to mess with it. So we get up in the morning, we and everything is okay-ish. We go to the conference and then that night, I guess these people only there for one night. That night, we had the whole place to ourselves, which is okay. Knowing that with Airbnb, I rate the place after I stay there, but the owner of the place rates me and so there have been a lot of issues of retaliation when it comes to Airbnb. If you stay at one of these places and you don't give them this glowing five-star review, then you're not going to get reviewed while and other people might not want you to stay at their place. So I gave it a reasonable rating. I can't remember what I gave it, you know, places clean and, and, you know, it was a nice place and there is another bedroom. You know, just kind of hint into anybody reading this. It isn't going to be dedicated to you and maybe your loved one you're staying with and left it at that. That's my first Airbnb story. And then my second Airbnb story, as I mentioned, had a lot to do with parking as well. And in this case, it was in the Toronto area, up in Brampton, and we rented a place on Airbnb, you know, I figured, well, we'll give another chance, see what happens. It was a three-bedroom place, and they said it sleeps like eight or something like that. What you did if you include the fold-out couch, and so we figured, okay, we need some parking. So I had sent them a message saying, hey, it's going to be myself and a couple of my kids and some grandkids. You know, I want to make sure that there's plenty of parking. Is it? Oh, yeah, plenty of parking, buddy parking, no problem. And so we get there, and there is one parking spot. And it's in one of these. I don't know if you know much about Canada and how they build their housing there. But one of the reasons I'm not that fond of it, right. I grew up there. It was these townhouses that are built right on top of each other, you know, the zero property line homes there. Three, four, or five of them attached. The only place you can park is in the little garage place. Well, the garage itself was full of stinking trash. Who knows how long it had been there. You couldn't use the garage. It had hared the driveway with the condo next door to you. It had one parking spot. I had my car, my daughter's car for her, her husband, and a couple of her kids. And then one of my other kids also drove up there. We had to find a place to park. Now the good news was that the whole neighborhood was under construction. They were able to park in the mud. in one area where construction wasn't happening right then, of course, the next morning, what shows up big dump trucks, excavators, everything else to work across the street from us. That wasn't fun. Let me tell you that it was not fun. We were quite worried about our cars, with all of this heavy equipment on this little narrow street designed for one car to go down the street when cars park on the street. We have to go right now when we come back, and I'm going to finish what happened with my air mean being being being a story, as well as my VR Bo story. And we got a whole lot more to cover. We're going to get into this Homeland Security thing with the ACLU and more but stick around, listening to Craig Peterson a course on WGAN online at Greg Peterson dot com is where you'll find me. Make sure you subscribe so that you get all of my free tutorials, training courses. Everything, Craig Peterson dot com, stick around. Hey, welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and of course online, at Craig Peterson dot com. I was in the middle of telling you my stories about Airbnb. If you have ever thought about staying at Airbnb, or VRBO, or any of these types of places, right, obviously you're not staying at a website, but you're booking through a website, somebody's home, somebody's rental, whatever it might be then this is for you. I have done it for personal reasons. I have done it for business reasons as well. I told you the beginning of my story in Toronto, and I told you the last segment about my story in Las Vegas. We didn't have the parking, and the kids are all worried, and I was concerned about our cars getting destroyed by the heavy equipment. Were we going to have to move them because they were working on the lots across the street? It's incredible how fast the housing is going up there and how expensive it is to it's, it's just not how pricey it is. We get inside the place. Now, remember, I said that the garage was full of trash which was, and it stunk to high heaven, which it did. Okay, so some of that leaks into the house, which makes the house kind of smell too, which is just plain old, no fun. We get into the house, and I go and sit on this folding couch. And remember, the house is supposed to sleep eight, and it has a fold-out sofa. I sit on the couch. It reeks of BO, body odor. Right? I mean reeks. One of the first things I have to do is I want to make sure that they know that this is a problem so that maybe they can take care of it. I call, and I don't get any answer because it's the weekend, right? Nobody's around. We head out to the local grocery store, and we get some odor killer stuff, and we bring it back, and we drench the couch in it. And we're able to get rid of most of the BO you know, and its underarm smell is what it is. Someone with some nasty underarm odor was sitting on that couch. They put their arm up on the back of the sofa and left all of their BO behind them. Then they did the same thing on the couch itself and somebody supposed to sleep there, right? Oh, it was just incredible. Then we go upstairs and upstairs that we noticed that the fire alarms had tape all around the sides of them. Now, if you're not familiar with the way firearm alarms work, they have to be able to have air flowing through them to sense that There's smoke in the air or carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, whatever the type of detector is. And it had been it had tape all around it. Now it looked like it was painters tape right that blue tape that you use as you can pull off that isn't going to leave residue behind. So maybe it was the painters perhaps it was the owners, I don't know, perhaps it was a previous occupant, but I warned them about that as well as saying hey listen, your fire alarms are not going to work because it blocks the airflow on the fire alarms by this tape that's on them. I never got a response on anything there. So what do I do when it's time to leave a review? Well, I said the place was in perfect shape. It's brand new. I had to do a little bit of cleaning. The cleaning crew in because the carpets upstairs all had the markings of a, you know, a vacuum cleaner. You can see the wheel marks on the floor and everything else. So you see it's not as though a rip them a new one like I have seen done before. And you never get to see your ratings by the way from these Airbnb owners. Okay, so there's a second one not neither one of mine were nightmares per se, but they both had significant problems that I was afraid to report on because I know that turnabout is considered fair play and who knows what these owners are going to say. Then I tried a VRBO, but they are older. They've been around for something like 30 years, and it's vacation rental type stuff, right? So VRBO, okay, we'll try it out. So we try it. We booked a place, and I wrote to the owners. Hey, there's we're going to have three cars, or two cars can't remember what it was now. Is this going to work for us this okay, I want to make sure this parking is I've had issues before? I never got a response from them. But, you know, they ran my credit card through so I figured, okay, well at least that part is done. I show up with the family in tow. And we're going to have this great time together. I'm going to be working, and they can stay in and just enjoy the place you know, a new city, a new location is going to be great. Guess what? VRBO had canceled my reservation without telling me without informing me, without crediting me. Well, it turned out that they didn't end up crediting me after all the credit card, but here I am waiting for the place that I can't get in. I called up VRBO to say, Listen, I never got a code for the door or anything else. What should I do here? Oh, no. Well, I see that reservation was canceled. I never canceled the reservation. Oh, no, sir. It was canceled, like the day after you booked it. I said, wait a minute. I never canceled it. Well, okay. Well, then the owner must have canceled. Why didn't I get notified? Oh, you didn't get notified, sir? Really? It says they sent an email. I went through all my junk mailboxes and everything else and yep. Okay. I got a notice of cancellation. Oh, man, what a pain that one was. Well, we can find another place in the area you're in right now. We'll make sure you get a refund. I said, Listen, I'm here. I don't have A place to stay. What am I supposed to do now? And they just say I'm sorry, sir. You know, I'm sorry, We'll make sure you get credit. That's all they would do. For me, it was absolutely a nightmare. Three experiences personal experiences for me. One of them a nightmare. One of them on the edge of a nightmare. Another one that could well have been a nightmare but was a mere inconvenience. You can probably guess by now what my thinking is about Airbnb and VRBO. That's what got my interest in this article about this poor guy who was scammed, okay. He was trying to stay in Montreal, and the owner asked him to pay for their stay, outside of the Airbnb app. I've seen that happen many, many times. Because that way, the owner does not have to pay the Airbnb fees, okay? But if you do that now you have very little recourse against the owner, then you know, I've done some chargeback. Lately, now my company if someone buys a course from us, and they're not happy, and we will immediately refund their money because we just don't want them to be upset or disappointed. Because again, you know, our whole thing is to nourish you back to health when it comes to security stuff, right, get that transformation done. I have had some nightmares personally trying to do a chargeback for things that were never delivered, or that got charged inappropriately. Or where I canceled the service. In one case, it was like it was over $1,000 a month for the service, and I canceled it. They charged me the 1200 dollars anyways. I went to my credit card company, and they said, well, we'll have to verify it with the vendor first. So what? I canceled it. I had to fight with a credit card company, and then when they checked with the vendor, and the vendor said, Okay, well, it's fine. We'll take chargeback. You used to be able to do this at the drop of a hat, and I guess they've abused it, right? I think that's the bottom line on it. But man, oh man, so we'll get a little bit more into this vise story. I guess its turned into an Airbnb, VRBO, what to do if you want a vacation rental or if you want to rent a place while you're on a business trip. And then we'll get into some of the more of the articles here, in the next hour. You're listening to Craig Peterson, of course, on WGAN and online. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson back here. I don't know if you guys know what Airbnb's roots were. It started as an air Bed and Breakfast. It was intended for the very young generation to be able to go to concerts and things and just get an air bed in somebody's apartment or home. That's what Airbnb is all about air bed and breakfast. That was the whole idea. And I'm not so sure they've come a long way from those days. I spent the last few segments, in fact, in talking about my horror stories, we've been trying to use Airbnb. There's another one I did not mention in Florida, which was not a horror story quite the disappointment for this house. That I think while I'm quite confident in this house that we rented. It was for a family reunion. So we rented this house that slept like a dozen or something like that. All of the beds were just terrible. You know, the cheapest mattresses that are known to man. You shift your weight at all, and the squeaks loud enough to wake you up. The sheets are the cheapest ones you could imagine. It was an Airbnb as well. It was pretty obvious that the set up for this place was for porn videos. You go into the garage, and the whole garage is one massive shower with I can't remember for six showerheads in it. And then a little bit of workout equipment. I mean a tiny bit of workout equipment. It sounded awful. Okay. And so there you go there, there's all of the Airbnb and VRBO, experiences I can remember. My sister rented the one in Florida for the family, and she did not stay there. She stayed with my mom. It was quite revealing, frankly, so disappointing. I never shared these stories before, but it was because of a story that was in a vice.com, and you'll find this up on my website and Craig peterson.com. They put a little note out saying, Hey, does anybody have any stories about Airbnb, Airbnb scams, and they said, this is Anna Marian, who wrote this that nearly 1000 people sent them emails with their stories. They looked at all of the stories they put together some patterns. A former vice senior staff writer by the name of Alec Conti shared her story about a disastrous vacation to Chicago, and she ran into what she's saying are a bunch of grifters, and frankly a nationwide scam. I no longer use Airbnb at all or VRBO at all. I have been sticking with hotels. If you're interested, I typically use hotwire. I don't use the star ratings of the hotels. I rely on the ratings that are posted by the people who stayed there. I think that's the best feature of hotwire, frankly. I don't care what hotel it is. I just want to stay at a decent hotel. I even used hotwire throughout France and Belgium. It worked great. We found some just wonderful spots that we would never have found if we were just looking to stay at the Marriott or the Hilton or whatever it is, right? So Conti's investigation revealed some serious problems with Airbnb. Now you might have heard about this problem with Airbnb. After all, it hit the news late last year of these party rentals after a death happened. I think it was in San Diego at one of these party rentals. Somebody rented a nice house. Essentially a lot of these places get destroyed by the partiers, right there. There are drugs and heavy drinking, and in this one case, that hit the news. There were gun shootings. Okay, that's a very, very bad, bad thing. So Conti apparently, and again, you can find this article on vice.com traced her scam back to a company that used fake profiles and fake reviews to conceal a whole bunch of wrongdoings. Let's get into this okay because property switches are one of the biggest ones will tell you about what those are the units of sawdust on the floor with holes in the walls, this whole bait and switch game which goes into these properties, switches, and stuff. It's awful. When all else fails, there are these clumsy threatening demands for five-star reviews to hide the evidence of what they've done. Sometimes multiple scams are involved. You know it the hackers aren't just coming after directly our money by trying to hack our businesses by trying to fool us into clicking on links or doing things that we shouldn't be doing, right? These scammers are all over the place. After this story that came out, Airbnb promised to "verify All 7 million listings on this site by December of this year 2020". Frankly, there's no way that they could do this. There's no way you could send investigators to all 7 million listings. He said, Well, we're going to have to take more responsibility for stuff on our platform. Yes, you will. You have to provide a firewall. Not just a firewall of the reviewers, the people who stay there and review can see the reviews that come in from the owners of these properties. That's not going to solve the problem. You need to make it so that there can not be retribution by the bad guys that have given Airbnb a bad name. Now I got to mention that my sister the one that booked that Airbnb for us in Florida, my sister has a house that she rents out in Park City, Utah, on Airbnb, and one of her daughters keeps it clean. I know my sister is not engaged in scams. I know that my niece is somebody who takes responsibility for things. I'm sure she keeps it clean. I don't want to paint the whole Airbnb, a website and people who are renting with a black brush here, I don't want to paint the whole rental market, including the VRBO with a black brush, but I've got to say 100% of the time I have had what I think are scams on both platforms. Now, that's my personal opinion, based on a handful of stays, and I know a handful of stays does not represent every listing on the platforms, right. I understand that. However, its the verification process, we're talking about here. I don't know that he's ever going to do it. How are you going to review and verify all 7 million listings on the Airbnb site within 12 months by December 2020? I don't know how you're going to do it. So let's go through the biggest scams according to vice.com number one, which they say is exceedingly common. It's across hundreds of emails. It's the bait and switch where Airbnb users were promised one apartment and arrived to find something very different. deceptive photos a bore no resemblance to what they found when they got there. My kids found this too. They rented some places in Italy when they did a tour, and you know, black mold everywhere just terrible. Okay? Other times and they were persuaded by those to switch apartments or houses entirely. It is a widespread thing where they say, hey, due to unforeseen circumstances, as a pipe broke, I'm going to have to move you to another one of our properties. Now under the rules for Airbnb, the owner does not get penalized if they push you to a property due to quote, unforeseen circumstances unquote, like a pipe break. But it turns out some of these people are using that unforeseen circumstance again and again and again. And they're showing up to their rental defined the new locations filthy, unfurnished on a different part of town. And they're saying that in a surprising number of stories, the original house was full of a weird amount of bear beds laid out and bizarre configurations, kind of sounds like that porn place my sister rented for the family in Florida, doesn't it? So here's one of the quotes I rented a place near Glass beach and a few weeks part of my trip. When I reached out to confirm the booking, the Lister told me she had a septic problem in the unit, and she would see if she'd put me if she could put her up in a more prominent place nearby. It never materialized, but she refused to cancel my booking, saying the first time that her computer wasn't working and the next time weeks later that her father just passed away. I had to complain to Airbnb that she refused to cancel the booking, so they canceled it, but I was unable to write a negative review. According to Vice again, they're saying the plumbing scam seems to rest on the idea Airbnb won't penalize a host if the house is uninhabitable. Okay, that's what I was saying. I've seen this before. So this goes on and on this whole bait and switch thing. Okay, next one, getting the guests to agree to move houses and the plumbing scam is often kind of segway into getting you to agree to move houses. Okay? So they will say, supposed to be this, you know, here's this complaint supposed to be quaint, quiet property in downtown. They get delayed by the homeowner stating that we'd need to change properties the last minute since it was only a quick two-night visit we weren't opposed. The new quote larger location was this scummy little apartment complex on the other side of town. Another one - Booking the Airbnb to multiple people at the same time. That's what happened to us in Vegas. When my wife and I showed up at this apartment through Airbnb, perhaps the most socially awkward Bait and switch is this one renting an Airbnb where you believe you booked the whole residence only to arrive and find a whole bunch of strangers there. That happened to us in Vegas. Multiple people told us they came to see other Airbnb guests at the house, or in some cases, people who seem to live there. It just goes on and on. Next one - money scams, paying outside the app. I mentioned this one early. It says it's a straightforward scam. Be careful. There's no be careful here, as there is no reason to do that. Fake damages - Man, I've heard about this from multiple people before mine. How can Airbnb police this? Did the guests damage the place? Okay. Oh man scam scams, you'll find more about this online. My advice? Use a hotel you trust us out of the hotel booking site, you believe. And I already told you, I use hotwire because I don't care what the brand is. I just want a good hotel, and I use the ratings from the people who stayed. Stick around. We'll be right back. Hey, welcome back, everybody, Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online at Craig peterson.com. Hey, have you thought about how to follow along at home or on the road during the week? The easiest way to do that is to listen to my podcasts. Why not? I put it out there are multiple things, including this weekend show, but many other things that I include during the week, and you can subscribe to that as well on your favorite podcast platform. And it says Craig Peterson dot com slash iTunes. If you are an iTunes type of person or Craig peterson.com, slash tune in or slash I heart. Okay, I am kind of all over the place today. I appreciate everybody who does Listen to me and comments on things during the Week. You'll also find me on LinkedIn and Facebook and YouTube, but it is kind of over the place as I talk about some of the biggest stories of the week. Now we were just talking about scams that seem to be coming from Airbnb and VRBO, of course, but there is a lot of scams going one. We are going to get into one right now tied into the coronavirus. But first I just want to make mention of this other article that came out last month in January. And it's talking about computer literate millennials and Generation Z. These are the people that grew up with the internet. They've had the internet pretty much their whole lives. They found meaning the Federal Trade Commission has found that people ages 39 and under are more likely to report fraud than the 40 plus Crowd now here's the thinking. It isn't that the younger kids and millennials and Generation Z, it isn't as though they are less afraid to report that money has been stolen from them, it appears that they are more likely to fall victim to fraud 25% more likely. Now the millennials are less likely to fall for scams over the phone than people over 40, but 77% More likely, Millennials are 77% more likely to get duped by email scams and 90% more likely to lose money on a fake check scam. Now the thinking behind this is that those of us who are a little bit older, we hold the whole internet thing with a little bit more skepticism than our children and grandchildren do. Because we know that there are scammers out there. And we've heard all of the horror stories, whereas the younger kids are looking at it as well. It's the internet, and they just give their stuff away. We already know that there are studies that show that the millennials will give their email address away in trade for a single donut. Okay, so they don't value a lot of this stuff. You know, to me, well, it's a little bit concerning, and it should be to you. But let's get into the latest scam that's out there right now. It isn't the Airbnb scam, which has been out there for a few years now. As I said, hey, I've been burned what, four or five times by this overall, personally. So I'm just to the point I just don't use it anymore period. It's a real shame because there are some good people out there. But this has to do with what's been happening. Now it is happening with the Coronavirus, and this is a huge deal. We had one day this week, where 15,000 new cases were reported. Supposedly, it was due to a change in the way China was tracking the Coronavirus and diagnosing people. So they're saying, Hey, listen, it's you know is just a change. Don't expect this to indicate that more viruses are spreading out there. And frankly, I look at it and say, Well, maybe there are there aren't. But what we're seeing are some rather sophisticated phishing scams going on. Phishing, of course, this is the one spelled with a Ph. It is where an attacker tricks you into doing something. It might be clicking on a link. It might be responding to an email. It might also be a phishing scam over the phone or, you know, SMS a text one which would be called smishing. A whole new type of phishing this going on right now. Well, last week, IBM and Kaspersky now Kaspersky is a Russian anti-virus company. They are also trying to stop the general spread of malware. The State Department, the FBI, Homeland Security, not to use Kaspersky software, but they do have good information. So when I see Kaspersky, combined with IBM, a company I do respect, then that does kind of make my years and help if you will. Still, IBM and Kaspersky caught hackers in Japan, trying to spread malware through emails, and the emails had links about the Coronavirus outbreak that started, of course, in Wuhan China last month in January. Now adding Sophos and now, of course, Cisco to the list. They have found phishing emails from cybercriminals, purporting to be from the Center for Disease Control, as well as the World Health Organization. And what these bad guys are trying to do is to steal your email credentials and other information. The emails are coming from several domains, including CDC dash gov.org, which, of course, is not the real CDC website. So be very careful if you are trying to find out information about the CDC or the spread of coronavirus about flu in general. For instance, in my home state of New Hampshire, we have I think it's seven deaths so far this year reported g attribute To the flu in general, not the Coronavirus. Every year about 12 to 16,000 people in the United States die from the flu. So far, we've only got 14 cases reported of Coronavirus. At this stage everybody, this is nothing to get all freaky worried about. Okay, so calm down. If you want more, go to cdc.gov. CDC Centers for Disease Control - cdc.gov, tells you what to do now. The current Coronavirus has an official name now. It's called covin-19 co vi n dash 19. There are multiple versions of Coronaviruses, which is why they identify each with a number. We have had a report in the past about Coronaviruses, and they have killed people previously. So you'll see Right at the top of the cdc.gov website, information about the Coronavirus and its spread. It is a respiratory disease and potentially fatal. It doesn't seem to be increasingly more fatal than some of the other viruses that we've had. Let's put all this in context. And when you get an email from someone saying, hey, look at this, you click on this link, to get information about the Coronavirus. It's going to let you track the spread of etc. don't respond. If you get a text message, don't respond. I got one because I'm a member of the Great and Powerful media, right. I got one last week that was sent out to members of the press saying, Hey, we got this new tracking site. You just can't be cautious enough when it comes to this. So if you go to CDC Gov at the top, You'll see the description here about the Covid-19. You can click on that, and it'll show you a global map about the location of reported cases and what is happening. So, I'm looking at one, and it's about one day behind. It looks like right now for Covid-19. But you can see all of the countries that have been reporting it. Then you can also look at the hard statistics. People under investigation in the United States, exactly how many 14 positives, you'll see that there. Of course, it changes daily. You can see how many tested negative and how many pending, the people are under investigation. Remember, the airplane full of workers from the State Department that came back from China. They have now been under quarantine for more than 14 days. They release them all from quarantine because it turns out, nobody had that virus. So just because you have the flow doesn't mean it's Coronavirus. More cases over on the left coast and the Midwest, which is kind of surprising to me than there are on the East Coast or the Mid Atlantic, etc., etc. So have a look there. Do not respond to emails or texts or phone calls. Okay? Just be very, very careful because the hackers are imitating this sort of thing. The other side of this is they are sending out messages seeking donations. They are asking for Bitcoin donations to the World Health Organization can tell you right now, the World Health Organization, the CDC, they are not taking Bitcoin donations, okay. So don't go and donate. Right And again, the CDC gov.org is the band guys CD see.gov is the good guys. The scam page is straightforward. It, you know, took the scammers, maybe just a few minutes to put together. It's handy, and it looks legit. And the FBI and, of course, also Homeland Security are taking down these pages as soon as they can, but they can't always get rid of them right away. And companies, we've got to be proactive. We've got to chain train our employees, not to follow up on these scams. So again, that's part of the reason for my newsletters. I report on the biggest scams that are going on. I try and keep it down to just a few a week. You can share them with your employees, share them with your family, but you have to get them to share them. Go to Craig peterson.com slash subscribe, and you'll get those as well stick around. We'll be right back on WGAN. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN, and thanks for joining us today. Hopefully, you picked up a lot of good information. We're just talking about the CDC some of the scams that are out there right now from the Coronavirus, including one involving Bitcoin, which kind of surprised me. We talked a lot in the first hour about the major scams on Airbnb, where you can rent apartments or homes for a day or a week or a month, almost anywhere. It's really quite neat. But the major scams have been going on there and how I've seen them personally and why I will never use it ever again. If you want to listen to that, just go to Craig Peterson comm slash tune in, you can subscribe right there. Listen to me, live by the way on tune in when I'm on the radio. He And when I'm on with canon Matt, the morning drive every Wednesday at 737, every Wednesday morning, as well. And those are all on tune in. Now, we're going to talk a little bit about this whole thing with the ACLU and their current fight. I spoke about something similar to this a couple of years ago, man, maybe actually the first time was probably about ten years ago. There are companies out there, and they gather information about us. They're called Data brokers. I have visited some of these data brokers sites themselves, I mean, physical sites, where the company operates where they have their data collections, to help them with security problems that they have, and to help prevent problems from occurring, right. That's what I do for living full time. It was probably ten years ago, the radio show that I talked with some of these companies. What they do is they collect open-source information that's used a lot by the government for any number of things from financial transactions to investigations. And you can use open-source information yourself. All you do is go to Google, for instance, and do a search. That's the open-source information. It's anything that anyone can gain access to, without having to be a police officer without having to go and really kind of, you know, get a court order kind of be surreptitious and how you gather that's open source. So the data break, brokers will take all of that, and that can include depending on the state you're living, driver's license information, it can include information about the mortgage for your home. It can include you know the ownership of your home, and it can include just all kinds of stuff. That becomes very, very difficult to control. Because all of your information is out there. It's available for free or for cheap on the internet. So these data brokers, they might buy it from the county, they might get it an open-source. Some of this information will contain data from your mortgage, will contain your signature, the deed to your home is going to contain the signature, the automobiles that you own. There's going to be UCC filings with the Secretary of State's office, detailing what cars you own, who the lien holders are, and how much money is involved all of this stuff. So it all gets pulled into these databases. I mentioned on the show a few months ago, a couple of months ago that we were out in Las Vegas at a wedding and of course, you know, doing work while I'm out there and I'm sitting They're on the couch doing work for some of our Las Vegas clients. And there's a knock at the door. And who's there? Well, it's an insurance investigator investigating an accident that it was a fatal accident. And of course, the insurance company had been asked to payout. So they came to this home because they had information that it that the person involved I had a contact with someone at this address, which indeed she did. It was her sister, and apparently, the driver had been responsible for this fatal death. The driver listed one of my sisters in law. She had died about six months before the accident. So obviously, it was all fate. The insurance investigator showed my wife all of this information she had from one of these data brokers. It listed my deceased sister in law's relatives, everybody, every address she had ever had. There were names and contact information for some of my kids. However, it had a lot of incorrect information, including supposed current addresses and voting information for relatives deceased for over two decades. When I've looked at the data brokers' information about me, about half of it's correct, but the other half is completely incorrect. And that's still the case because they had a lot of completely incorrect information. People that they said were relatives that weren't people we'd never heard of before. They said these were direct relatives of hers. At any rate, they had purchased all of this information from a Data Broker. In collections, this is called a skip trace. It's called a skip trace for people who jumped bail, etc. Man, we should talk to about this whole bail thing, and the idiocy in New York state that is spreading country-wide dog, the bounty hunter and his wife, Beth had been fighting this for a long time because it's making us much, much less safe. But anyhow, that's not a topic for today's show. It's not a political topic, because it's undeniable what's already happening with the increase in the crime rate in New York anyways. What the government is doing now is what I was warning about a decade ago. That is that the federal government, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, of the IRS, you name it, they are limited in how they can collect information, we kind of already knew that right? You know that they had to get a search warrant for certain things right. They can follow you around, without any expectation of privacy, etc., etc. So So obviously, federal government agencies can use open-source information to see what you're doing online. But how about the closed source stuff? How about this stuff that the data brokers are collecting? Some of it they're getting from the people who lent you money, some of it they're getting from places where you have to pay to get that information. So, what's happened here is that the ACLU has filed a suit, according to The Wall Street Journal, against Homeland Security. Homeland Security, through its Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, as well as Customs and Border Protection, is buying geolocation data from these data brokers and choosing to investigate suspects who have allegedly committed immigration violations. So let me boil all that down into plain English. You might be using games on your smartphone, and you might be using all kinds of apps on your smartphone. If you have a smartphone, frankly, you're probably not using 90 95% of those apps that you have downloaded. But many of those apps are tracking you. And that information is being sold to data brokers. So think about that for a minute. Remember that free app and how you've heard me and many others for so many years say, hey, you're not the customer. You are the product. Well, what's happening here now is that the ACLU is saying to the federal government, hey, you cannot buy the information that by law your organization cannot collect. You cannot buy it from data brokers or these app developers who are selling it. Interesting question, interesting problem, isn't it? What should they do? What should you do? What can you do? It is going to play out in court, and I suspect it's going to come down on the side of the Department of Homeland Security because this information is generally available to anyone willing to pay for it. So now the government stepped forward, saying we are will pay for it. By the way, this goes down to local law enforcement as well. In many cases, they are also buying this information from the data brokers. So let's stick around when we come back. We're going to talk about shadow IT. If you don't know what it is, it's a problem if you're in business. Hey, welcome back, everybody Craig Peterson here on WGAN. Thanks for joining me and for spending part of your Saturday with me. If you're listening to this on a podcast at Craig Peterson dot com slash tune in, thanks for joining me, some listen to me while they're driving to and from work and find the various segments of my show, which are about ten-ish minutes long, really work well into their day. So if you're doing that, thank you if you're not, please do consider it. I try and keep everybody up to date with the information that you need to know. And that leads us to what we got right now. Which is shadow IT. Now I bet there is not a co

Welcome!   Today there is a ton of stuff going on in the world of Technology and we are going to hit a number of topics today. There are some scams that are getting more and more prevalent with Airbnb and VRBO that we will talk about. Also, phishing scams using the Coronavirus as a way to trick you into clicking.  The ACLU is filing suit against DHS. China is stealing our Intellectual Property.  Shadow IT becoming more and more of a problem and even more on Tech Talk With Craig Peterson today on WGAN.  It is a busy show -- so stay tuned. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Is it possible to secure our Elections using Technology The security mistakes made by the Iowa Democratic Party in creating their App Coronavirus bringing out opportunistic Hackers   Extensive US Intellectual Property theft by Chinese being investigated by FBI  Scammers have found a fertile field in Airbnb DHS wants to track illegal aliens using available cell-phone location data. ACLU says Whoa!  Shadow-IT: Employees putting Business at Risk Ransomware rings adapt to business declarations by Revealing Stolen Data --- Machine Automated Transcript: Hey everybody, welcome, welcome. Craig Peterson here on WGIR, you can also hear me every Monday morning at 737 with Jack Heath, where we discuss some of the latest topics in technology. Of course, nowadays, you can't talk about technology without security, which is what I've been doing in my business now for about 30 years. I was coerced into it. Maybe one of these days, I'll share that whole story with you. It can get to be kind of a long one. But today we are going through some of the problems that I've seen out there lately. I have on my podcast this week that you can get at Craig peterson.com slash Iheart, Craig peterson.com slash Iheart. I spent quite a bit of time talking about recent problems people have been finding with Airbnb with VRBO, and I go through some of the problems I recently have had with both of those services. And I think it's well worth listening to because I've gotten to the point right now where I will not use either Airbnb or VRBO, I don't think ever again. My experiences with them have just been so overwhelmingly negative, anyhow you'll find that online, and you can subscribe there as well at Craig peterson.com slash I heart. That like is going to take you to the I heart app. You might be listening to me right now, in fact, on Iheart streaming on these AM and FM stations. If you are, kudos to you, but you can also get all of my content by going and subscribing, Craig peterson.com slash I heart, and I'm also on every other major podcast streaming platform that's out there. But first, I just want to make mention of this other article that came out last month in January. It's talking about computer literate millennials and Generation Z. These are the people that grew up with the internet. They've had the internet pretty much their whole lives. They've found meaning the Federal Trade Commission found that people ages 39 and under are more likely to report fraud than the 40 plus crowd. Now, here's the thinking here. It isn't that the younger kids millennials and Generation Z, it isn't as though they are less afraid to report that money stolen from them. It appears that they are more likely to fall victim to fraud. 25% more likely. Now the millennials are less likely to fall for a scam over the phone and people over 40, but 77% More likely, Millennials are 77% more likely to get duped by email scams and 90% more likely to lose money on a fake check scam. Now, the thinking behind this is that those of us who are a little bit older, we hold the whole internet thing with a little bit more skepticism than our children and grandchildren do. Because we know that there are scammers out there and we've heard all the horror stories, whereas the younger kids are looking at it as well. It's the internet, and they just give their stuff away. We already know that there are studies that show that the millennials will give their email address or weigh in trade for a single donut. Okay. They don't value a lot of this stuff. And, you know, to me, well, it's a little bit concerning, and it should be to you. But let's get into the latest scam that's out there right now. It isn't the Airbnb scam, which has been out there for a few years now. As I said, hey, I've been burned, what, four or five times by this overall personally. I am jaded, and I just don't use it anymore period. It's a real shame because there are some good people out there. But this has to do with what's been happening with the Coronavirus. It is a huge deal. We had one day this week, where 15,000 new cases were reported. The Chinese changed how they tracked and diagnosed cases. So they're saying hey, listen, it's you know, it's Change. Don't expect this to indicate that more viruses are spreading out there. And frankly, I look at it and say, Well, maybe there are there aren't. But what we're seeing are some rather sophisticated phishing scams going on. Phishing, of course, this is the one spelled with a Ph. It is where an attacker tricks you into doing something. It might be clicking a link. It might be responding to an email. It might also be a phishing scam over the phone or, you know, SMS a text one which is called smishing. A whole new type of phishing this going on right now. Well, last week, IBM and Kaspersky now Kaspersky is an anti-virus company. They are also trying to stop the general spread of malware. They are a Russian firm, and the State Department and FBI have warned us about using their software, but they do have good information. When I see Kaspersky combined with IBM, a company I do respect, then that does kind of make my ears stand up, if you will. IBM and Kaspersky caught hackers in Japan, trying to spread malware through emails. And the emails had links about the coronavirus outbreak that started Of course and won China last month in January. And now adding cell phones to the list. Of course, Cisco, to the list, they have found phishing emails from cybercriminals, purporting to be from the Center for Disease Control, as well as the World Health Organization and what they're trying to do the bad guys his deal your email credentials and other information. The emails are coming from several domains, including CDC dash gov.org, which, of course, is not the real CDC website. So be very careful if you are trying to find out information about the CDC, or about the spread of Coronavirus about flu in general. For instance, in my home state of New Hampshire, we have I think it's seven deaths so far this year reported g attributed to the flu in general, not the Coronavirus. Every year about 12 to 16,000 people in the United States die from the flu. So far we've only got 14 cases reported of Coronavirus So, at this stage everybody, this is nothing to get all freaky worried about. Okay, so calm down. If you want more, go to CDC.gov. CDC Centers for Disease Control cdc.gov. And it tells you what to do now this Coronavirus has an official name now it's called Covin-19, co vi d dash 19 because there are multiple versions of Coronaviruses and viruses. And we have had a report in the past about Coronaviruses, and they have killed people previously. So you'll see right at the top of the CDC, gov website, information about the Coronavirus and it spread. It is a respiratory disease. It is potentially fatal. It doesn't seem to be any more fatal than some of the other viruses that we've had. So let's put all of this in context. And when you get an email from someone saying hey, Look at this, click on this link, it's going to get you information about the Coronavirus, it's going to let you track the spread of, etc. don't respond. And you, if you get a text message, don't respond. I got one because I'm a member of the Great and Powerful media, right. I got one last week that was sent out to members of the media saying, Hey, we got this new tracking site. You just can't be cautious enough when it comes to this. So if you go to CDC Gov at the top, you'll see the description here about the Covin-19. And you can click on that, and it'll show you a global map about where it has been reported what is happening. I'm looking at one. It's about one day behind it looks like right now for Covin-19. But you can see all of the countries that have been reporting it and then you can also So look at the hard statistics. People under investigation in the United States exactly how many 14 positives you'll see that there. Of course, it changes daily. How many negative how many pending? The people are under investigation. Remember, the airplane full of workers from the State Department that came back from China. They have now been under quarantine for more than 14 days. They released them all from quarantine because it turns out that nobody had that virus, so just because you have the flow doesn't mean it's Coronavirus. More cases over on the left coast and the Midwest, which is kind of surprising to me than there are on the East Coast or the Mid Atlantic, etc., etc. So have a look there. Do not respond to emails or texts or phone calls. Okay. Just be very, very careful. Hackers are imitating this sort of thing. Then the other side of this is they are sending out messages, seeking donations, and they're asking for Bitcoin donations to the World Health Organization. I can tell you right now, the World Health Organization, the CDC, they are not taking Bitcoin donations, okay? Don't go and donate, right. Again the CDC gov.org is the bad guys cdc.gov is the good guys. The scam page is elementary. it might have taken the scammers just a few minutes to put together. It's very effective. It looks legit. And the FBI and, of course, also Homeland Security are taking down these pages as soon as they can, but they can't always get rid of them right away. And companies we got to be proud. We've got a chain, train our employees not to follow up on these scams. So again, that's part of why I publish my newsletters. I report on the biggest scams that are going on. I try and keep it down to just a few a week. You can share them with your employees, share them with your family, but you have to get them to share them. Go to Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. Now, we're going to talk a little bit about this whole thing with the ACLU and their current fight. I spoke about something similar to this a couple of years ago, man, maybe actually the first time was probably about ten years ago. There are companies out there, and they gather information about us. They're called Data brokers. And I have visited some of these data brokers sites themselves. I mean physical site, where the company operates where they have their data collections, to help them with security problems that they have. And to help prevent problems from occurring, right. That's what I do for a living full time. And it was probably ten years ago, the radio show that I talked with some of these companies. But what they do is they take what's called open source information that's used a lot by government or investigations. And you can use open-source information yourself. All you do is go to Google, for instance, and do a search. That's the open-source information. It's anything that anyone can gain access to, without having to be a police officer without having to go and really kind of, you know, get a court order kind of be surreptitious and how you gather that's open source. So the data break brokers will take all of that, and that can include depending on States your living driver's license information. It can include information about the mortgage for your home. It can include you know the ownership of your home, and it can include just all kinds of stuff. And that becomes very, very difficult to control. Because all of your information is out there. It's available for free or for cheap on the internet. So these data brokers, they might buy it from the county, they might get it an open-source. Some of these documents are going to contain like your mortgage is going to contain your signature. The deed to your home is going to contain the signature, the automobiles that you own. There's going to be UCC filings with the Secretary of State's office, detailing what cars you own, who the lien holders are, and how much money is involved, all of this stuff. So it all gets pulled into these days. databases I mentioned on the show a few months ago, a couple of months ago that we were out in Las Vegas at a wedding. And of course, you know, doing work while I'm out there sitting on the couch, doing work for some of our Las Vegas clients when there was a knock at the door. Who's there? Well, it's an insurance investigator investigating an accident that had a fatality. And of course, the insurance company had been asked to payout. They came to this home because they had information that the person involved had contact with someone at this address, which indeed she did. It was her sister, and the driver had been responsible for this fake fatal death. The driver listed was one of my sisters in law, who had died six months before the accident. It was all fake. The insurance investigator showed my wife all of this information she had that they had purchased from one of these data brokers. It had listed my deceased sister in law's relatives, everybody every address she had ever had. It had names and contact information for some of my kids as well. Now, it was not all correct or organized. When I've looked at the data brokers' information about me, only about half of it is right, but the other half is entirely incorrect. That's still the case because they had a lot of utterly false information. People that they said were relatives that weren't. People we'd never heard of before, they identified as direct relatives of hers. The insurance company purchased all of this information from a Data Broker, in collections, this is called a skip trace. It's called a skip trace for people who jumped bail, etc. Man, we should talk about this whole bail thing, and the idiocy and New York state that is spreading countrywide dog, the bounty hunter and his wife Beth had been fighting this for a long time because it's making us much, much less safe. But anyhow, that's not a topic for today's show. It's not a political topic, because it's undeniable what's already happening with the increase in the crime rate, New York anyways. What the government is doing now and this is part of what I was warning about a decade ago, is the federal government, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, of the IRS, you name it. They are limited in how they can collect information, we kind of already knew that, right? They knew that they had to get a search warrant for certain things, right? They can follow you around if you do not expect privacy, etc., etc. So obviously, federal government agencies can use open-source information to see what you're doing online. But how about the closed source stuff? How about this information that the data brokers are collecting? Some of it comes from the people who lent you money. Some of it they're getting from places where you have to pay to get that information. What's happened here now is that the ACLU has filed a suit, according to The Wall Street Journal, against Homeland Security and Homeland Security through its Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. As well as Customs and Border Protection, is buying Gilo geolocation data from these data brokers. It's using it to investigate suspects who have allegedly committed immigration violations. So let me boil all that down into plain English. You might be using games on your smartphone, and you might be using all kinds of apps on your smartphone. If you have a smartphone, you probably are, frankly, not using 90-95% of those apps that you have downloaded. But many of those apps are tracking you. And that information is being sold to data brokers. So think about that for a minute. Remember that free app and how you've heard me and many others for so many years. Say, hey, you're not the customer. You are the product. But what's happening here now is that the ACLU is saying to the federal government, hey, you cannot, you cannot buy this information that you are not allowed to collect yourself. You cannot buy it from data brokers or these app developers who are selling it. Interesting question, interesting problem, isn't it? What should they do? What should you do? What can you do? It is going to play out in court. I suspect it's going to come down on the side of the Department of Homeland Security because this information is generally available to anyone willing to pay for it. So now the government stepped forward, saying we are will pay for it. By the way, it's down to local law enforcement as well, who, in many cases, are also buying information from the data brokers. Have you ever set up a company Amazon account? Have you ever set up an account for a company account for Uber? Maybe it's not a company account. Perhaps it's your account that you're using for Uber or something else? How about using something like Constant Contact to send out emails to your customers? How about salesforce.com, where we've seen a shift over the years from what used to be kind of the glass castle, where you had a central computer room in that computer room was a mainframe. And those mainframes were astounding. They still are. And that mainframe in that glass room was controlled by professional Information Technology people, people that knew what they were doing at least at the time, right? Then we started seeing some changes. You remember the apple two and VisiCalc Visicalc was kind of the killer application. And if you wanted to do numbers, then you bought an apple, you purchased a little apple two. And you then pulled data and people were asking that glass house, they were asking it, Hey, can you give us data because we want to put together some spreadsheet. People put together spreadsheets without really understanding the implications of the numbers they were using without understanding how to audit a spreadsheet to make sure that the figures included were correct. They didn't understand the double journaling. They didn't understand the cross-referencing of the information. They started a bit of a movement away from that glass house from that glass castle from it. They said hey, we could figure this out, why are we going to pay it all of this fake budget money to do something for us and we can do it for ourselves and do it cheaper. Frankly, that's a problem I still face with many organizations, if you can believe it, who think they can do security themselves, which is impossible for almost any organization. In this day and age, any small-medium business must have full-time external professionals who are helping your internal IT people. The internal IT should be doing what they do best, which is helping your business use information technology, to its best use, assisting people to be more efficient, finding new ways of doing things, etc. Instead of that, what most businesses do is they have these various silos, like sales and marketing and accounting. And each one of those silos, those lines company does things their way. So the sales guys, they're out, and they said, Hey, we're going to use Salesforce. And we're going to tie that into Constant Contact. And then you have your accounting people saying, well, we're going to use QuickBooks Online. Or maybe they're going to use one of Oracle's accounting systems. And then the manufacturing people say, Well, we are going to use this particular era p program, which is going to be great for manufacturing. And we've decided that we're going to use Survey Monkey to collect information from our customers from our vendors. You see where I'm going, each one of these lines of business is going out there and making what are in actuality, information technology decisions. They're making decisions about what type of technology to use, which is one level, but then the next Next Level is they're using it. And they're putting the business's information at risk. It is a huge, huge problem. It's something that I'm going to be addressing with some of this training that I have coming up with a couple of these tutorials correctly tackle these problems. And so if you're on my email list at Craig Peterson comm slash subscribe, you're going to find out about these, and I'm going to give you some great cheat sheets and other things. But all of those again, Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. All of those different lines of business, all of those different functional responsibilities within an organization larger small, are adding up and adding up hugely. And there is a massive problem behind this. Now you know, that I use one password, and I recommend it, and we typically Use one password in conjunction with Duo to help secure login information. But because one password is used so frequently by companies to keep track of logins, they have kind of a unique view into the risks of all these different accounts. And what we're talking about where these lines of business are making Information Technology decisions that they're not qualified to make, and frankly, in most small-medium companies, there's probably no one in the organization that's fully qualified. Still, at least it has a better idea, but then a marketing person or an accounting person would have. So this is called shadow it and it's absolutely something that we have to be careful of and we have to watch for and if you are one of these people who is using one of these third-party services, and you have not informed your IT person. Do it right now. All right, thanks. Okay, hey, we have a lot more content that you can get online. Just go to Craig Peters on.com. You'll find it right there in my weekly newsletter that you can use to help educate other people inside your company. Maybe family, maybe friends, and indeed, educate yourself and the things that you need to know security-related or just the newest and latest greatest technology. Now I got an email here just while was Facebook a couple of weeks ago a message about a story that I had reported on about Tesla before, and I try and answer those I dig them up I get them for you. But I want to make sure you are subscribed at Craig Peterson comm slash subscribe, so you get all of that. Thanks for being with me here, WGIR, and we'll be back Monday morning with Jack Heath at 737. Hey, welcome back Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online Of course, Craig peterson.com. If you want to, you can subscribe to my email list you'll find out about the free tutorials that pop up training, courses, everything that I do to help make you and your business more secure. So again, Craig Peterson, dot com slash subscribe. I got to read this to you right now. I decided to cancel through Airbnb and tell them about what had happened. He went off at me, berated me for not handling in it privately, and told me I was acting in my self-interest, and belittled me. I ended up having to pay the first full month even though I stayed one night. His listing is still up, and a review posted after my state also mentioned the silverfish. Isn't that something? Now, this is from a report that came out from vice. Now you might be familiar with vice.com. There's a lot of decent stuff up there. But I want to tell you a little bit about my own experience I've had with Airbnb and VR Bo now VR Bo is vacation rentals. It's it has been used more, I think, by businesses from what the stuff I've read than it is by individuals. But I have had bad experiences with both of them. Every time I have had an Airbnb, I have had a bad experience. So let me tell you what I mean by a bad experience. For instance, I was out of Vegas at a conference, and we thought, you know what, let's try Airbnb. I'm the tech guy, right? I need to understand this. Why wouldn't I go ahead and use Airbnb in make sense, right? So here the tech guy goes, and we poke around read reviews we read ratings. We found an apartment, not far at all, I mean like half a mile from the convention center. We thought, okay, this is going to be perfect. It says it's right by the strip we could walk over there, hop a cab or, or grab a ride and enjoy The Strip, and then the morning we can just walk over the convention center. We're not going to have any problems parking because it said it is an apartment. Let me start with parking. By the way, parking is another thing in the second Airbnb story. There was no parking. You had to park a half a mile away sometimes because people were just parking in the parking lot of the apartment building. There were no reserved parking slots for the apartment. So there's number one — number two. When we go into the apartment, and it's quite nice. We find out that it has two bedrooms. We had only booked one bedroom because that's all the listing talked about the one-bedroom. We get there, and we find, okay, so this is our bedroom over here. Well, the bedroom did not have an ensuite bathroom. The bathroom for the bedroom was across the hall. So there we go, we get in there and okay, fine. So our bathrooms across the hall, and we end up going to bed. We enjoyed it was a nice place relatively clean, quite old. It was probably a 40-50-year-old apartment. In the layout that you would expect there in the southwest where there's kind of a courtyard in the middle, and it's a little two-story thing and, you know, kind of reminded me when I lived in LA back in about 1980 late 70s early 80s. You know it's that part was quite nice. You know brand new shag rug in there, well you know not brand-new but quite new and clean. That part result was good. We go to bed and then we there we hear just tons of commotion because somebody else who didn't speak English very well had come to stay at the apartment as well. We hear them going into our bathroom, using our towels. They are very, very loud talking on the phone, and they get a hold of the owner right of this Airbnb. They got the same impression we did, which is there's one-bedroom in this place. So they had an ensuite bathroom. We did not, but they were using our bathroom the whole time and our towels, there's only one set of towels. It wasn't a great experience at all. They kept us up for quite a while because they were just so loud. Now you know me, I'm not an outgoing guy. You might not believe that, but I'm a little bit of an introvert. And as an introvert, I didn't want to go out and confront these people who were I'm guessing, or you know, from Asia, they were speaking Chinese or Korean or Japanese, I have no idea. I just didn't want to mess with it. So we get up in the morning, we and everything is okay-ish. We go to the conference and then that night, I guess these people only there for one night. That night, we had the whole place to ourselves, which is okay. Knowing that with Airbnb, I rate the place after I stay there, but the owner of the place rates me and so there have been a lot of issues of retaliation when it comes to Airbnb. If you stay at one of these places and you don't give them this glowing five-star review, then you're not going to get reviewed while and other people might not want you to stay at their place. So I gave it a reasonable rating. I can't remember what I gave it, you know, places clean and, and, you know, it was a nice place and there is another bedroom. You know, just kind of hint into anybody reading this. It isn't going to be dedicated to you and maybe your loved one you're staying with and left it at that. That's my first Airbnb story. And then my second Airbnb story, as I mentioned, had a lot to do with parking as well. And in this case, it was in the Toronto area, up in Brampton, and we rented a place on Airbnb, you know, I figured, well, we'll give another chance, see what happens. It was a three-bedroom place, and they said it sleeps like eight or something like that. What you did if you include the fold-out couch, and so we figured, okay, we need some parking. So I had sent them a message saying, hey, it's going to be myself and a couple of my kids and some grandkids. You know, I want to make sure that there's plenty of parking. Is it? Oh, yeah, plenty of parking, buddy parking, no problem. And so we get there, and there is one parking spot. And it's in one of these. I don't know if you know much about Canada and how they build their housing there. But one of the reasons I'm not that fond of it, right. I grew up there. It was these townhouses that are built right on top of each other, you know, the zero property line homes there. Three, four, or five of them attached. The only place you can park is in the little garage place. Well, the garage itself was full of stinking trash. Who knows how long it had been there. You couldn't use the garage. It had hared the driveway with the condo next door to you. It had one parking spot. I had my car, my daughter's car for her, her husband, and a couple of her kids. And then one of my other kids also drove up there. We had to find a place to park. Now the good news was that the whole neighborhood was under construction. They were able to park in the mud. in one area where construction wasn't happening right then, of course, the next morning, what shows up big dump trucks, excavators, everything else to work across the street from us. That wasn't fun. Let me tell you that it was not fun. We were quite worried about our cars, with all of this heavy equipment on this little narrow street designed for one car to go down the street when cars park on the street. We have to go right now when we come back, and I'm going to finish what happened with my air mean being being being a story, as well as my VR Bo story. And we got a whole lot more to cover. We're going to get into this Homeland Security thing with the ACLU and more but stick around, listening to Craig Peterson a course on WGAN online at Greg Peterson dot com is where you'll find me. Make sure you subscribe so that you get all of my free tutorials, training courses. Everything, Craig Peterson dot com, stick around. Hey, welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and of course online, at Craig Peterson dot com. I was in the middle of telling you my stories about Airbnb. If you have ever thought about staying at Airbnb, or VRBO, or any of these types of places, right, obviously you're not staying at a website, but you're booking through a website, somebody's home, somebody's rental, whatever it might be then this is for you. I have done it for personal reasons. I have done it for business reasons as well. I told you the beginning of my story in Toronto, and I told you the last segment about my story in Las Vegas. We didn't have the parking, and the kids are all worried, and I was concerned about our cars getting destroyed by the heavy equipment. Were we going to have to move them because they were working on the lots across the street? It's incredible how fast the housing is going up there and how expensive it is to it's, it's just not how pricey it is. We get inside the place. Now, remember, I said that the garage was full of trash which was, and it stunk to high heaven, which it did. Okay, so some of that leaks into the house, which makes the house kind of smell too, which is just plain old, no fun. We get into the house, and I go and sit on this folding couch. And remember, the house is supposed to sleep eight, and it has a fold-out sofa. I sit on the couch. It reeks of BO, body odor. Right? I mean reeks. One of the first things I have to do is I want to make sure that they know that this is a problem so that maybe they can take care of it. I call, and I don't get any answer because it's the weekend, right? Nobody's around. We head out to the local grocery store, and we get some odor killer stuff, and we bring it back, and we drench the couch in it. And we're able to get rid of most of the BO you know, and its underarm smell is what it is. Someone with some nasty underarm odor was sitting on that couch. They put their arm up on the back of the sofa and left all of their BO behind them. Then they did the same thing on the couch itself and somebody supposed to sleep there, right? Oh, it was just incredible. Then we go upstairs and upstairs that we noticed that the fire alarms had tape all around the sides of them. Now, if you're not familiar with the way firearm alarms work, they have to be able to have air flowing through them to sense that There's smoke in the air or carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, whatever the type of detector is. And it had been it had tape all around it. Now it looked like it was painters tape right that blue tape that you use as you can pull off that isn't going to leave residue behind. So maybe it was the painters perhaps it was the owners, I don't know, perhaps it was a previous occupant, but I warned them about that as well as saying hey listen, your fire alarms are not going to work because it blocks the airflow on the fire alarms by this tape that's on them. I never got a response on anything there. So what do I do when it's time to leave a review? Well, I said the place was in perfect shape. It's brand new. I had to do a little bit of cleaning. The cleaning crew in because the carpets upstairs all had the markings of a, you know, a vacuum cleaner. You can see the wheel marks on the floor and everything else. So you see it's not as though a rip them a new one like I have seen done before. And you never get to see your ratings by the way from these Airbnb owners. Okay, so there's a second one not neither one of mine were nightmares per se, but they both had significant problems that I was afraid to report on because I know that turnabout is considered fair play and who knows what these owners are going to say. Then I tried a VRBO, but they are older. They've been around for something like 30 years, and it's vacation rental type stuff, right? So VRBO, okay, we'll try it out. So we try it. We booked a place, and I wrote to the owners. Hey, there's we're going to have three cars, or two cars can't remember what it was now. Is this going to work for us this okay, I want to make sure this parking is I've had issues before? I never got a response from them. But, you know, they ran my credit card through so I figured, okay, well at least that part is done. I show up with the family in tow. And we're going to have this great time together. I'm going to be working, and they can stay in and just enjoy the place you know, a new city, a new location is going to be great. Guess what? VRBO had canceled my reservation without telling me without informing me, without crediting me. Well, it turned out that they didn't end up crediting me after all the credit card, but here I am waiting for the place that I can't get in. I called up VRBO to say, Listen, I never got a code for the door or anything else. What should I do here? Oh, no. Well, I see that reservation was canceled. I never canceled the reservation. Oh, no, sir. It was canceled, like the day after you booked it. I said, wait a minute. I never canceled it. Well, okay. Well, then the owner must have canceled. Why didn't I get notified? Oh, you didn't get notified, sir? Really? It says they sent an email. I went through all my junk mailboxes and everything else and yep. Okay. I got a notice of cancellation. Oh, man, what a pain that one was. Well, we can find another place in the area you're in right now. We'll make sure you get a refund. I said, Listen, I'm here. I don't have A place to stay. What am I supposed to do now? And they just say I'm sorry, sir. You know, I'm sorry, We'll make sure you get credit. That's all they would do. For me, it was absolutely a nightmare. Three experiences personal experiences for me. One of them a nightmare. One of them on the edge of a nightmare. Another one that could well have been a nightmare but was a mere inconvenience. You can probably guess by now what my thinking is about Airbnb and VRBO. That's what got my interest in this article about this poor guy who was scammed, okay. He was trying to stay in Montreal, and the owner asked him to pay for their stay, outside of the Airbnb app. I've seen that happen many, many times. Because that way, the owner does not have to pay the Airbnb fees, okay? But if you do that now you have very little recourse against the owner, then you know, I've done some chargeback. Lately, now my company if someone buys a course from us, and they're not happy, and we will immediately refund their money because we just don't want them to be upset or disappointed. Because again, you know, our whole thing is to nourish you back to health when it comes to security stuff, right, get that transformation done. I have had some nightmares personally trying to do a chargeback for things that were never delivered, or that got charged inappropriately. Or where I canceled the service. In one case, it was like it was over $1,000 a month for the service, and I canceled it. They charged me the 1200 dollars anyways. I went to my credit card company, and they said, well, we'll have to verify it with the vendor first. So what? I canceled it. I had to fight with a credit card company, and then when they checked with the vendor, and the vendor said, Okay, well, it's fine. We'll take chargeback. You used to be able to do this at the drop of a hat, and I guess they've abused it, right? I think that's the bottom line on it. But man, oh man, so we'll get a little bit more into this vise story. I guess its turned into an Airbnb, VRBO, what to do if you want a vacation rental or if you want to rent a place while you're on a business trip. And then we'll get into some of the more of the articles here, in the next hour. You're listening to Craig Peterson, of course, on WGAN and online. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson back here. I don't know if you guys know what Airbnb's roots were. It started as an air Bed and Breakfast. It was intended for the very young generation to be able to go to concerts and things and just get an air bed in somebody's apartment or home. That's what Airbnb is all about air bed and breakfast. That was the whole idea. And I'm not so sure they've come a long way from those days. I spent the last few segments, in fact, in talking about my horror stories, we've been trying to use Airbnb. There's another one I did not mention in Florida, which was not a horror story quite the disappointment for this house. That I think while I'm quite confident in this house that we rented. It was for a family reunion. So we rented this house that slept like a dozen or something like that. All of the beds were just terrible. You know, the cheapest mattresses that are known to man. You shift your weight at all, and the squeaks loud enough to wake you up. The sheets are the cheapest ones you could imagine. It was an Airbnb as well. It was pretty obvious that the set up for this place was for porn videos. You go into the garage, and the whole garage is one massive shower with I can't remember for six showerheads in it. And then a little bit of workout equipment. I mean a tiny bit of workout equipment. It sounded awful. Okay. And so there you go there, there's all of the Airbnb and VRBO, experiences I can remember. My sister rented the one in Florida for the family, and she did not stay there. She stayed with my mom. It was quite revealing, frankly, so disappointing. I never shared these stories before, but it was because of a story that was in a vice.com, and you'll find this up on my website and Craig peterson.com. They put a little note out saying, Hey, does anybody have any stories about Airbnb, Airbnb scams, and they said, this is Anna Marian, who wrote this that nearly 1000 people sent them emails with their stories. They looked at all of the stories they put together some patterns. A former vice senior staff writer by the name of Alec Conti shared her story about a disastrous vacation to Chicago, and she ran into what she's saying are a bunch of grifters, and frankly a nationwide scam. I no longer use Airbnb at all or VRBO at all. I have been sticking with hotels. If you're interested, I typically use hotwire. I don't use the star ratings of the hotels. I rely on the ratings that are posted by the people who stayed there. I think that's the best feature of hotwire, frankly. I don't care what hotel it is. I just want to stay at a decent hotel. I even used hotwire throughout France and Belgium. It worked great. We found some just wonderful spots that we would never have found if we were just looking to stay at the Marriott or the Hilton or whatever it is, right? So Conti's investigation revealed some serious problems with Airbnb. Now you might have heard about this problem with Airbnb. After all, it hit the news late last year of these party rentals after a death happened. I think it was in San Diego at one of these party rentals. Somebody rented a nice house. Essentially a lot of these places get destroyed by the partiers, right there. There are drugs and heavy drinking, and in this one case, that hit the news. There were gun shootings. Okay, that's a very, very bad, bad thing. So Conti apparently, and again, you can find this article on vice.com traced her scam back to a company that used fake profiles and fake reviews to conceal a whole bunch of wrongdoings. Let's get into this okay because property switches are one of the biggest ones will tell you about what those are the units of sawdust on the floor with holes in the walls, this whole bait and switch game which goes into these properties, switches, and stuff. It's awful. When all else fails, there are these clumsy threatening demands for five-star reviews to hide the evidence of what they've done. Sometimes multiple scams are involved. You know it the hackers aren't just coming after directly our money by trying to hack our businesses by trying to fool us into clicking on links or doing things that we shouldn't be doing, right? These scammers are all over the place. After this story that came out, Airbnb promised to "verify All 7 million listings on this site by December of this year 2020". Frankly, there's no way that they could do this. There's no way you could send investigators to all 7 million listings. He said, Well, we're going to have to take more responsibility for stuff on our platform. Yes, you will. You have to provide a firewall. Not just a firewall of the reviewers, the people who stay there and review can see the reviews that come in from the owners of these properties. That's not going to solve the problem. You need to make it so that there can not be retribution by the bad guys that have given Airbnb a bad name. Now I got to mention that my sister the one that booked that Airbnb for us in Florida, my sister has a house that she rents out in Park City, Utah, on Airbnb, and one of her daughters keeps it clean. I know my sister is not engaged in scams. I know that my niece is somebody who takes responsibility for things. I'm sure she keeps it clean. I don't want to paint the whole Airbnb, a website and people who are renting with a black brush here, I don't want to paint the whole rental market, including the VRBO with a black brush, but I've got to say 100% of the time I have had what I think are scams on both platforms. Now, that's my personal opinion, based on a handful of stays, and I know a handful of stays does not represent every listing on the platforms, right. I understand that. However, its the verification process, we're talking about here. I don't know that he's ever going to do it. How are you going to review and verify all 7 million listings on the Airbnb site within 12 months by December 2020? I don't know how you're going to do it. So let's go through the biggest scams according to vice.com number one, which they say is exceedingly common. It's across hundreds of emails. It's the bait and switch where Airbnb users were promised one apartment and arrived to find something very different. deceptive photos a bore no resemblance to what they found when they got there. My kids found this too. They rented some places in Italy when they did a tour, and you know, black mold everywhere just terrible. Okay? Other times and they were persuaded by those to switch apartments or houses entirely. It is a widespread thing where they say, hey, due to unforeseen circumstances, as a pipe broke, I'm going to have to move you to another one of our properties. Now under the rules for Airbnb, the owner does not get penalized if they push you to a property due to quote, unforeseen circumstances unquote, like a pipe break. But it turns out some of these people are using that unforeseen circumstance again and again and again. And they're showing up to their rental defined the new locations filthy, unfurnished on a different part of town. And they're saying that in a surprising number of stories, the original house was full of a weird amount of bear beds laid out and bizarre configurations, kind of sounds like that porn place my sister rented for the family in Florida, doesn't it? So here's one of the quotes I rented a place near Glass beach and a few weeks part of my trip. When I reached out to confirm the booking, the Lister told me she had a septic problem in the unit, and she would see if she'd put me if she could put her up in a more prominent place nearby. It never materialized, but she refused to cancel my booking, saying the first time that her computer wasn't working and the next time weeks later that her father just passed away. I had to complain to Airbnb that she refused to cancel the booking, so they canceled it, but I was unable to write a negative review. According to Vice again, they're saying the plumbing scam seems to rest on the idea Airbnb won't penalize a host if the house is uninhabitable. Okay, that's what I was saying. I've seen this before. So this goes on and on this whole bait and switch thing. Okay, next one, getting the guests to agree to move houses and the plumbing scam is often kind of segway into getting you to agree to move houses. Okay? So they will say, supposed to be this, you know, here's this complaint supposed to be quaint, quiet property in downtown. They get delayed by the homeowner stating that we'd need to change properties the last minute since it was only a quick two-night visit we weren't opposed. The new quote larger location was this scummy little apartment complex on the other side of town. Another one - Booking the Airbnb to multiple people at the same time. That's what happened to us in Vegas. When my wife and I showed up at this apartment through Airbnb, perhaps the most socially awkward Bait and switch is this one renting an Airbnb where you believe you booked the whole residence only to arrive and find a whole bunch of strangers there. That happened to us in Vegas. Multiple people told us they came to see other Airbnb guests at the house, or in some cases, people who seem to live there. It just goes on and on. Next one - money scams, paying outside the app. I mentioned this one early. It says it's a straightforward scam. Be careful. There's no be careful here, as there is no reason to do that. Fake damages - Man, I've heard about this from multiple people before mine. How can Airbnb police this? Did the guests damage the place? Okay. Oh man scam scams, you'll find more about this online. My advice? Use a hotel you trust us out of the hotel booking site, you believe. And I already told you, I use hotwire because I don't care what the brand is. I just want a good hotel, and I use the ratings from the people who stayed. Stick around. We'll be right back. Hey, welcome back, everybody, Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online at Craig peterson.com. Hey, have you thought about how to follow along at home or on the road during the week? The easiest way to do that is to listen to my podcasts. Why not? I put it out there are multiple things, including this weekend show, but many other things that I include during the week, and you can subscribe to that as well on your favorite podcast platform. And it says Craig Peterson dot com slash iTunes. If you are an iTunes type of person or Craig peterson.com, slash tune in or slash I heart. Okay, I am kind of all over the place today. I appreciate everybody who does Listen to me and comments on things during the Week. You'll also find me on LinkedIn and Facebook and YouTube, but it is kind of over the place as I talk about some of the biggest stories of the week. Now we were just talking about scams that seem to be coming from Airbnb and VRBO, of course, but there is a lot of scams going one. We are going to get into one right now tied into the coronavirus. But first I just want to make mention of this other article that came out last month in January. And it's talking about computer literate millennials and Generation Z. These are the people that grew up with the internet. They've had the internet pretty much their whole lives. They found meaning the Federal Trade Commission has found that people ages 39 and under are more likely to report fraud than the 40 plus Crowd now here's the thinking. It isn't that the younger kids and millennials and Generation Z, it isn't as though they are less afraid to report that money has been stolen from them, it appears that they are more likely to fall victim to fraud 25% more likely. Now the millennials are less likely to fall for scams over the phone than people over 40, but 77% More likely, Millennials are 77% more likely to get duped by email scams and 90% more likely to lose money on a fake check scam. Now the thinking behind this is that those of us who are a little bit older, we hold the whole internet thing with a little bit more skepticism than our children and grandchildren do. Because we know that there are scammers out there. And we've heard all of the horror stories, whereas the younger kids are looking at it as well. It's the internet, and they just give their stuff away. We already know that there are studies that show that the millennials will give their email address away in trade for a single donut. Okay, so they don't value a lot of this stuff. You know, to me, well, it's a little bit concerning, and it should be to you. But let's get into the latest scam that's out there right now. It isn't the Airbnb scam, which has been out there for a few years now. As I said, hey, I've been burned what, four or five times by this overall, personally. So I'm just to the point I just don't use it anymore period. It's a real shame because there are some good people out there. But this has to do with what's been happening. Now it is happening with the Coronavirus, and this is a huge deal. We had one day this week, where 15,000 new cases were reported. Supposedly, it was due to a change in the way China was tracking the Coronavirus and diagnosing people. So they're saying, Hey, listen, it's you know is just a change. Don't expect this to indicate that more viruses are spreading out there. And frankly, I look at it and say, Well, maybe there are there aren't. But what we're seeing are some rather sophisticated phishing scams going on. Phishing, of course, this is the one spelled with a Ph. It is where an attacker tricks you into doing something. It might be clicking on a link. It might be responding to an email. It might also be a phishing scam over the phone or, you know, SMS a text one which would be called smishing. A whole new type of phishing this going on right now. Well, last week, IBM and Kaspersky now Kaspersky is a Russian anti-virus company. They are also trying to stop the general spread of malware. The State Department, the FBI, Homeland Security, not to use Kaspersky software, but they do have good information. So when I see Kaspersky, combined with IBM, a company I do respect, then that does kind of make my years and help if you will. Still, IBM and Kaspersky caught hackers in Japan, trying to spread malware through emails, and the emails had links about the Coronavirus outbreak that started, of course, in Wuhan China last month in January. Now adding Sophos and now, of course, Cisco to the list. They have found phishing emails from cybercriminals, purporting to be from the Center for Disease Control, as well as the World Health Organization. And what these bad guys are trying to do is to steal your email credentials and other information. The emails are coming from several domains, including CDC dash gov.org, which, of course, is not the real CDC website. So be very careful if you are trying to find out information about the CDC or the spread of coronavirus about flu in general. For instance, in my home state of New Hampshire, we have I think it's seven deaths so far this year reported g attribute To the flu in general, not the Coronavirus. Every year about 12 to 16,000 people in the United States die from the flu. So far, we've only got 14 cases reported of Coronavirus. At this stage everybody, this is nothing to get all freaky worried about. Okay, so calm down. If you want more, go to cdc.gov. CDC Centers for Disease Control - cdc.gov, tells you what to do now. The current Coronavirus has an official name now. It's called covin-19 co vi n dash 19. There are multiple versions of Coronaviruses, which is why they identify each with a number. We have had a report in the past about Coronaviruses, and they have killed people previously. So you'll see Right at the top of the cdc.gov website, information about the Coronavirus and its spread. It is a respiratory disease and potentially fatal. It doesn't seem to be increasingly more fatal than some of the other viruses that we've had. Let's put all this in context. And when you get an email from someone saying, hey, look at this, you click on this link, to get information about the Coronavirus. It's going to let you track the spread of etc. don't respond. If you get a text message, don't respond. I got one because I'm a member of the Great and Powerful media, right. I got one last week that was sent out to members of the press saying, Hey, we got this new tracking site. You just can to be cautious enough when it comes to this. So if you go to CDC Gov at the top, You'll see the description here about the covin-19. You can click on that, and it'll show you a global map about the location of reported cases and what is happening. So, I'm looking at one, and it's about one day behind. It looks like right now for covan-19. But you can see all of the countries that have been reporting it. Then you can also look at the hard statistics. People under investigation in the United States, exactly how many 14 positives, you'll see that there. Of course, it changes daily. You can see how many tested negative and how many pending, the people are under investigation. Remember, the airplane full of workers from the State Department that came back from China. They have now been under quarantine for more than 14 days. They release them all from quarantine because it turns out, nobody had that virus. So just because you have the flow doesn't mean it's Coronavirus. More cases over on the left coast and the Midwest, which is kind of surprising to me than there are on the East Coast or the Mid Atlantic, etc., etc. So have a look there. Do not respond to emails or texts or phone calls. Okay? Just be very, very careful because the hackers are imitating this sort of thing. The other side of this is they are sending out messages seeking donations. They are asking for Bitcoin donations to the World Health Organization can tell you right now, the World Health Organization, the CDC, they are not taking Bitcoin donations, okay. So don't go and donate. Right And again, the CDC gov.org is the band guys CD see.gov is the good guys. The scam page is straightforward. It, you know, took the scammers, maybe just a few minutes to put together. It's handy, and it looks legit. And the FBI and, of course, also Homeland Security are taking down these pages as soon as they can, but they can't always get rid of them right away. And companies, we've got to be proactive. We've got to chain train our employees, not to follow up on these scams. So again, that's part of the reason for my newsletters. I report on the biggest scams that are going on. I try and keep it down to just a few a week. You can share them with your employees, share them with your family, but you have to get them to share them. Go to Craig peterson.com slash subscribe, and you'll get those as well stick around. We'll be right back on WGAN. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN, and thanks for joining us today. Hopefully, you picked up a lot of good information. We're just talking about the CDC some of the scams that are out there right now from the Coronavirus, including one involving Bitcoin, which kind of surprised me. We talked a lot in the first hour about the major scams on Airbnb, where you can rent apartments or homes for a day or a week or a month, almost anywhere. It's really quite neat. But the major scams have been going on there and how I've seen them personally and why I will never use it ever again. If you want to listen to that, just go to Craig Peterson comm slash tune in, you can subscribe right there. Listen to me, live by the way on tune in when I'm on the radio. He And when I'm on with canon Matt, the morning drive every Wednesday at 737, every Wednesday morning, as well. And those are all on tune in. Now, we're going to talk a little bit about this whole thing with the ACLU and their current fight. I spoke about something similar to this a couple of years ago, man, maybe actually the first time was probably about ten years ago. There are companies out there, and they gather information about us. They're called Data brokers. I have visited some of these data brokers sites themselves, I mean, physical sites, where the company operates where they have their data collections, to help them with security problems that they have, and to help prevent problems from occurring, right. That's what I do for living full time. It was probably ten years ago, the radio show that I talked with some of these companies. What they do is they collect open-source information that's used a lot by the government for any number of things from financial transactions to investigations. And you can use open-source information yourself. All you do is go to Google, for instance, and do a search. That's the open-source information. It's anything that anyone can gain access to, without having to be a police officer without having to go and really kind of, you know, get a court order kind of be surreptitious and how you gather that's open source. So the data break, brokers will take all of that, and that can include depending on the state you're living, driver's license information, it can include information about the mortgage for your home. It can include you know the ownership of your home, and it can include just all kinds of stuff. That becomes very, very difficult to control. Because all of your information is out there. It's available for free or for cheap on the internet. So these data brokers, they might buy it from the county, they might get it an open-source. Some of this information will contain data from your mortgage, will contain your signature, the deed to your home is going to contain the signature, the automobiles that you own. There's going to be UCC filings with the Secretary of State's office, detailing what cars you own, who the lien holders are, and how much money is involved all of this stuff. So it all gets pulled into these databases. I mentioned on the show a few months ago, a couple of months ago that we were out in Las Vegas at a wedding and of course, you know, doing work while I'm out there and I'm sitting They're on the couch doing work for some of our Las Vegas clients. And there's a knock at the door. And who's there? Well, it's an insurance investigator investigating an accident that it was a fatal accident. And of course, the insurance company had been asked to payout. So they came to this home because they had information that it that the person involved I had a contact with someone at this address, which indeed she did. It was her sister, and apparently, the driver had been responsible for this fatal death. The driver listed one of my sisters in law. She had died about six months before the accident. So obviously, it was all fate. The insurance investigator showed my wife all of this information she had from one of these data brokers. It listed my deceased sister in law's relatives, everybody, every address she had ever had. There were names and contact information for some of my kids. However, it had a lot of incorrect information, including supposed current addresses and voting information for relatives deceased for over two decades. When I've looked at the data brokers' information about me, about half of it's correct, but the other half is completely incorrect. And that's still the case because they had a lot of completely incorrect information. People that they said were relatives that weren't people we'd never heard of before. They said these were direct relatives of hers. At any rate, they had purchased all of this information from a Data Broker. In collections, this is called a skip trace. It's called a skip trace for people who jumped bail, etc. Man, we should talk to about this whole bail thing, and the idiocy in New York state that is spreading country-wide dog, the bounty hunter and his wife, Beth had been fighting this for a long time because it's making us much, much less safe. But anyhow, that's not a topic for today's show. It's not a political topic, because it's undeniable what's already happening with the increase in the crime rate in New York anyways. What the government is doing now is what I was warning about a decade ago. That is that the federal government, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, of the IRS, you name it, they are limited in how they can collect information, we kind of already knew that right? You know that they had to get a search warrant for certain things right. They can follow you around, without any expectation of privacy, etc., etc. So So obviously, federal government agencies can use open-source information to see what you're doing online. But how about the closed source stuff? How about this stuff that the data brokers are collecting? Some of it they're getting from the people who lent you money, some of it they're getting from places where you have to pay to get that information. So, what's happened here is that the ACLU has filed a suit, according to The Wall Street Journal, against Homeland Security. Homeland Security, through its Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, as well as Customs and Border Protection, is buying geolocation data from these data brokers and choosing to investigate suspects who have allegedly committed immigration violations. So let me boil all that down into plain English. You might be using games on your smartphone, and you might be using all kinds of apps on your smartphone. If you have a smartphone, frankly, you're probably not using 90 95% of those apps that you have downloaded. But many of those apps are tracking you. And that information is being sold to data brokers. So think about that for a minute. Remember that free app and how you've heard me and many others for so many years say, hey, you're not the customer. You are the product. Well, what's happening here now is that the ACLU is saying to the federal government, hey, you cannot buy the information that by law your organization cannot collect. You cannot buy it from data brokers or these app developers who are selling it. Interesting question, interesting problem, isn't it? What should they do? What should you do? What can you do? It is going to play out in court, and I suspect it's going to come down on the side of the Department of Homeland Security because this information is generally available to anyone willing to pay for it. So now the government stepped forward, saying we are will pay for it. By the way, this goes down to local law enforcement as well. In many cases, they are also buying this information from the data brokers. So let's stick around when we come back. We're going to talk about shadow IT. If you don't know what it is, it's a problem if you're in business. Hey, welcome back, everybody Craig Peterson here on WGAN. Thanks for joining me and for spending part of your Saturday with me. If you're listening to this on a podcast at Craig Peterson dot com slash tune in, thanks for joining me, some listen to me while they're driving to and from work and find the various segments of my show, which are about ten-ish minutes long, really work well into their day. So if you're doing that, thank you if you're not, please do consider it. I try and keep everybody up to date with the information that you need to know. And that leads us to what we got right now. Which is shadow IT. Now I bet there is not a company out there. Well, maybe there's one right because you just can't put always say or you know everyone that I say almost every company out there has a shadow IT problem. So let's start by kind of defining what's going on. Ha

Day: 008 Date: Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020 Note from Aimee J.: You have more time than you think. Topic: Manage Your Time Action: Plan out your day. Take a sheet of paper and divide it in two. On the left side, write down 24 hours starting from two hours before you wake up to 11:59PM in hour or ½ hour increments. Still on the left-side next time to the times, in pencil, block off the time you know you’re doing something, i.e. sleeping, working, activities, studying, etc. You should start to see what free time you have. Make a list of things you need to do on the left-side of the paper. Now is when you have to manage your time. Fit your to do items into the spaces not blocked off. If you can’t fit everything, then you need to do one of two things. Either one, adjust your blocked time (i.e. sleep for less, take shorter breaks, cut back on tv time, etc.), or really think on whether that to do item needs to get done today. It won’t always be easy and you won’t always make everything fit, but do your best. Here's an example of my list or check it out on my Instagram highlights: Affirmations: You are brave. You are talented. You are smart. You are unique. You are you.  =) and You are Awesome. You are Loved. You are Needed. And most importantly, YOU ARE ENOUGH. I Have Only Just a Minute by Dr. Benjamin E. Mays I have only just a minute, Only sixty seconds in it. Forced upon me, can’t refuse it. Didn’t seek it, didn’t choose it. But it’s up to me to use it. I must suffer if I lose it. Give account if I abuse it. Just a tiny little minute, but eternity is in it. Resources & Links: ToDoist ; Things ; Your Personal Hype Man ; Alexa Skill: Your Personal Hype Man ; Your Personal Hype Man on iTunes Let’s Connect: Leave a Voicemail ; E-mail Aimee J. ; Aimee on Instagram ; Aimee on Facebook ; Aimee on Twitter ; Aimee on YouTube ; Aimee on LinkedIn ; Aimee on TikTok ; Aimee on Snapchat ; Aimee on Pinterest ; Transcript: Good day family. This is your personal hype man, Aimee J. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. I promise within the next week or so we are going to get a better intro than just applause. It's coming. We're working on it, but you got to start somewhere. I couldn't wait for perfection to kick off this amazing podcast, which I am. So I have fun with doing this. It brings me back to my original podcasting days and I'm just having fun with this. So hopefully you guys are finding something out of this too. And if you are hitting me up on social media at @aimeej21 let me know. This is for you. This is kind of to help you and remind myself as well that you are brave, you are talented, you are smart, you are unique and you are you. And that is the best thing this world could get. Being yourself is the best gift you could give this world and living your life day in and day out the way you want it is the best thing you could do for yourself. So guys, we've talked about a number of things in the past week. Don't forget, even though we're not doing gratitude, uh, together, ask yourself, what are three things I'm grateful for? And repeat that to yourself every day. It's a very helpful exercise. I do it myself. I don't do it. We're not going to do it on the show anymore together, but maybe, maybe periodically. But do that on your own when you wake up, remind yourself what is, what are three things I'm grateful for? Very important exercise. It helps kind of set you right, in mindset and in focus for the day. It puts you in a positive space. So try to do that. Highly encourage it. You know, it's up to you. But I do encourage it because it is important. Today we're going to talk about managing your time. That could be a number of things. It's a huge topic. I'm really gonna focus on just one day, right? And so I want to share with you an important poem that my mentor, the late Mr. LaMont Toliver shared with me, that really resonated with me during college. And it's by Dr. Benjamin E. Mays. It's "I have only just a minute" and here's how it goes. I have only just a minute, only 60 seconds in it forced upon me. Can't refuse it, didn't seek it, didn't choose it, but it's up to me to use it. I must suffer if I lose it, give account if I abuse it. Just the tiny little minute. But eternity isn't it? Isn't that such a powerful poem? Often times we think we just don't have any time. There is no time. You know, you think of that saved by the bell episode. I'm dating myself, but where Jessie Spano is panicking about tests and studying, and she got so much going on, there's no time. There's never any time, you know, no time to study, no time to do this. We often feel that way, but guys, we actually have more time than we expect more time than we think. It's true. There are 24 hours in a day. You only need to sleep probably six or seven of that. Some of you are hardcore and need less than that, but six or seven is about the average. Do the research, see what it is, you know your body the best. So go with that. Then you have your work. So usually eight to eight hours, you may be in school, that's about eight hours, whatever that is, right? So if we're thinking seven, we're thinking eight, that's 15 that's 15 hours of 24 so if I pull out a calculator and I do 24 minus 15 that gives us nine hours left in the day, nine hours, nine hours to spend time with our family, nine hours to do our homework, nine hours to prepare ourselves for the next moment, right? So yeah, of course some time will be spent on getting ready for the day travel, right? But there's still time. Some of you guys think that there is no time because you get home and you're just, that's it. There's nothing you can do. But in reality there is time. So I want you to do this. There's an exercise that I do to help myself figure out and manage my time and want to share it with you. It's kind of noted in the show notes. So check that out in the description. It'll be there. Um, and the way it works is you take a piece of paper, 8 ½ half by 11, whatever, whatever paper you have, write down on the left side, we're gonna divide the paper into two on the left side. Write down the number of hours, a few hours before you sleep all the way to midnight. Okay, go all the way to the midnight. And if, if some of you are daring, go past midnight. So for me, I do from four o'clock to midnight and I write that down. I write within half hour an hour increments. That's up to you. Play around with what you're comfortable with. I do it by an hour and I took a picture of this. It'll be on my Instastory but I'm going to try and put it in my show notes. So check there as well so that you can see what it is I'm talking about. So you're going to write the hours, that's step one. Step two is on that same left side right next to the times. Block out time that you already know you have to take account for. School work, uh, activities. You may have Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, uh, after school programs, sports, whatever it is, go out, go ahead and block the time off. Right? You're, we're, we're doing is, we're getting a picture of where your free time is. Once you've blocked that off, you'll see where your time is going and you'll see where your free time is. And now is when you need to start managing that time. So we've set up the left side. I want you to go to the right side of the paper and write down your to do list for the day. Okay? Just for the day, what is it you have to get done today in order to sleep peacefully. Might include studying for an exam, might be doing some homework, might be doing your chores. You should include that, right? That takes up time. And now's the managing. Take the stuff on the right side in your to do list items and put it in the space that you have on the left side. And when you find out, hey, something's not fitting, there's not enough time. We got to think of one or two things. One, can we move things around, cut back a little bit on our sleep, maybe not watch TV as much as we wanted to. Right? Adjust things so that we can fit what we need in. Or two do we really need to get this item done today or can it wait till the next day? Right? That's how we're going to manage our time. That's how you have to put it together. So think about that, try that and see if you do this, you will start getting into the habit of being more in control of your time and the time and less of the time being control of you. Right? You'll panic last because you know clearly what the battle plan is. That's what we're doing. We're managing our time and laying it out and I do this every day, just kind of see what my day is going to look like. Sometimes I do it in unofficial ways. Does have to be this formal of a thing. But you know, when I was in high school, when I was in college, this is what I did. This is how I kept track of my time. So for those who are like, how do you balance everything, this is how, this is what I did, this made my life easier, right? And there are tricks for other things of managing time we'll talk about later. But start with this, start with this. Manage your time. You have more time than you think you do and maybe you're giving more time to things that don't need it. But that's where the managing part comes in. All right guys. So keep in mind, you know that this is all up to you. Even though I'm sharing this, I'm telling you, giving you advice about how to manage your time, you have to do what works for you. So I want to make sure that's clear because while I'm your hype men and I will support you through and through. At the end of the day, it's all about you. True story. Okay? So you do what you gotta do. There are apps that can help you. The Todoist is one, Things is another app. I'm sure there are plenty others that can help you. Planners have hours put in it, use that. Franklin Covey if that's still a thing, you know, find what works for you. The point and message I want to get to you today though is manage your time. Find a way, and manage your time. What I shared with you is just one option. All right? So guys, until tomorrow when we get back together, remember, you are awesome. You are loved, you are needed, and without a doubt you are enough as you are. Just because you're trying to better yourself with education. Just because you're trying to learn new things doesn't mean you're not enough. You're just improving upon yourself at your own choice and decision. So remember, you are enough. You are loved and you are appreciated. Guys. Alright, until next time when we get together, don't forget. Don't Stop, Keep Chasing.

There's a lot more to YouTube than most people come to know. In fact, most people have only scratched the surface! In this episode, Nate Woodbury will be answering some of the most common questions regarding YouTube. Check this out! Okay. We're tackling it. YouTube for dummies. You're not a dummy. But you know what, we're answering some really good questions about YouTube. I produce 13 different YouTube channels. My biggest one is making 600 thousand dollars a month. So, I have some answers for you. Okay. So, the first question that I have is: what are the best ways to make money on YouTube? Now, there's ad revenue that can be a good way if you're a really good entertainer, if you're willing to go a few years without making significant money. So, you've got another way of paying your bills, right? And you can make entertaining content for a few years. Wow, you can really do well with ad revenue. Personally, it took me several years. I did make $16,000 last month. It averages about 12 right now. $12,000 thousand dollars per month. But that's just icing on the cake because I have a lot of expenses. That's not all profit -- right? -- for my business. So, that's just one way. That's one way you can make money is ad revenue. YouTube will put ads. So here's your video. YouTube will put an ad in front of it. (or is that behind?) So here's your video right the front of it. So, here's your video. YouTube puts an ad in front of it and the advertiser pays money to put that there. Well, YouTube gives you 55% of it. So, that's how you can make money through ad revenue. But if you've got a business, you've got a product or service that you sell if you're an expert, like a coaches, speaker, and author, YouTube is an amazing place to share your expertise. And then people will want to buy what you have to sell. People get your free advice on YouTube and then they want to go to your website and hire you as their coach, hire you to come speak. They want to come to your events. They want to buy your courses. So, that last one -- digital courses -- that's where you going to start making the most money early on on YouTube. Let me just share with you a story. So, Kris Krohn, 2 years ago, he was hoping from all this YouTube traffic to get people to come to his local events in Utah. In the previous year, only one person had come to his event. And yet everyone was saying, "How can I work with you. I want to learn from you. This is so amazing. Can you help me invest in real estate?" And yet, no one was willing to come to Utah to attend his event. That's how he was mainly making money is by people coming to his events and selling them things at the end of event. So, we then decided to create a digital course. Long story short, we created the course, we launched it. We made 6 figures that month. It's done very well ever since. But guess what? Fast forward 2 years. Today, Kris puts on events and he fills them mostly with people outside of Utah. So, he just needed to get his channel to a bigger space. So the the courses are how you're going to monetize your channel the fastest and the most significantly. Ad revenue will start to come in after a few years. People start to get people coming to events or hiring you for speaking engagements after a few years. So hopefully that puts things in perspective. So, how do I personally make money on YouTube? Well, I mentioned ad revenue. I get a lot of leads for people wanting me to produce their YouTube channel. They're experts and they hire me to do it from start to finish. So, we help with the topic strategy. We do the filming we do the editing. And we do the  lunch. The thumbnail design everything. So, I make money from that. I also have an affiliate arrangement with... My biggest ones are virtualassistanttool.com. That's a great affiliate program. So, virtualassistanttool.com. Also procart.org. Okay, this question that came in is kind of interesting. I'll read it. It says is it still possible to make money on YouTube without making videos in 2020? This was it's still possible to make money on YouTube without making videos, what do you... How are you making... I don't know. I don't know if it's still possible because I don't know if it ever has been possible. That's what YouTube is all about is making videos. Maybe you're stealing other people's content? Sorry. I'm the dummy on this one. So, I don't know how to answer your question my friend. So, this is a great question: How do YouTube channels benefit from getting more subscribers? Right? The more subscribers you have, that's like your following. It's your tribe and when you post a video, a good portion of your subscribers are going to watch that video. So, if I've got 10 subscribers, one person watches. That's 10%, okay? if I've got a million subscribers and that's same 1% watches. Well, hey, at least I got 10,000 views. Or some channels get 100%. You know, they get it. They have 50,000 subscribers on their channel and they'll on average get 50,000 views on their videos. So, it depends on the type of content that you're creating. But the more subscribers you have, it's really a good indicator of the momentum that you have. How many views you're getting every single month. I can go back even more basic. You can subscribe to a YouTube channel. Let's talk about how does it -- subscribing -- benefit you. So, if you watched a video that you like, you think, "Oh, I would like to see more like this." Or "I like this channel." Then you can subscribe. And when a new video is uploaded to that channel you can get an email notification. You subscribe and turn on the alerts. Or when you go to your YouTube home screen, you'll see videos that YouTube thinks you would like to watch next. Because you're a subscriber, it'll suggest videos from that channel. So, by people subscribing to my channel, my content is shown to those people more often. Okay. So, this was a very specific question and it's kind of assuming. It says, "Why do financial videos on YouTube make more money than other videos?" Well, by financial, I can definitely agree that videos that are talking about how to make more money in business or how to make more money in real estate, those videos do make more money because advertisers are willing to pay more money for audiences that are looking to make money. Because they have programs to sell and like in the the space that I work with Kris Krohn, how to invest in real estate. And real estate is the largest commodity out there that we can typically buy and sell. You know, a property might be $250,000. And that's kind of an average price of a home. And so to learn how to invest in real estate, people are willing to invest at a higher amount. And so there's just larger amounts of money to be made there. Versus I can make a great channel about cute kittens and cute puppies and cute animals. But I don't know that I'm selling anything. I might just get lots of views. Maybe I'll get some some ad revenue but who wants to advertise next to those. How is it going to relate to their product it may or may not. Okay. So, why is video editing so important to a YouTube channel? Well, you've got there attention. It's not like a podcast or radio where you're just kind of listening to you in the background. With YouTube, they've got their phone out or their computer and they're giving you their full attention. If you've recorded for 17 minutes but there's some dry spots throughout there, you definitely want to go and edit out those dry spots. Since that video up to 11 minutes. So, that it'll keep their attention and you can keep their attention watching to the end. Because here's the thing: If people watch all the way to the end, the YouTube algorithm sees that and will recommend your video to more people. So, the more watch time you get, the more people watch the whole thing; the more people that video will be promoted to and the more people will watch there's a lot more watch time and so forth. Editing isn't really to make your video look more professional. It's just to keep people's attention more. This is an interesting question. Should I trust the Shopify gurus on YouTube? I'm going to go a little bit more broad and like how can you know if you can trust someone on YouTube? Yeah, that's a good question. Like how do you know that you can trust me? How do you know that what I'm sharing with you is true or not? It's kind of the same way that you you know it in real life. I mean, when you meet someone, you have a gut feeling, with YouTube, you have a little bit more advantages. Because you can dive in a little bit deeper. You can do some research. You can watch more of their videos. You can get to know them a bit a little bit better. I mean, it's not like when you're in a sales situation and and the person's right they're trying to move you towards the clothes. On YouTube, you can take your time. You don't have to go to their website for months and months, right? If you want to know if you can trust them, watch more other videos. Learn their personality, see if you agree with them, find a controversial topic that you have a strong opinion about. And go and watch and see what do they think about it. You know, integrity is doing what you say you're going to do. And what you teach. Right? So, if you teach to do something, are you doing that thing? That's a big ingredient for trust, right? So, pay attention to what they're doing in addition to what they are saying. See if you can research and find out. Okay. This next question, "How to outsource YouTube video editing?" Well, you can hire me and my team. We'll do we do the filming editing strategy and the launch. But if you just need an editor, you've got the filming side down... Man, I have a recommendation for you. It's virtualassistanttool.com. It's what I use. That's where I found all 14 of my employee. Oh, I have to take that back. I've got 2 sibling that was hired and I've got a friend that was hired. But everyone else was hired through the virtualassistanttool.com. And I've got other videos about why I hire people in the Philippines. I can link to it up there. You'll find other videos on my channel that teach the different of aspects of how you can actually hire a video editor. Okay. So, question here I've got a read to you. It says, "Every video I try to upload on YouTube says, it's copyrighted. How can I remove the copyright from those videos?" Okay, YouTube can scan your video and know if you have rights to that or not. And if everything that you upload it says it's copyrighted, it means you don't have permission to use that. It means it belongs to somebody else. So, how you can avoid that is to pull out your phone or your camera and make a video and you create the footage. Don't take someone else's content. Don't take someone else's music that you don't have the rights for. Buy the music or create the music. Make your own videos like this video right here. No one else owns the copyright. When I upload this to YouTube, it's not going to give me a copyright warning or notice because no one else owns this. It's my camera. I'm recording, I'm talking. I own it. I'm uploading it to YouTube. And that's what you've got to do to avoid the copyright garbage. How much does it cost on average to make a YouTube video? Well, if you you already have one of these in your pocket. So, pull it out. Hit record. Talk to the camera just be conversational. I can make an amazing YouTube video like that. Now, you can upgrade. You can increase production costs over time. But let's start at free. Start at free. Start getting results there and then you'll know when the right time is to buy a new light or to get a better microphone. Or to get a DSLR camera. Because you want to be able to blur the background. I love blur in the background. See, how I do that blur. I mean watch this. Now, look how blurry that is. That is awesome. See, if you want to be able to do that, like start with your phone. And then invest when the time is right. So, this question I'm going to twist my answer a little bit because the question is how do I stop the edge which come in YouTube. I'll actually give you two answers. Now, I don't see ads when I go to YouTube. I pay for YouTube's premium. It's like 12 bucks a month. So, my YouTube experience is ad free. The creators, they still get paid a portion of it. Instead of getting paid for the ads that I would see, now they get paid for the premium that I pay each one. They get their pieces of that. But the other way that I want to answer this question is I love ads. Because if I make a video that YouTube pairs an ad with and it does well, YouTube will promote my video and my video will get lots and lots of views. I have a video that's got 5.4 million views not because it went viral but because YouTube paired an ad with it and then started promoting it. So, you don't want to turn off the ads. You want ads before your video. Even if it's a competitor. Even if it's a competitor that competitor is going to bring you traffic. I love this question: Can one seek therapy on YouTube? Well, yeah. Live On Purpose TV, doctor Paul Jenkins. He's a positivity psychologist. There are lots of channels like that where you can get therapy. Now, I love watching content like that on YouTube. But I also have a therapist. So, I don't think YouTube can fully replace a real therapist. I think everyone should be seeing a therapist. In addition to my therapist, I have many coaches that I pay thousands of dollars to every month. So, that I can always grow and always learn. A therapist is not a bad thing. A therapist is a really good thing. If you have a therapist, good for you. If you're thinking "You know what? I'm just too hesitant. I don't want to go see a real person. Can I get therapy on YouTube?" I'm going to say do both. Do both. You can definitely learn a lot and gain a lot of insights. And use YouTube with a real therapist. Okay. I've got two last questions. Second to last one: How do we start our business on YouTube? Okay, start a business off of YouTube first. Okay? Just create your product, your service, your event. Whatever it is, create something of value and sell it. Start making money. If you have something that's a value that you can sell, then create a YouTube channel. And watch more videos on my channel to learn how to build a following so the leads will then go into your business. How do you start a business on YouTube? I guess the other way is you have a job and you don't need to worry about money. And you just start YouTube as a hobby. And after a few years, you'll have a big enough following and your audience will tell you what they want you to sell. They'll tell you what they want to buy. And so you can go that route. Last question: "Mr. Nate. How would you make a better YouTube?" That is a tough one because YouTube has done so many things right with their partner program. I mean somehow and I know that this is a controversial topic. I would clean up YouTube a bit. I want the full YouTube to be friendly for my children. I really have to monitor things a lot there. So, that's one thing. I love the results I'm getting. It takes a long time. It takes 12 to 24 months to really start to get real momentum. I mean, you want to make seven figures on YouTube. You've got a 7 figure business already, you want to use YouTube to market it, it's going to take two or three years to really build a significant following and to generate that additional seven or eight figures of revenue. The strategy that I use works there's a lot of people succeeding on on YouTube. But there's there's so much content being uploaded to YouTube every minute. Go ahead and look up the stats. You probably know the stats. You know, this might sound weird. but I want YouTube to continue making all the algorithm changes that they're making. A lot of my friends make content that chases the trends or finds a loophole. And when there's an algorithm change, they really suffer. Their income goes down. Their views go down. Their channel can contract. That's never happened to me. Every time there's been an announced algorithm change or whatnot, my channel is either steady at gradual growth or it's increased because I make content that people are searching for. And I make content that will make YouTube money. So, if they're making an algorithm change is because they're trying to filter out a lot of the garbage to find my channels and to find my content. Now, if you don't know about my leaf strategy, this is something you want to know about. If you want to succeed on YouTube, watch this video next. My leaf strategy video. That's how I've achieved the level of success that I have across all 13 channels. It's how you can make a video and get it to rank number one on YouTube on day one. Go watch my leaf strategy.

Why Dave Decided to talk with Myles Clifford about Affiliate Marketing: With ClickFunnels rolling out their new One Funnel Away Challenge, Dave thought it would be a great idea to let us all in on the secrets and tips of Affiliate Marketing. He is joined today by Mr. Myles Clifford, a fellow ClickFunnels employee. Dave and Myles talk about ClickFunnels’ sticky cookies if you decide to become an affiliate for us and tons of useful tips and tricks for your own affiliate work. Listen to hear just how important (and simple) it is to publish content about your journey. Others want to hear your story and journey and affiliate marketing could just be the vehicle in which you tell this story. Tips and Tricks for You and Your Business: (1:07) Do You Really Know How Affiliate Marketing Can Not Only Help Your Bank Account, But Also Your Own Business? (1:48) What ClickFunnels’ Affiliate Marketing Will Look Like This Year (7:00) How Sticky Are Your Cookies? (FYI These Aren’t Your Grandmama’s Cookies) (9:15) Russell Has Written Your Swipe Copy...No This is Not a Fantasy (15:30) Publish for Leads (16:48) Document Your Journey Quotable Moments: "The whole idea about affiliate marketing is to learn about marketing and become a great marketer. Then you can use whatever business, product, or service and bring it into that." "When you’re marketing, you have to understand copy and you have to understand traffic." "Document Your Journey. That’s the most important thing, you don’t have to come up with content. Just document your journey." Important Episode Links: AffiliateBootcamp.comFunnelHackingLive.com FunnelHackerRadio.com FunnelHackerRadio.com/freetrial FunnelHackerRadio.com/dreamcar ---Transcript--- Speaker 1:       00:00           Welcome to funnel hacker radio podcast, where we go behind the scenes and uncover the tactics and strategies top entrepreneurs are using to make more sales, dominate their markets, and how you can get those same results. Here's your host, Dave Woodward.   Speaker 2:       00:17           Hey everybody. Welcome back to funnel hacker radio. This is gonna be a fun episode. I have the opportunity of having Mr Myles Clifford in the house with me. Great episode. I'm excited to be here. We're going to cover a lot of different topics today, but they're all going to be surrounded around affiliate marketing. They've asked me to do this because we love affiliate marketing. We love our affiliates and we're going to and tell you what's coming up and how you guys can go out and crush it as an affiliate for clickfunnels or for others as well. So yeah, let's jump right into this. All right, so for a lot of you guys are kind of understand or trying to figure out how do I actually get started making money online? That seems to be one of the biggest things we run across our first year. There's a lot of people who are out there saying, gosh, I'd love to make more money this year. Speaker 2:       00:54           How can I do it? So one of the things, I'm going to do a podcast here real quick with Julie Coyne and we'll be talking to her with regard to agencies and how you can create your own agency. That's great. And all the one thing, both an agency as well as a affiliate marketing have in common. And that is you don't have to have your own product. And that's the main thing that miles I want to talk to you about is too often we have a lot of people think they wanna start making money online, but they spend all their time trying to create a product that they don't even know if it's going to sell. So the whole idea behind affiliate marketing is to learn about marketing and to become a great marketer. And then you can go ahead and you can use whatever type of business or product or service you want to bring into that. Speaker 2:       01:33           So what the hell? That said, I'm one talk to you about some of the things that are inside of our affiliate marketing program, how it works, how did the commission's work, what is it? Sticky cookie, why is that important to you? And more importantly, what are the actual products and services that we have coming up? So what's the first one we in launching this year? So the first one we have launching this year is our one funnel away challenge. And if you know clickfunnels, you know we usually do 40 percent recurring commissions and 40 percent commissions on other products that people purchase, which by the way, so what is recurring commissions? Commissions. Yeah. So if someone signs up for click funnels, you're going to get 40 percent of what they pay each month. So if someone's paying $97 a month to use click funnels and they signed up through your affiliate link, you're going to get 40 percent of that each and every month. Speaker 2:       02:15           So it's not just a one time thing. You're not just making $38 and eighty cents one time, you're making $38 and eighty cents every stinkin month, which adds up. You get 10 people sign up, you're making $380, $88, I don't know math very well, but you make $388 a month and get 10 people sign up for clickfunnels. You double that triple that. Like people have quit their jobs just getting others to sign up for clickfunnels. But. So that's, that's, you know, we'll get into that here in a minute. But the first thing we have launching is the one funnel away challenge. And not only are we paying commissions on it, we're paying actually 100 percent commissions on it. So it's $100 to join the one funnel away challenge. So for every person you get to join that, you're going to make 100 bucks. You have a mother who wants to, you know, everyone's setting your goals, like Dave just said. Speaker 2:       02:57           So people are trying to find ways to make money online, supplemented income or pay for the car payment every single month. If you can get just a few people to sign up for the one funnel away challenge, that's a few hundred dollars in your pocket. So what exactly is the one funnel? A challenge. What do they get for 100 bucks? How's all that work together? So we, we, we did this back in September and it was attached to a different product, but it was. We have Steven Larsen who, man, he should be in here because he's the, I think he said one of the Kings of affiliate marketing. Right now you have Steven Larsen, Julie Stuart, and Russell Brunson. And for 30 days they're going to take you by the hand and not only going to take you by the hand, they're going to prod you from behind. They're gonna push that sound. Speaker 2:       03:33           They're going to just push you like crazy a cut that out real fast from behind. Make sure you cut that out. Listen to this. What's his name? Uh, Scott. Cut that out. So not only are you going to, okay now Russell and Julie and Steven coaching you, they're going to be pushing you along through your, I guess click funnels during. They're going to help you figure out a product or an offer. It doesn't have to be your own product and we're going to go through that, but they're going to tell you what you need to do, how to use click funnels, how to build. Man, that whole thing threw me off. Sorry, the prod from behind. So the funnel of again, Speaker 3:       04:10           so guys, what's going to happen here is you get the opportunity to sign up for one funnel, a challenge, and what they get is as miles was talking to you about it, they get a 30 day challenge and you'll probably see these challenges that really become one of the major things that have built a lot of the weight loss industry and the industry. We're seeing the same thing taking place inside of coaching programs in internet marketing. One of the great things about the challenge is they're going to get daily content. So what happens here is Russell went over and basically gives a 10,000 foot level. Julie came in and said, okay, let's take that 10,000 foot level and break it down into daily actionable steps and then steven actually comes on on a daily basis and he's going to actually help people understand exactly what they need to do every single day and give them encouragement and motivation to make sure they get lily take action to get that done. The reason this is important to you is what you're gonna find in your group and the people that you're working with Speaker 3:       05:05           is people these days. They feel like they get just information overload. And so the way that we've kind of combat that information overload is to literally say, stop looking at everything else. Pay attention for the next 30 days and literally do each and every little tiny step. And that's the whole idea behind the one funnel with challenge. Now what they're going to pay for the hundred dollars, $100 bucks gives them an actual hard bound book of the 30 days plan. And this is where we went through in September, is miles referring to you and actually contacted 100 of our top two comma club award winners, 30 them submitted their actual plans, meaning if you were to lose absolutely everything and all you had was click funnels and your marketing knowledge, what would you do to get back on top and the next 30 days and they literally created a page by page action item and it Louise over 550 pages. Speaker 3:       05:53           They get that hard bound book. In addition to that, they also get an MP three, the MP three player has all the content of the last challenge so they can start listening to that in advance and getting that done. They get a map literally is a step by step what they're going to do over the next 30 days to actually make sure this takes place. They get invited into part of our mighty network group, which is a community where they can now work with others and actually have accountability partners to make sure they actually make things happen over the course of the next 30 days. For us, the whole idea here is we want to make sure that anybody you're promoting this out to get massive value, you will find we will over deliver on this product more so than anything else. As miles mentioned, we asked, you're paying 100 percent commission. Speaker 3:       06:31           We've never ever done this before until we get it in September and had over 7,500 people sign up. We gave out at $75,000 in commissions. We expect this time to be somewhere between 100,000, $150,000 in commissions directly to you. What want to do is to make sure that you're actually getting value out of this and so they, whenever they sign up, that hundred bucks goes directly to you. We don't get anything. We actually lose money on this deal. One thing smiles mentioned though is it sets a sticky cookie for you. So what the heck is a sticky cooking? Why would that be important to me to listening? Speaker 2:       07:00           Alright, so a sticky cookie. This is where it's important. As we talked about, you get recurring commissions or you make 40 percent or in this case, under our CPA, so somebody signs up for the one funnel away, challenge through your affiliate link when they purchase something going forward, whether that's another book or another training program, or they sign up for click funnels because they're going to be encouraged to during the week challenge, you're going to get the commissions for that. So they are therefore sticky cookie to your affiliate id or their sticky cookie to you. Meaning anytime they buy something, anytime they sign up for something, you're going to get the commissions for those products or for those services. So that's huge because really you promote one time to somebody and then they're kind of your customer forever. So you're going to make that money. You know, obviously they're not buying from you, but once you get them sign up through your affiliate link, they're yours. Speaker 3:       07:47           So one of the great things about that is we actually do a lot of our own email promotions and marketing on the back end. So if we send out any emails, we never send an affiliate links with that. So if they click on that link, whoever the last affiliate was, they clicked on being you. You didn't get the missions on any additional products. The reason this is super important to you is this next year, our whole focus is just going to be on creating front end products. So right now if you were take a look at their certain, first of all miles, they want to sign up for an affiliate or if they're already aren't they like how do they check their stats? Where do they go to get that? Oh, Speaker 2:       08:16           well if you go to, what's your dream car.com. If you're not an affiliate yet, go to what's your dream car.com and sign up to become an affiliate if you already are. That's where you can check your dashboards, grabbed the other affiliate links, because we. If you go into that dashboard and it's been a while since you've been in there, you can see that we have a ton of different products. David was just talking about different front end products and we're going to be adding more and that's just ways to get people into click funnels into Russel Brunson into this realm and world where they can just continue to purchase more things, but then also continue to grow and learn and then that means they have more money to purchase and grow, and so it's just an amazing thing for you guys. So go to what's your dream car.com. Sign up to become an affiliate if you aren't already. If you are an affiliate already, go grab some of your links and are sharing Speaker 3:       08:58           so it doesn't cost you anything to become an affiliate, which is awesome because the whole idea here is there's no way you can lose on this deal. In addition to that, we're going to be rolling out this year, our new affiliate bootcamp you can get. You can go to bootcamp right now and still get a bunch of training. We're going to revamp that probably in April or May and, uh, put some additional stuff in there. So realize as an affiliate, you don't need any products. All you need is marketing knowhow, so affiliate bootcamp is actually where you are to get the knowledge. What's your dream car? Dot Com is where you can get the links, plus you also get swipe copy, so minus what is swipe copy. Speaker 2:       09:30           Swipe copy is done for you, so if they were to create swipe copy for this podcast, he would have handed me a sheet that I would read everything off and I wouldn't have to think on my own. I can literally just copy it and it would be done for you. So you have swipe copy where you copy it, put it into your email autoresponder, and we literally like. I don't know if you know this, Russell Brunson may be one of the world's greatest marketers and copywriters. He's written that swipe copy, so you're getting Russell Brunson to write your swipe copy and you just send it out and it's done for you. So that's already done for you. There's a graphics and images that you can use as well, so we've provided as much as we can for you so you don't have to do a lot of that label. If you don't have to write the email, if you don't have to create assets or images and things like that, you can go into the affiliate dashboard and grab those. They're done for you. Speaker 3:       10:14           Yeah, they're awesome. Part is you don't have to worry about the funnel because the funnels already been created that swipe copy of those links. They lead to the funnel. Once they're in the funnel, they get the top of the funnel where they basically entered their email address in. As miles mentioned earlier. You get sticky cookies to them and as long as no other affiliate promotes them directly, they don't click on the field. It's like you're going to get any additional commissions. Uh, the other great thing about it is, as you first get started going online, the key here is to learn marketing. So I highly recommend that you go ahead and you actually read through the email copy, understand the copy. You can, obviously you can change it, you can add to it, uh, but the copies there to give you a template or something to at least get started with. Speaker 3:       10:51           Realize that when you first get started in affiliate marketing, your only focus is to learn how to drive traffic and to learn how to continue to write copy. Those are the two things that matter most. So one of the things I always recommend is if you want to get better at writing copy funnel scripts is probably the best tool I can think of to actually do that. It's 500 bucks. Basically buy it for the year and it literally writes your copy's for you, meaning you type in a couple of, uh, it's kind of like fill in the blank and then fills out an entire email copy for you, gives you subject lines and gives you a ton of subject lines. It's not just one, I don't know how many Jim Edwards has in there, but every time you do it, you get a ton of different headlines. You also get a different email copy and you have to understand this is all, even though it's computer generated, this is from the best of the best of the best copywriters over the last hundred plus years where Jim went out and he literally took all of the copy secrets and all the things that Gary Halbert and all the other amazing copywriters have written over the last hundred hundred 50 years and that now is in software where you fill in the blanks. Speaker 3:       11:53           It literally creates all of your emails. It creates all of your subject lines. It actually will do podcast for you. It'll do webinars, powerpoint, I mean it does a ton. I'm just talking. When you're learning marketing, you have to understand copy and you have to understand traffic. So as far as traffic, we typically recommend the best places to start off is with facebook and in affiliate bootcamp there. John Parks who runs all of our traffic for us, I think he's got what, three or four modules on trees. Facebook tracking does. He does three or four in there. Miles, if they want to learn additional things as far as the market, what else can we provide to them? Speaker 2:       12:23           So I mean first and foremost is the best way for you is if you're promoting these products, make sure you have them as well. Like if you're going to promote the expert secrets book, make sure you've gone through that book and studied it and the Dotcom secrets book because you can't tell people what kind of values can provide until you realize the kind of value that's in those books or in the different products and programs, right? Um, and I want to reemphasize what Dave said about funnel scripts. That is, you know, as you go through and it generates all these headlines and copy as you see that you begin to see patterns in the way people respond to different ads and different headlines, different topics as you use that. You'll see, okay, these, these are what's working, and then it's going to be embedded in your mind. Speaker 2:       13:03           You're not going to have to rely on that. Although we use it all the time, but it's absolutely amazing. It is a shortcut to create or the best copy out there, but there's a ton. So if you're not already in affiliate bootcamp, I recommend going and using that like they've just been afraid. I feel like bootcamp.com. Yeah, it's 100 percent free. I would go dive into that right now and as Dave mentioned, we're revamping it. So take advantage of what's there right now, but then you'll definitely want to go back and take advantage of it when we revamped. It's going to be absolutely incredible. I'm so giddy for that. It's going to be an incredible. There's, I mean there's a ton of other things out there. Dave, do we want to send them other places like we watch them back to her book. So there's a book that we read here in the office to help all of us, um, you know, master this craft of marketing in the book is called great leads. Uh, it's all about writing copy, creating headlines, the different audiences you want to talk to, whether they're really aware of the product or not aware at all. How would you write to those different audiences? Speaker 2:       13:56           If you want any help, we have a ton of different courses. We have traffic secrets that you can use, obviously that's in the affiliate bootcamp, but do you want to learn hundreds and hundreds of different ways to drive traffic to your site or to different products? Traffic Secrets is they're obviously expert secrets, you know, building a tribe. You can do that on facebook.com secrets. It's all about how to use funnels and utilize them so that the three things that we have is affiliate bootcamp. Obviously, it's absolutely incredible. The paintings is expert secrets.com secrets funnel scripts. Uh, we have. I wish Tenex secrets was still open, but it's not. I'm sorry guys. We have the one funnel away challenge, like, that's going to be incredible. I think that is worth every penny, especially for you guys. If you're just getting into this and you want to start making money online, invest in one funnel away challenged. Have Steven Julian, Russell take you by the hand to show you what you need to do to create income and to sell your own product, but more importantly to sell other people's products. That's how a of people get started and that's how I got started in entrepreneurship. That's how Steven got started in entrepreneurship, like affiliate marketing is the way is kind of that gateway drug to entrepreneurship. If you asked me, Speaker 3:       15:00           I love it, so guys understand the most important thing for you right now is to learn marketing and the best way to learn marketing is actually to go out and start marketing other products and services and that's what affiliate marketing is all about. We have the facebook, the facebook of group where you can post comments and questions in there were pretty active and they're responding to questions. Their affiliate bootcamp.com, and by all means one funnel. A challenge I think is probably as miles said, is if you really want to get started, it's probably the best hundred bucks you will ever spend a. you'll get a ton of value out of it and most importantly, as miles mentioned, I'm a huge believer in the fact that the best way to promote things is to actually already bought it, used it, consumed it. Then you know what they're getting and you're not just saying, well, I heard this might work. Speaker 3:       15:44           The last thing I want to make mention of, and that's the importance of publishing and we always talk about building a list and you can either build, either work your way in or you buy your way in and you can just spend a whole bunch of money trying to buy your way in as far as creating a list, which again, if you've got some extra money, I highly recommend that you do that. The other thing is you can basically work your way in and that's by literally just spending the time going out and publishing. So miles, any publishing secrets are ticked. Speaker 2:       16:09           Tips that you recommend I would publish as often as possible. I think Dave as well, we find this correlation when I'm publishing a lot more on instagram or facebook, that's when people are reaching out to me and asked me, hey, what are you doing? Tell me about clickfunnels. Tell me about this, and it's literally three traffic to me. People are reaching out to me for my affiliate links or you know, that's how I'm making money. There's a correlation between the more that you publish, the more people are going to see you and see what you're doing and be interested in asking for help and asking for guidance. Know, no matter where you're at on your path, there's someone who's a few steps behind you and they're looking up to you and if you can provide that value to them, they're going to follow you and believe it or not, they're going to purchase through your affiliate link because you're providing value to them. Speaker 2:       16:49           Uh, it's the same with me like Russell Brunson. Uh, that's how I, you know, I looked up to him and I still look up to him and now I'm following everything that he does. Like I'm following his facebook and instagram. So publish as often as possible as Steven Martin says, publish, publish your face off because whether it's a podcast, facebook, instagram, youtube, you know, whatever is best for you. What if you hate writing, then podcast. If you hate talking, then then, right? So just get out there, document your journey, that's the most part. You don't have to come up with content, document what you're doing, other people want to see what you're doing and they want to follow you. So that's my advice is just document Gary v says at Russell, says it, Steven says it, just document what you're doing because people aren't interested. If people want to follow somebody, Speaker 3:       17:30           I love it. So we're going to end on that note as far as document your journey. So if you're just getting starting to feel it, marketing, there's nothing better than documenting that journey because other people are gonna fall behind you and you'll find that your linkedin, everything else, they get clicked on overtime. So document the journey. Again, if you're a writer, that means you're gonna. Write a blog. Steven [inaudible], who is our very first number one affiliate, he did all his through blogs and so write a blog and that for him was how he liked to publish. If you have a preferred to speaking, audio is great. Start a podcast, a anchor dot FM is probably easiest. Fast way of getting started. Were you living when you record push play and it's done and you don't have to worry about all the post editing stuff that a lot of our team best for miles and I on this podcast, so podcast is a huge thing from an audio standpoint as mentioned as far as facebook live, instagram stories, all those things are ways of getting your, of your video and your voice and your face out there and then obviously be saved. Speaker 3:       18:25           They can put on youtube and you can then start building up a whole long history on youtube as well. So the key this year, I hope, if nothing else is learn how to market and learn how to publish. Any other parting words? Speaker 2:       18:37           No, I think that's 100 percent right because you know this one, the only challenge is a great thing, but we have so many other amazing things coming this year. Make sure you guys are prepared for those because it's going to be just incredible and an opportunity for you to learn as a marketer and as an entrepreneur and to make some really good money as an affiliate marketer. So hopefully you guys enjoyed this episode. I'm dave and I were just been so excited about what's coming up this year and we want to make sure our affiliates are ready to go and if you're just getting into it, reach out to us on facebook, you know, getting that Avenger's group start asking questions. There's a lot of experience affiliates in there and they're willing to help. They're willing to share that information and you guys go hit at art and we're looking forward to a huge 2019 like we're trying to tame myself. But it's gonna be an amazing 2019. Thanks for listening everybody. Speaker 3:       19:24           Happy New Year everyone. Again, we'll hope to see you at funnel hacking live and for some reason you have not bought your ticket. I don't know why that would be. What are you doing? Why haven't you bought it yet? For some reason you haven't got to funnel hacking live.com. Get your tickets. Come see miles. And I had funnel hacking live and tell us that you heard the podcast, you liked it, and that you're basically an affiliate marketer and uh, can't wait to get started if you didn't like it. Still come to funnel hacking live. Just don't talk to us. Okay? Just kidding. No, don't talk to us. We'll see if funnel hacking live. Everybody. Take care. Speaker 4:       19:54           Hey everybody. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to the podcast. If you don't mind, could you please share this with others, rate and review this podcast on itunes. It means the world to me. We're trying to get to as a million downloads here in the next few months and just crush through over $650,000 and I just want to get the next few 100,000 so we can get to a million downloads and see really what I can do to help improve and, and get this out to more people at the same time. If there's a topic, there's something you'd like me to share or someone you'd like me to interview by means, just reach out to me on facebook. You can pm me and I'm more than happy to take any of your feedback as well as if people you'd like me to interview. I'm more than happy to reach out and have that conversation with you so again, can go to itunes rate and review this, share this podcast with others, and let me know how else I can improve this or what I can do to Speaker 5:       20:41           to make this better for you guys. Thanks.

Hey guys, Brandon Olson here. Welcome back. Rank Daddy TV. Today’s episode is gonna be a little different, a little longer. Let me give you kind of a back story. So, in Rank Daddy, in the training, in the group, we had a contest over the Summer. It was a Summer business building contest. The objective was to add as much monthly revenue to your agency as you possibly could. So the grand prize was $1,000, just a drop in the bucket really compared to what growth you guys see, or have seen over the Summer that you’ve put into your agency. So, a lot of growth, there was a lot of competition, it was awesome. So, what we have in today’s episode, the winner, his name is Caleb. Just a regular dude. He’s doing SEO part time. Started an agency literally six months ago he joined us. So at the beginning of this contest, he was only three months in. Total newbie. And what that shows is, that Rank Daddy literally works for anyone, okay? It doesn’t matter if you know SEO, or you think you know SEO, or you don’t know anything about SEO. Caleb won this $1,000, but really compared to what he brought into his agency, what he grew his business, it was insane, he literally added $17,000 in new monthly recurring revenue. So we didn’t count anything that students already had going. This is all newly added revenue to your business. But because of the way he scales his pricing, he starts everybody out a little low, maybe gives them half price to get them in, but by the end of next month, or within a month from now, he’ll be at over $28,000 just from what he brought in during this contest. $28,000 a month in added revenue from the contest. So, just over the Summer. So here’s what happened. You’re gonna notice as you watch, Caleb, like I said is just a regular guy. He hasn’t been doing this very long. Six months total. He’s got another business that he runs full time, and takes his entire … Or the majority of his focus and his time. He’s in real estate. SEO for him is completely part time. So as you watch this, I want you to do this. Keep telling yourself throughout the video, self, if this guy, a complete newbie, just a regular dude can build and scale an SEO business to $30,000 a month in just a few short months, part time, I can do it too. So keep telling yourself, let’s get into my computer, I’ve got this thing downloaded. What happened is, when we announced him as the winner, he was getting message after message after message, how did you do it? What was your prospecting like? What is your pricing? So he hit me up. He said, Brandon, can I just go in and do a Facebook Live? Do a Facebook Live and explain to people exactly what I did so I don’t have to answer? I mean, it’ll be a lot faster. So, literally he was bombarded. So that’s what we got for today’s episode. He literally shares in this Facebook Live, and you’ll see as if he’s doing a question and answer, it’s because people are posting questions as he goes along. We downloaded it, put it on YouTube, so you won’t be able to see the questions. But just kinda be in tune with what he’s doing. But he literally shares exactly how he did it. How he landed the clients, how he used leverage to land more clients, how he priced his deals, and more. He goes into great detail. I’m really, really glad he shared his story. Now this thing is 47 minutes long. If you have to pause it, come back to it. But don’t skip any of it. This thing is insanely, insanely valuable. And remember, as yourself, if this regular dude can do this, why can’t I? And you can. So let’s go. So that’s what we got for today’s episode. He literally shares in this Facebook Live, and you’ll see as if he’s doing a question and answer, it’s because people are posting questions as he goes along. We downloaded it, put it on YouTube, so you won’t be able to see the questions. But just kinda be in tune with what he’s doing. But he literally shares exactly how he did it. How he landed the clients, how he used leverage to land more clients, how he priced his deals, and more. He goes into great detail. I’m really, really glad he shared his story. Now this thing is 47 minutes long. If you have to pause it, come back to it. But don’t skip any of it. This thing is insanely, insanely valuable. And remember, as yourself, if this regular dude can do this, why can’t I? And you can. So let’s go. Rank Daddy. What’s up? It is Tuesday, and I think, yeah, Tuesday here right at noon Central Time. It’s actually 11:59. I’m a minute early, but want to let you guys hop on here. I will give you guys a second, but we’re going to be talking about how I was able to win the 2018 summer contest. I’ve gotten messages after messages, and so I just sent a message over to Brandon, and just really was like, “Hey, man. Can I just come live because it’s going to be so much easier to just come live, rather than texting everyone back individually?” Whatever, you guys jump on, say hey, say hello. I want to see you guys in here, whether that’s a hand wave. Jerry, what’s up, man? How are you? Thanks for joining in. Like I said, guys, whatever, you hop in here, wave. Give me a little wave. Give me a thumbs up. Give me something. I don’t know. As well, want you guys to know this, any questions that you guys have, feel free to let me know. In the middle of this, I’ll definitely be able to answer those, and so wanted to just go through with you guys what my process is honestly, and what I did do to achieve everything I have, and so I’m not done yet. It’s not like I’m just going to kind of go, “Oh well, I’m here”, whatever. Aaron, what’s up? What’s up? Nathaniel, Randy, how are you, guys? Alec, how are you? [Amit 00:01:36]? [Ahmet 00:01:37]? Dude, I don’t know. I’m sorry. The worst pronouncer of names ever here. Jimmy, what’s up, man? All right, guys, so we’re just going to go ahead and kick things off. If you guys are watching this on the replay, say replay. Want to see who all watches this live, and obviously back. Like I said, for those of you who just jumped on, if you guys have questions, feel free to reach out and say them right in the middle of this, all right? I want to help you guys, because like I said, I’ve been getting tons of messages, “Hey, what did you do?”, “How did you do this?”, all this, and so I messaged a couple of people back, and then I was like, “All right. No. I’m done. I’ve got to go live because texting people back so much is just not going to really work out as well.” “It just took forever.” This is honestly what I did, all right? If you guys aren’t in Rank Daddy Pro yet, please, please, please go sign up for it, because that’s why I was able to do what I did. You guys need to really … For those of you who are in Academy, you guys need to figure out a way to upgrade. I don’t know. Get a credit card with 0% APR interest, something like that to make this investment because this is a huge, huge investment, and for those of you who are in Pro, you guys know the value of one, all the trainings, but secondly, our Facebook group. That’s just incredible of a small community that we hope to get even bigger, but just how helpful that it is, right? Whenever you ask a question, it’s all there, and that’s honestly why I was able to do what I did. Now, let’s talk about prospecting, all right? What I did is I literally just came up with a list. I sat down one night and just started thinking, “Okay. What kind of businesses are there? What are the categories?” All right? I’ve got a list pinned up of roofers, landscapers, tree service, a dentist, pest control, towing, restaurants, water damage, painting, contractor, lawyer, a plumber, carpet cleaning, a limo service, car detailing, a mover. I just came up with a big list of … Oh, man. My water is out. That’s a sad day. All right. I guess I’m back. Cool. If you guys can hear me, just give me a thumbs up. It said I had low internet connection for a second, so just want to make sure that you guys can hear me before I start to ramble on. Like I said, create that list there. I’m seeing thumbs up. All right. Perfect. Thanks, guys. Creating that list helped me, and this is what I did. I straight up just did this because a lot of you guys might not know this, but I’ve got a background in the real estate industry, and that’s really what I do kind of more so than SEO, is I buy and flip and sell investment properties, and so that’s really what I do full-time. It’s kind of what I focus on, because there’s big money in that. You can pop off a big chunk of 20, 30,000 bucks at once, and so that’s what I focus on, and I do this stuff on the side, so I haven’t really gotten full into prospecting like I really want to, just because again, I don’t have the time running two businesses, so I just have to pick and choose what I have. What I did is I straight up went on to Google. Again, this is a prospecting method in Rank Daddy Pro, then I’m going to give you guys tips about what they teach you in Pro of what I actually use. What I did is I just created a list like that, and I just straight up cold called. I went on to Google, began at the top of page two, and just started calling people. “Am I the only one? The video stopped playing.” Yeah. It kicked off, so if you guys need to rejoin, go ahead and get back on there. What I did is I cold called them straight up. I also had a virtual assistant help me, and what I would do is, is I made a training video, and if you guys have a Mac, it’s key. Hey, if you guys are on here, I see some new faces hopping on. If you guys have questions about what I’m talking about, anything else, feel free to ask me. If you guys are catching this on the replay, say, “Replay”. You can even do #Replay if you’re really feeling it. So happy to have you guys on. What I did is I had a virtual assistant help me with this as well, is that they would go through, and they would actually go and create lists for me. What they would do is, is they would call, or … They would call. I did that at first. Matt, yeah. Absolutely, man. Happy to help. What I did is, is I had a virtual assistant go through … I gave them a big list, and I told them to go through page 10. Honestly, I probably should have had them go through page like 15 or whatever, but of each industry and each city that I wanted to, so I’m here at the Nashville area, so I gave him like Nashville and a few surrounding areas as well that I thought might be a good idea, and I had him create an Excel sheet of the business name, company phone number, email address if it was there, and I think what page of Google they were on. What I did is, is with all those emails, what I did is I created a MailChimp, and I sent out a MailChimp to that same list about three times. I sent the same thing, and then I mixed it up, but I just sent it over and over and over again, until I got people saying, “Take me off your list”, or whatever just to know that people got it, but that worked. I got a couple of clients by doing that, and then I called people. Just straight up cold called them. One of them is … Actually, I’ve got a follow-up with them tomorrow. Funny enough, this was back in June, all right? He was ready for SEO. He’s a t-shirt printer. They do that, and they do embroider as well, which is something that I didn’t really think of, but they were ready to do SEO, man, and it was t-shirt company population of about 200,000 people. They were ready, and their AC blew out in their workspace, and so he was like, “Hey, I’m not going to be able to. I want to. Call me back in September.” Here we are, so I’m going to get back with him and follow up, and that’s another big thing, is follow up. Make sure that you guys create some sort of … For me, it worked the best creating a Google sheet, and just kind of keeping up with who I called, when I called them, when I was going to need to call them back, things like that, and that was really a great way for me to know who I needed to call when, and it just helped me keep organized, because I feel like I need to be … I’m a very organized individual, so I like to have things laid out to a tee. You know what I mean? That’s what I would suggest for you guys, is to do that. Again, if you guys have questions throughout all of this, feel free and shoot. I did that, and then, this is a really important thing that I did as well, and this has worked for me the very best, the very best, asking for referrals. Now, you can’t just straight up ask for a referral until you do some work for them, right? One client, my very first one, I landed back in I think April or May, and what I did is, she was paying me about two grand a month, and so I literally socked all 2,000 into her. Boom. I was just throwing it in there, PBNs, press releases, Web 2.0, doing tons of stuff to get her up there, right? Population, about a million. I mean, I was throwing stuff. I was just literally like I said all of it to her, and so what ended up happening is, is in July, she had a record-breaking month, like three times what she’d ever made, and so she was just crazy. She’s like, “This works. This is amazing. Oh, gosh”, so I asked her, “Hey, do you know anyone else that could use the same thing?” She referred six people to me. Six that are all clients right now, all right? They range from a CBD oil shop thing. He’s just sells CBD oil and a few Gummies, and things like that to a plumber. I mean, the list goes on and on of just random friends that she has that are attorneys, and a plumber, a CBD oil shop owner, like just random things, but she was like, “Look at what happened. This guy is legit.” That’s really what happened, and I got her from cold calling, right? That’s what I did, but then … My best advice for you guys is your first one, two, three, four clients really, so everything they give you into them to get them up there to generate the most money. Yeah, you probably won’t make a lot or anything at all, but it’s going to be worth it, guys, so make sure that you guys are sowing into people, and giving and putting everything you can into them. Don’t be super greedy. “Oh well, I’m going to just wait until they pay me.” No, no, no, no. Push that in. Sow into them, because guess what’s going to happen, is when you do that, people know, “Wow, they’ve given me everything”, and now look at it. She gave me six new clients. Why? Because I helped her get a record-breaking month because I wasn’t pinching pennies. I was putting every cent into her website and ranking her. Every penny, all right? I mean, yeah, I think I ended up making like, I don’t know, 2,000 bucks for two months of it. I ended up making about $400, so 200 bucks each month. That kind of like made up for my time, just as far as putting into it. You know what I mean? It didn’t really make up for all of my time, but it made up for a little bit, and so like I said, I just sowed into it, right? That’s what I did, guys. I mean, it’s really not that hard, and another big thing is Facebook marketing. That’s another big one, is literally doing this, joining the yard sale groups, buy, sell, trade groups, literally any of that, and just post something like this, “Hey, local business owners, share your website. Let’s see what we come up with”, and make something creative. Make it sound like you’re trying to talk to people, and then say, “Mine’s in the comments”, and you start it off, and you share your SEO agency site, right? You say, “All right. Hey, here’s my company site. I run an online marketing agency.” I just say online marketing agency is a lot easier. People don’t know what SEO is most of the time, so say something like … Literally just do that and don’t spam a group, right? Add some value to it. If somebody is asking for a referral for a chiropractor, give them yours, whoever you go to, a dentist, same thing. Add value so that way, people see you as real, not just as a spammer. You know what I mean? Literally, like I said, just it’s when you get that one client, when you get your first, what you need to do is you need to literally sow every penny that you have to getting them to be number one, all right? Here’s why. Here’s why. Even if you’re like, “Yeah, it’s 500 bucks a month they’re going to pay me. What the heck?”, it’s nothing. Put all 500. Put 700 into it, right? Here’s why. When you can show somebody rankings and say, “Look at this guy. I ranked him. He’s ranking number one”, mobile, on a computer, and in the Map Pack … It’s important for you guys who aren’t using SerpTrack.io, go use that to track your rankings. Literally, Brandon and whoever helped him create that is literally the best-ranking tool out there, so go sign up for that. Plus, it’s cheap. It’s the same price … I was using Rank Tracker before to pay 19 bucks a month, went over to Brandon’s and paid 20 bucks … Oh, a dollar more, and got double the keywords, and I think double or 10 times the sites I get, but like something insane that I was like, “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I, right?”, and he shows you a computer, ranking mobile and Map Pack, especially the Mac Pack. I think the Map Pack is probably one of the most important ranking tools because that shows up the majority of times when somebody searches on an iPhone, and over 60% of mobile of any search on to Google is done from a mobile phone, so yeah, makes sense that the Map Pack’s going to show up, and that’s why it’s important to get you guys up there. Again, I would really highly suggest for you guys to just hustle and cold call people. Call people off of one of the billboards, a van, and here’s a big one that you guys probably aren’t going to like this, show up in their office. Just show up, right? Show up. Dress professionally with a little handout, some sort of a letter, a flyer, I don’t know, something that you can hand them and say, “Hey, this is what I do.” “No.” “Are you guys interested, and if not, you just leave it there”, because who knows? In six months, they might call you back, right? They might, because they might be going through a hard time, one, or two, if they are already doing SEO, their SEO, dude might just suck, okay? Straight up, might just suck. I had a client, and they were with another SEO company for like six months, best-ranking like page four, I think. All I did was on-page SEO on to … They ranked number one in all their cities they were trying to go after, right? Again, my man Jerry here, who is on … I don’t know. He was on. I don’t know if he is. He helped me out big time, and guess what? In Rank Daddy Pro. That’s why it’s so important, guys for you guys to get into Rank Daddy Pro here. Now, I’ll be honest, Brandon didn’t ask me to come on here and sell you guys Rank Daddy Pro and blah, blah, blah. That’s not why I’m doing this. I’m just being honest, giving you guys my opinion about what’s best, because you guys saw what I was able to accomplish, and why was that? Rank Daddy Pro. That’s why I was able to do that. Why do you think that Ed over here is popping off these big clients? One, he actually hustles and actually does the work, and two, Rank Daddy, right? That’s why. A community, right? We ask each other questions, even if we feel like it’s a silly thing to ask like, “Hey, guys. I should probably know this, but I’m just kind of drawing … I’m just kind of having a hard time remembering what that is. What is that?”, and people answer, and boom. There it is, so people … We help each other there, and it’s fantastic. As far as what my favorite niche and population size is, honestly, I don’t really have a favorite niche necessarily because I’ve got a bunch of different clients and a bunch of different fields, and they all work pretty well, from car detailing to a plumber, to CBD oil, to tons of different things. Honestly, I think my favorite clients to go after are probably the ones in the like 1,000 to $1,800 a month range, and I’ll talk about how I also price things here in a minute, but I’m going to wrap this up fairly quick, probably 10 more minutes because I’ve got a tea time this afternoon. Why? Because I don’t really have to work that much, because I’ve gotten this stuff. Yeah. I’m going to continue to push, but guess what? I can work half a day in the morning and go play 18 holes in the afternoon because of this, so it’s fantastic. My favorite population sizes honestly are probably anything under about 300,000. That’s me. Why is that? Because that’s the easiest to rank. Really, all you would need to do is drop a press release, do social signals, Web 2.0s, and of course, this is kind of … You should just know this, but do an on-page SEO correctly, right? That’s kind of a given, but doing that right. Let’s just back it up. On-page SEO, number one. Very, very important. Then, press release, social signals, few Web 2.0s and a couple PBNs, and they’re pretty much top three, and really, once you do the local citations, they’re going to be up there in the Map Pack. Matt, yes. One second. I will go over that. Yes. One of the things that you guys need to look at is what’s going to be easier to rank, 10 clients and a thousand bucks a month in a population of 150,000, or one client going national from very competitive keyword for 10,000 bucks a month? In fact, they’re going to be on you constantly every day. “Hey, how are the rankings? Hey, how are the rankings?” “Hey, how are the rankings? Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.” They’re going to be on you constantly, but somebody paying you a thousand bucks a month in a population of 150,000 people, yeah, they might message you once a week, but guess what? The upkeep’s going to be a lot less because they know you, they trust you. It’s not going to be a big corporation. It’s going to be a mom and a pop type thing. It’s going to be one dude running it, or a father and son, husband and a wife. You get the idea, so it’s a little bit easier, so I would pick easily a 10, a thousand buck a month clients in a hundred thousand, 200,000 city because you get a rank faster, and when you get those, it just gives you more ammo, more marketing ammo, saying, “Look. Look at me. Look at me. I rank this guy number one.” “I can do that for you”, and that’s a big thing of other clients that I got, is that yes, the one client that had that record-smashing, not even [breaking 00:23:28], so record-smashing month in July. They just saw her, and they saw those rankings and said, “Yeah. She said you’re good. I don’t even need to see other people”, so that’s why it’s important for you to focus on one individual client, or two or three to get them up there to begin asking for a referral. That’s very, very key. Now, Matt asked, “Can you go over a bit of how your cold calls went, stuff that you found worked and didn’t, et cetera?” Yes. This sounds kind of silly, I guess, but get yourself a pair of headphones, all right? I’ve got the Powerbeats3, so you just hook in to your ear. It just looks like this, right? It’s super easy. Super comfortable. The microphones here, you put this one on the other ear, and you just go at it, and you call, and you can’t tell. These things are, I think they’re 150 bucks. I would make an investment in these or something like it, plus, I like these for when I go on a run or anything like that because they’re just super nice. That’s my tip number one, get some sort of a headset, but this isn’t what I would say, is as soon as I would call them, is whoever would answer is I would say, “Hey, just out of curiosity, I found you guys online back on page four or five. Was just curious if you guys have anybody doing SEO or online marketing work for you guys at all.” They would just base on what they would answer, I would kind of lean with that, see how they would answer, and then just say, “Okay. Great. Is there something I could maybe chat to, maybe a manager or somebody who’s in charge of all of your guys’, all of the marketing?” They would usually be like, “Yeah. Sure.” “That’s Jim. He does all of that, or that’s John”, or whoever, and you would get to them, and then you just ask them and just say, “Hey, found you guys back online back to page four or five. Was just curious if you guys have anybody helping you guys rank your website, increase your traffic, get more leads, et cetera.” If they’re like, “No thank you.” Be like, “Would you like to increase your revenue by two times or five times?” Kind of like, “Wait. What? Yeah, of course.” SEO can help you with that, right? One thing is cold calls get a lot easier the more you do them and the more ammo you have. Ammo is clients, and rankings, and things like that. You can say … This is one of the things I love to do, and when I first began, I would use this, because I had already ranked, and this was before I even found Rank Daddy and all, but I had already ranked my real estate investment company up there, and so I would just have them on the phone, say, “Hey, why don’t you go in to Google right now and just type in, ‘Where can I sell my house?’, in whatever their area was, because I knew that I was already up there, and just say, ‘Hey’. Just tell me who shows up number one.” They would read, “Oh, this website.” “Yup. That’s me.” “If you click on that, go to the About Page, you’ll see my name, my picture, all of that”, to give them a validity saying, “Oh, snap. I Googled this, and you just showed right up.” It’s good when you talk to somebody over the phone, is have them actually look up one of your clients, right? Actually, look that up while you’re on the phone with them. Say, “Hey, yeah. Are you in front of a computer?” They’re like, “Yeah, I am.” “Wonderful. Go ahead and hop on there to Google, and just type in there whatever the keyword that your client’s up there for”, and they’re going to say, “Yeah. I see that.” You say, “Yup. I ranked them.” It gives them a validity, so it just gives them validity to see, “Okay. This dude is real. This client here, he’s ranking them, and okay. All right. All right. I’m beginning to see this, beginning to trust this”, so really guys, with cold calling, you’re going to face rejection. It’s just going to happen, and this is a weird trick, I know. This is going to sound so weird to all of you, but it works for me, so you’ll have to find your thing that works for you, is that give yourself some sort of a reward for cold calling people. What I would do, kid you not, I’m a two-year old, it’s so funny, I would literally … I went to Sam’s Club, and I bought a big thing of some fruit snacks, so I literally would, after every couple of calls, I would say, “All right. I can eat a couple of these. For every two, three calls I make, I can get one gummy or two”, however I set it in my own head. What that would do is, is that would motivate me a little bit to call them to say, “Okay. I can’t eat these until I make that call.” I know it sounds silly, but it worked for me, right? Maybe for you, it’s, “All right. I can’t play another round of 18 holes until I make 25 calls, 30 calls. I’m not allowed to do something I enjoy until I make this many calls.” What that’s going to do for you is it’s going to kind of give you motivation to do it, right? Hey, guys. If you guys have any questions, feel free to shoot. Alexis, I’m trying to expand your question there. It says, “See more”, but when I hit “See more”, just brings me to like it or something. I don’t know. Yeah, “Share one of your real estate sites.” We can talk about it. Yeah. Send me a private message and we can chat. Oh, before I forget, yes, this is the last thing I’m going to go over, but if you guys have any other questions, feel free and shoot. Again, got to go play 18. What I did as far as pricing, this has been huge for me, and this has worked so stinking well, is what I’ve done is … All right. Let’s just say that you’ve got a client for 2,000 bucks a month. Aaron, yeah. Literally, it’s exactly what I’m going to go into. This is how I set this up, guys, and this works so well. So well. Let’s just say that we have a $2,000 a month client. Again, guys, in Rank Daddy Pro, it teaches you how to price clients correctly, and how to do it all, and again, a good Rank Daddy Pro community that’s, has other clients and might have them in your own, in that particular area or clientele that you’re shooting for. They might be able to help you, and give you tips. “Oh, hey, I only gave them a thousand dollar a month, $1,500 a month”, whatever. It’s a great way to help, but this is what I did. Let’s just say we have a $2,000 a month client, right? What I would do is, is I would give them a bit of a pricing cut month one and month two, so I would tell them this, “All right. It’s going to take about 2,000 a month”, and this is a good thing for you guys to do. I always send this in an email always. I never tell them a pricing over the phone. I always say, “Hey, I’m going to have to look into it. Let me send you an email.” Here’s why, is you have that in writing proof of what you’re going to offer them, how much, how everything is. It’s just wise to have everything in writing, all right? Now, what I did … Again, I keep on shooting off here. Let’s go back. 2,000 buck a month client. How I present this to them is say, “All right, so the typical price is going to be 2,000 a month, but you know what? What I’m going to do for you is I like to help out other companies because I know what it’s like.” “I get it. I know what it’s like to pay for a marketing channel that’s new and might not generate leads right off the top, and it’s going to take time, and I get that. I know what it’s like. I run a company too”, blah, blah, blah. “I know what it is. What I’m going to do is I’m going to actually help eat some of your costs.” “It’s not that you’re getting any less of a package, but I’m going to actually help you eat costs. Yeah, it’s going to be 2,000 bucks a month, but, you know what? For month one and two, I’m only going to charge you a thousand, or 800”, or you make the determination for what you feel is comfortable for you, and say, “All right. You know what? I’m going to chop that 2,000 in half, so month one is going to be a thousand, month two, same thing, another thousand, and then month three and beyond, it’s going to jump up to the agreed upon $2,000.” What that does is it lets people see, “Oh, wow. It’s kind of like I’m paying for one month, but getting two months out of it.” “Oh, okay. All right.” It’s a lot easier for them to try things out for lesser, for less money than what you talked to them about originally, because it makes them feel like they’re getting a deal, a sweet deal. “Hey, I’m giving you half off”, and that’s how you get to give it to them. I did that. Worked like a charm. Perfect, like you would not believe. Worked incredible, all right? That’s how I do it for everyone of my clients is I give them a bit of a price cut, and honestly, I don’t give them any less. If I lose money, I lose a little bit of money. No big deal, because I know that it’s going to succeed and they’re going to come back month three, four, five, six, seven, and they’re going to keep paying me money, right? It’s a way for me to set myself up for the future to know, “Okay. They’re going to keep paying me. They’re not going to stop paying me.” Any other questions, guys? That’s kind of how I did what I did. I know you’re kind of like, “Did I miss something? Yeah.” Like, “What’s going on?” No, guys. That’s literally it. There’s no secret magic sauce, you know what I mean? It’s just doing it. Hey, Ken. Yeah. How many calls a day was I doing? Like I said, I also run a real estate investment company, and so I did this SEO thing on the side. I wasn’t really focusing on it, so I would only make five to 10 calls a day, if that, and I did for probably a couple weeks, until I landed a couple clients, then I kind of got overwhelmed with a couple of houses. I went to buy and fixing them up, and doing things, so I got overwhelmed and didn’t really focus on it much, other than the clients I had, and so what I did is like I said, is I said, “Okay. Probably, the easiest way for me to get more clients is to have one do really, really well and have a couple do really, really well, and have them just refer people to me so I don’t have to make all the calls and do that.” I was right, and it worked, and yes. Ken, what I did is I … I would definitely encourage you to go watch the first half. What I did is I have a virtual assistant. I picked a bunch of categories, roofers, landscapers, tree service, all of that, and what I did is had a VA go and pull the company name, the website, the phone number, any email address that was on there, and what page they were on to Google on, and when I call them, I always added a couple extra pages, so if they’re on page two, you go, “Hey, we found you on page four or five”, kind of make it sound kind of worse than it is, and so that’s how I set that up. Yeah. Aaron said, “Are you basing price off city?” Yeah. What I tell them, I tell everyone this, is I base what the pricing is on these two things, the city population size and your competition, how much competition do you have in your area online, right? Really, all I do is I base it off a city, and so … I forgot that was empty, man. Did that earlier. Definitely going to have to get some water here soon. How I set things up is right now, I’ve got a plumber in a city of 50,000 for about 600 bucks a month because I know that that’s a lot for him, but it’s going to work well for him, so yeah, I base it all off city population size, and so what I would say is kind of a good rule of thumb, is anything below 150,000 people, consider being in the range. I don’t want to charge people less than 500 bucks, and that’s like rock-bottom. I really don’t take people under a thousand, but I took on a plumber just to again build my ammo, build my rankings to show people, “Hey, I ranked him”, so I’m not making money off of him. I’m going to make money off of him eventually though because I’m going to use his rankings to show other high-profile clients, right? That’s how I set things up, so don’t say no to the little guys because it’s going to help you land a much larger fish. Like I said, anything under 150,000 people, I would probably look at between 500 and a thousand bucks, somewhere in that range, and then population of 150 to 300,000. I would say no more than 2,000 a month, just kind of look in that kind of range. I feel like a good, solid base no matter what is about 1,500 bucks because if you look at it, you run local citations, press release, social signals, PBNs, kind of gives you enough to put into the client, but you also make a little bit, so if they’re not feeling 3,000 bucks a month, chop it in half and see what 1,500 bucks is. You know what I mean? It’s better to get something than nothing at all, and again, clients … Excuse me, the smaller fish are going to help you land bigger clients because new, potential clients want to see rankings of current clients, so if you don’t have any because you’re too expensive and you’re not willing to kind of take a little bit of a hit upfront to get those rankings, then guess what? You’re probably not going to do so well. Okay? Just saying, so that’s what I would do, all right? All right, guys. That is really … Honestly, guys, that’s everything. If nobody has any other questions, I’m going to sign off. I’ve got like I said my tea time here pretty soon, so I got to go get changed and go get ready for that. Going to grab a bite to eat and go play 18 holes. Guess what, guys? You guys can live the luxury life I am … No. I’m just kidding. I’m not really … Listen, guys, I’m not living some extravagant life or anything like that. Just working hard, guys. It’s what I tell all of my employees, is I tell them this is, “Listen, guys. We just have to work hard. We can’t settle. Don’t settle, guys. Don’t settle.” When you have 10 clients, awesome. That’s great. You got 10. Go get 30. When you get 30, you did it. You got 30 clients. Go get 50. You’ve got 50. Oh, it can’t get better than this. Oh, it can, because when you hit 55, it gets better. When you hit 75, it gets better. When you hit 100, it gets better, all right? I’ve made a mistake, especially in all of the real estate side of things for me, is when I close a house, I’m saying, “Oh, man. Feels good. Let me kick back and relax. Oh, this feels great.” Right? Don’t do that. Don’t relax. Don’t settle. I’m not saying don’t go and enjoy yourself, right? Have fun. Live life with your family, your friends. Do fun things. Let this be a freeing experience to say, “I’ve got the money now. We can go play 18 holes. We can go on a little vacation, a weekend in somewhere, to the mountains, to a local beach, a lake house”, something to … Let this be an enjoyable process for you guys, and again, Rank Daddy Pro is where it is at, guys. It’s where it’s at. Go sign up. If you guys haven’t … I’m just telling you this now. That’s why I am where I am, is because of that, Rank Daddy Pro. Go and sign up for it, guys. I’m telling you, go do it. Go do it. It’s worth its weight in gold. “Yeah. So what? It’s a few thousand bucks.” Go open up a credit card and put it on that. Do something. Make an investment in yourself. Yeah, I had to pay too. Guess what? Pulling in almost 20,000 bucks a month. Going to up that to 30 or 40,000 a month coming up soon. Guess what? Got a few thousand bucks. It’s just a tiny, little drop, okay? You have to pay that. You have to pay to play. It’s just the way that it is, guys. It’s worth it. I’m telling you, it’s worth it. Listen, guys, if you guys have questions, feel free to drop a comment on here, and so feel free. Drop a comment, and I would love to answer it here, because it would be awesome if you guys can just leave any questions. Those of you guys catching this on replay, watch it here. Leave a comment here, so that way, I can answer it here, so that’s just like everybody can see it rather than you just sending me a message. Let’s try to keep it all in here, so that way, this helps everyone, and not just you. Guys, that is everything. Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope this has been a big help, just kind of give you guys some encouragement on what to do and things like that, so guys, go make calls. Go get it. Go kill it. Go lock up clients. Go get the job done. Guys, biggest encouragement here, do the work. Make the calls. Don’t hire somebody to do the calls. Make the calls yourself. It’s always the sweetest victory when you can do something yourself and say, “I did this. I made that call. I worked that deal.” “I got that person. I landed it. Boom. I did it. Yes, this is great.” Then, when you begin to land clients, then you can tell somebody, “Hey, this is actually how I did this”, rather than trying to hire somebody saying, “Hey, I don’t know how to make cold calls.” “I don’t know how to land a client. Just go figure it out.” You can’t do that. You got to do it yourself, right? That’s my biggest piece of advice. All right, guys. I will see you guys later. I got to go play 18 holes. I’ll talk with you guys later. All right. I’ll see you.

[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent="no" equal_height_columns="no" menu_anchor="" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" class="" id="" background_color="" background_image="" background_position="center center" background_repeat="no-repeat" fade="no" background_parallax="none" parallax_speed="0.3" video_mp4="" video_webm="" video_ogv="" video_url="" video_aspect_ratio="16:9" video_loop="yes" video_mute="yes" overlay_color="" video_preview_image="" border_size="" border_color="" border_style="solid" padding_top="" padding_bottom="" padding_left="" padding_right=""][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type="1_1" layout="1_1" background_position="left top" background_color="" border_size="" border_color="" border_style="solid" border_position="all" spacing="yes" background_image="" background_repeat="no-repeat" padding_top="" padding_right="" padding_bottom="" padding_left="" margin_top="0px" margin_bottom="0px" class="" id="" animation_type="" animation_speed="0.3" animation_direction="left" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" center_content="no" last="no" min_height="" hover_type="none" link=""][fusion_text] How to you ensure the BEST and FASTEST results when pursuing geographic farming?  Listen to this question and answer session with marketing expert Beatty Carmichael and one of his clients.  Learn the nuances that make geographic farming most profitable. Have Questions or Comments? Please ask your questions in the comments section below. We attempt to respond to ALL questions or comments. Listen to this audio via YouTube video if desired [/fusion_text][fusion_youtube id="https://youtu.be/RNgkfIyIaig" alignment="center" width="" height="" autoplay="false" api_params="&rel=0" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" class="" /][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]   Transcript   Beatty: This is the Get Sellers Calling You marketing podcast for real estate agents and I’m Beatty Carmichael.  For simple to do proven marketing strategies focus exclusively on finding sellers and getting more listings, visit our website at GetSellersCallingYou.com.  And now, let’s begin our next session of Get Sellers Calling You.  Caller: I’m very eager to start getting listings in an area and maybe make a name for myself in that area as well. Is there anything you would recommend that I do to get the ball rolling faster? Beatty: Absolutely. So, tell me which city and state you are in. Caller: I’m in Pasadena, California. Beatty:  Great. The most important thing, when we do geographic farming, especially out in California and in those areas where you have a lot of transplants (people who move into the area as opposed to grew up there). Let me give you background of where I am coming from. I don’t care to bore you too much with detail but I think the more you understand why the better. Caller: Certainly. Beatty: What we found through testing and through—we actually engaged an MBA university and their marketing research class to do an analysis for us with what we were seeing. What we were seeing is that some farms produce great results right off the bat. Other farms produced poor results all the way down to no results. We were trying to understand what the difference was. What caused those farms to differ? The final analysis has to do with what we call a trusting community. A trusting community as it is defined in context of what we’ve identified and validated that is the key factor is a community that trusts the agent already. There are two ways that that happens. Either they are like, if you recall the Andy Griffith Show many years back. No one locked their doors because everyone trusted everyone. When you get into those communities where everyone grew up there, they live there, they have their kids there, and their kids grow up there and live there. Then everyone knows everyone and it’s a trusting community. What you have in California is you don’t have that feature. People didn’t grow up there; they grew up somewhere else and they moved there, even if it’s moving across town, they are still in foreign area in terms of people they grew up with. So, as a result, it creates a psychological barrier that they are not as trusting as you are in the other environment. So, they way that you have to build trust is you have to always be there and you build up, not only a name recognition, but you build up an expertise recognition. So this is the focus of what our cards do, but there are some things you can do that will dramatically impact it and make it more productive for you. The most important thing is for you to get out and actually meet those people. When we created your list, when we ran it through data analytics to identify those home most likely to sell, we should have sent you a copy of that list as well. Did we do that? Caller: I do have a list. Beatty:  Okay, perfect. So what I want you to do, I want you to do a number of things. But the most important is going to be door knocking. And next week’s call on my podcast call, which is Wednesdays at 11:00 am central / 9:00 am pacific. We are actually going through 10 low cost things you can do to build up a farm, to do touches, that I would like you to start focusing on, or at least take those things out of the list that are applicable to you. But the most important thing is to door knock and actually meet people. So that means that typically it’s going to be a weekend activity, like a Saturday morning / late Sunday afternoon, when people are typically back home. You are probably going to have to do it a few times to make it work. Door knocking is going to be the most impactful thing you can do. Here is another study that has been corroborated through data points. And that is, once they have met you, the likelihood that they’ll do business with you increases between 8 and 10 times. So, if you want to get off the ground in that area and get quicker results soon and more powerful results that are consistent, the number one thing that is going to be the most impactful is that you meet them. They get to put a face and a voice and a personality. When you go out to door knock is not to try to get a listing appointment or try to get a referral, all that will come later. The most important thing is to say, “Hey, I’m out. I’m a real estate agent in the area. I’m just trying to introduce myself to people. I just want to say, hello, how are you?” Okay? Just engage in that small-talk concept. But I would also have two things, Dixie can give you the first one and it’s what we call a pre-marketing pack. A pre-marketing pack is a package of information—don’t let the page count scare you—but it’s like 43-45 pages long—but what does is it has big print and big pictures and stuff. And it walks through, and you can trim it down to things that are only specific for you, but it gives you a chance to give that homeowner something in their hand that they can read about you. And the whole thing about this premarketing pack is it sells you as an expert agent. When we’ve used this, and we’ve had clients using it for years, the typically thing that happens is two things. First, we use it when we identify seller leads, so that’s the self-selection cards. When that package is given to someone, what happens is, that agent usually gets the listing when it comes on the market and the average listing appointment goes from about 2 to 2.5 hours down to about 30 – 45 minutes because most of that listing appointment is the presentation, trying to sell why they should choose you. But this packet does such a good job, that when we are using it with seller leads, it kind of pre-sells you and they’ve already bought in so it eliminates all that. I’ve got to tell you another story because it is a powerful piece of information. Another one of our clients up in Washington state, when he started with us, had just updated his packet and he gets a phone call from one of his referral sources that says, “Julie Smith at this address is thinking about selling her home, you ought to give her a phone call.” So Ed calls her up and introduces himself. She says, “Yes, we are playing to sell. But, I am already planning to use another agent. Thanks for calling.” He said, “Are you under contract yet?” She said, “No.” He said, “Great, can I email you some information about me first.” She responds, “Sure, I’ll be happy to review it.” So he emails the information. She calls him back the next day and says, “Ed, I got your information. I read it. I want you to sell my house. I’ve already cancelled my appointment with the other agent. Can you meet me tomorrow at 2:00?” And it was a $700,000 listing. It’s real powerful. As you are door knocking, you want to have a stack of those and hand them to everyone you meet as simply a way to introduce yourself. Okay? Caller: Sure. Beatty: The second thing I want you to do is, I want you to create a free report of some sort. The focus of this free report is, if I were to ask you and say, “Stephen, what is, in your mind, if I’m going to put my home on the market, what are the most important things I need to be concentrating on right now to get it ready to go on the market so it shows its best, sells at the highest price and gets the offer as quickly as possible. Caller: Right now I have that on my website and on YouTube. Also I do a market update every single month on video as well. Will that help my cause? Beatty: Not on what I’m doing right now. It will help your cause as you continue to touch your people, touch that list in addition to our touches, but for where I’m going on this, it’s not going to be helpful because you’ll find out in my next sentence. Now that you’ve got it, put it on paper. Okay? Something that they can hold. Make sure that that paper is branded to you and keep that in your car. So then, when you are talking to that person, you door knocked, you are meeting them, you are giving them some information and you are just building a relationship. You are not asking, “Hey, are you guys thinking about selling? Do you know anyone who is? Can you refer me?” You don’t want to do anything like because that is going to be pushy. Now, if it comes out naturally in the conversation, that is okay, but build the relationship first. Then here is what I suggest. On the way out, you shake their hand and say, “It’s so nice to meet you. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your weekend.” You turn around. They haven’t closed the door yet. And you go, “One last thing” as if it was an aside. “One last thing. I don’t know if you guys are planning to sell your home anytime in the next six of twelve months, but if you are, I’ve got some information that I actually put together for another client of mine. I have an extra packet in the car of things you can do to get the most money for your home in terms of what you need to be focusing on first in terms of getting it prepared. Would you guys have any interest in that because I have an extra copy? Now, what happens is that it comes across as an aside. You built a relationship; they kind of trust you. You are not asking, “Are you planning to sell because I wanted to get your listing.” You are offering them, “Hey, if you are thinking about listing your home, I have something for you.” What that’s going to do is, if they ask for it, is let you know that they are most likely thinking about selling because that is why they are asking you for it. So you’ll go get it from the car and then you make a note when you get back into the car after you give it to them. Note who they are and any information about them. Once you give it back to them, “If you guys are thinking about selling, what type of timeframe? There may be some other strategic things you can do depending on how far out you are thinking.” So get some information that you can follow up with. And then you write them a personal note, a handwritten letter or a handwritten card that day and then you drop it into the mail. You get them on additional postcard mailings from you. Now you start to touch them more specifically. Does that make sense, what I’m doing? Caller: Yes. I should put together a “How to prepare your home to sell” mini-brochure? Beatty: That’s right. What you are looking for is anything that will guide that homeowner that you can give them as a value-added gift and you keep it in the car and you make them request it. Because by virtue of requesting it, now they are basically identifying themselves as thinking about selling. So you can start to nurture that relationship more. Caller: I do like your marketing cards because they pull on heart strings and I think that is very important. I finished my “What you may not know about me” card and I talk about my grandfather who was a broker and he molded my way of what you think of the customer and I think that will help people get to know me that way. Beatty: That’s the whole purpose of this. The whole idea is this. Trust is built on three things. If they trust you, they will do business with you. First trust is have they met you? That’s why the most important thing you can do is door know and keep door knocking until you have met up to 100% of everyone on your list. Okay? The second thing of trust is, do they know that you are constantly selling? That’s why our cards are going to show off a sale every single time. The third part of trust is, do they know that you have the expertise to get them the most money. And that is where the rest of cards come in and that is where this pre-marking pack comes in. That’s where this free report that you are going to do comes in. All of these things are you showing off your expertise so they trust you. They are all hitting the same point. Caller: Stunning. Beatty: There are some other things you can do, but these are the most important. If you can door knock, have a pre-marketing pack and have that free report that you create that you can give them upon request at the end of your visit then you pretty much have it made. Caller: You know, I’m of the opinion, wrongly, that let’s say I didn’t want to bother people. I would touch them maybe 2 – 3 times a year which is way too low. I would definitely lose business that way. I mean, I would get business but I would also lose business as well. Recently, I sent out to my top 25%, a $5.00 gift certificate to Starbucks and that turned out to be pretty good because I would say 70 – 80% of them called me or emailed me thanking me for that. So, that’s something that I think I want to do maybe once a year. What do you think about something like that? Beatty: I love it.  One of the things that we request, in fact, for our guarantee, we require is that you personally touch your list twice a year.  So, sending out a gift card like that, just a handwritten note, a phone call, a face visit, anything that you can do that is a personal touch is huge.  Typically the large chain restaurants, like maybe Longhorn Steakhouse, I’m not sure. Caller:  Like maybe IHOP. Beatty: Yeah, IHOP, anything like that.  Many times you can get a 2 for 1 coupon and especially if you called their corporate office and say that I want something to promote to my list, can you send me some 2 for 1 coupons or anything like that that I can give my people value and it gives them a discount coming to your location?  They jump on that.  They will do anything to get business.  That won’t cost you anything. Caller:  Okay Beatty:  So you won’t have to buy gift certificates because they will give them to you for free. Caller:  2 for 1 discounts, right?  Are you saying like a discount card or a discount coupon or something like that? Beatty:  Yeah, it’s probably a coupon.  I don’t know if you’re familiar with coupon books. Caller: Oh, yeah. Beatty:  Sometimes organizations will sell coupon books as a fund raiser.  What happens is that restaurant or that store will pay money to put that coupon in the book so they can get more business.  If you find one of those coupon books and literally go through it and call those stores up personally.  Just say, hey, I see that you’ve got the coupon in here.  I have a list of people I want to give a benefit.  Can you give me a bunch of coupons that I can give out for free?   They will give you the same coupons that they pay to put in that book and give it to you for free.  All you want to do is make it special and personal, so it doesn’t look like you just ripped it out of a book, but do something so it sounds like I arranged for you to have a 2 for 1 dinner over at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and here’s a card or here’s a coupon for that will bless you on it.  I know that over at Fleming’s Steakhouse, I don’t know if you have Fleming’s over there. Caller:  We do. Beatty:  It’s a high end steakhouse and they have internally gift cards that they will give out on a birthday or because they want to reward some sort of a client.  It’s like a $25 gift card. It can only be used there and typically because all of the entrées are much more expensive than $25, they know that they will make money on it.  You could go to even Fleming’s and suggest, hey, here’s what I want to do.  Can you give me any gift cards so I can give out and promote you to my list?  A lot of these places will jump on the opportunity to do that. Caller:  I love it.  I never thought of it, but now I will. Beatty:  Yes.  Those are just some things you can do as additional touches.  Back to what can you do.  The most important thing in your farm is you’ve got to be there and let me also suggest you need to be there ideally more frequently that just our postcards.  Okay? Caller:  Sure. Beatty:  If you have another thing that you can mail quarterly or every other month, then that’s going to add even more value and then if you door knock and then if you get them on an address list and then you can mail them personally a handwritten not.  Hey, I enjoyed meeting you.  By the way, here’s a $25 gift certificate to Fleming’s that I got for you.  I hope you enjoy it.  Anything like that.  Now, you’re adding value and they appreciate you and you’re touching them more and that’s how you’re going to win that business. Caller:  I love it.  I’ll do it.  We do have a Fleming’s and we do have a Ruth’s Chris in town in Pasadena.  Pasadena is very restaurant heavy. Beatty:  Good. Caller:  There’s a lot of restaurants. Beatty:  So that means that there’s a lot of competition and if you just spend a little bit of time, or get an assistant to spend some time, and tell them what’s going on.  Tell them how big your list is.  Just tell them that I’ve got a list of 500 people that I want to or whatever your list is, that I want to promote something special.  Do you have a gift card that will give them a discount or give them any sort of benefit that I can give to them as a special gift?  Caller:  I will. Beatty:  You will find that many of them will do it. Caller:  I hit on that. Beatty:  Well, on the geo farm, let me set expectations.  You will get quicker results with your sphere than you will the geo farm.  The geo farm, the first stages of the geo farm is simply to get them to recognize you and start to remember you and then to start to trust you.  That’s where the additional touches that you do will greatly enhance it and that additional effort, the face visit, will take it through the roof.  Let me share a story of another client of ours over in California. Caller:  Sure Beatty:  Near Los Angeles.  When he started working with us, he was targeting a 1200 home farm, 1500 home, excuse me.  He was a nobody there in terms of market share.  In 18 months, he was controlling 22% of the listings, outselling the number 2 agent by 7 times.  What happened was he door knocked that area three times a year.  We were mailing, at that time, either 8 or 12 times a year, I don’t recall and that community was also, there’s a Facebook community page for it because it was a large subdivision. Caller:  Uh huh. Beatty:  He got involved with the Facebook community page and just became a very active participant.  Every listing he did, he would market it three or four times.  Coming Soon, Just Listed, Open House, Under Contract, Just Sold so people saw his activity.  He would post on people’s post and comment on things.  He was there as an individual and also there as a realtor.  Any time someone joined the Facebook community page, he would personally welcome them.  He became an Admin person on the community page.  He would welcome them personally and add them to his personal Facebook page.  What happened was that between our mailings, his door knocking and Facebook, he was always there and always as a professional agent.  So, 18 months, 22% of the farm.  2 years later, 50% of the farm market share.  I mean, he’s just killing it.  So, it’s all about always being there in some form and capacity.  If you keep that focus with this list that we’re doing, then you’ll win. Caller:  Yeah, yeah.  It certainly should.  Again, Beatty, thank you for your time.  This has been insightful and it’s a matter of me getting out there and implementing. Beatty:  Well, very good.  I wish you great success.  If you have any questions, let me know.   P019