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Tips to Get Rid of Telemarketers
Visualize this: You are a telemarketer. You’re sitting at your terminal and each person that you speak to has to be entered into a certain category. The objective is to fill up the “sale” category but you also have “refusal”, “call back”, “answering machine”, etc.
Now put yourself in the position of the prospect. You’ve just answered the phone, most likely at dinner time, and it’s another annoying sales pitch. You’ve already put yourself on the “Do Not Call” Registry, you’ve asked over and over to not be called, you’ve even threatened legal action and the calls keep coming. Every night as you sit down to relax after a hard day’s work the phone rings and it’s an offer to refinance your home, give you a better rate on your credit card, or a plea for money for the police something or other that you never heard of. How do you make it stop?
There is a way to do it. Let’s go back to the telemarketer at his terminal. He needs to push one button at the end of the call that will tell the computer when or if to call you back. Even if you say “no”, you will still get another call because “the list” now says that you are an active prospect. If you want to stop the phone calls you need to get off “the list.”
Everyone is on “the list”. I worked in telemarketing for twenty-five years and watched the developing impact of database companies on the industry. When I first started in the business we used to call off a photocopied page right out of the phone book. Call centers today use modern technology. They buy a list from Dunn and Bradstreet or American Business Listings and load it into a predictive dialing computer that makes a connection every seven seconds. Picture that multiplied by the thousands of call centers out there and you now know why you get all those calls.
If you hang up on an automated dialer it will automatically call you back after a certain amount of time.
If you say “no” you will be called back again for a different campaign. Most companies use the same list over and over again.
If you look at your caller id and don’t recognize the number, don’t let your machine get it. The dialer will call you back again, usually in less than an hour.
If you say, “That person is not home,” the dialer will call you back.
Sometimes if you ask to placed on a do not call list you won’t receive calls on that particular campaign but it probably won’t stop the same company from calling you for another campaign. Also, many telemarketing companies are based outside the United States now and our laws aren’t always enforceable with them.
Even if you tell the caller that you (while pretending you are not you) are deceased will not stop the calls. He’ll just delete your name but leave the phone number as an active number.
So how do you do it? The simplest way is to change your own category. Telemarketing lists generally come in two categories, residential and business. Ninety percent of the telemarketing calls made in the United States are to residential phone numbers. The only way to get yourself removed from a residential list to tell the caller that you are a business. Generally he will apologize, hit the appropriate button and you will never hear from him again.
Do this often enough and your phone number will begin to show up as a business number with most telemarketing companies. These companies trade lists all the time and even buy them outright from each other. If you happen to be home during the day and you get a business solicitation you can tell the caller he has reached an old number for a company that has gone out of business. He’ll push the button that says “out of business” and your phone will stop ringing.
This technique should stop most of the telemarketing calls made to your home. At the very least you’ll be able to enjoy a peaceful dinner more often.
How Can I Get My Free Credit Score
For clarification purposes, the many offers that you see on TV and in print to receive your “free credit report” do not cover receiving your credit score to go along with them. Gaining access to the magical three digit number that summarizes your credit history from any of the three credit bureaus is not free; you have to pay for it. Generally the score by itself costs anywhere from $7.00 to $15.00, depending on where you go to acquire it. You will need to pay three times that if you want all of your scores from each of the credit reporting agencies: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. There are, however, a few ways to get them free if you have a credit card and are good at keeping track of due dates.
Equifax sponsors a website at www.myfico.com. You will find this site at the top of the search rankings if you put the words “free credit report” into your browsers search box. Your Equifax FICO score, either a Beacon or Pinnacle score, is available as part of a free trial offer for credit protection put out by Equifax. You submit your credit card number, but they don’t charge it for thirty days, a time frame in which you can cancel the service at any time with no obligation. If you choose to keep it, they charge you for the year in one lump sum of $89.95. You also have the option of enrolling for $8.95 a month, but there is no free trial period.
TransUnion has a similar program available at www.truecredit.com. Their offer is free service for thirty days, just like Equifax, but they charge you $11.95 a month after that and there is no lump sum discount if you want to pay for the year in advance. Their credit protection program, like the one offered from Equifax, includes monitoring and email notifications of all three of your credit reports, free access to your report and score from TransUnion, and identity theft protection.
The website sponsored by Experian is the one you are probably most familiar with, www.freecreditreport.com. They have a trial period of just nine days for the same protection package the other two credit bureaus offer and then they charge you $14.95 a month, the most expensive monthly fee of the three. Experian advertises this site heavily on TV and many consumers think that they will receive their credit score for free when they log on to get their free credit report. This is not true. According to the Free Credit Reporting Act, you are entitled to a free copy of your credit report from all three agencies once a year, but your credit score is not included.
There are other agencies out there that have packages similar to the trial periods offered by the big three credit bureaus, but they are mainly private credit repair services and not affiliated with the credit bureaus or any government agencies. www.freetriplecreditreport.com offers all three scores on a trial basis for thirty days and then $29.95 a month after that. www.identityguard.com also has a thirty day trial but you need to put up the first month ($11.99) and then get it back if you cancel in the first thirty days.
Lending institutions such as banks and mortgage brokers don’t generally give you your credit score when they check it because they have to pay for it also. The same is true of automobile finance companies. WAMU, Washington Mutual, did offer free credit scores to their credit card customers before they were taken over by Chase. This is a practice that many consumers hope will be picked up by other banks and credit unions.
How to Drive Traffic to Your Website
What is the secret? That’s the question that everyone who has a web-based business asks when they first start out. How do you drive traffic to your website? The answer is probably a lot simpler than you imagined. You need to take your product or service and put it in front of the people that have an interest in buying it. Easy, right?
Ask yourself a few simple questions first. The most important of these is, “What are you selling and who would want to buy it?” If you’ve set your company up properly, you already know the answer to this. Most new businesses do a little market research before they launch a venture and there is probably someone else out there who is offering the same thing you are in a different package.
So now you know what you have and what the niche market is that you need to get to. Maybe it’s men or women, old or young, in a specific industry, or perhaps just those who have an interest in your particular field of expertise. Whatever your target demographic is, they are already out there on the Internet. Driving traffic to your website is a matter of tapping into the existing flow. Maybe we can help you. Here’s a few ideas to get you started:
Try using classified sites like Craig’s List to advertise your product or service directly. Classified sites already have the categories that you need to separate potential buyers. Go back to that first big question and put what you have in front of those that actually want it. This is one of the most direct ways to drive traffic to your website.
A similar method is shopping networks. Regardless of how big a network is and how lost you think your item will be in the sea of millions of sellers, shopping networks on the web can be valuable to you. You’ll get direct hits and also have another link for your site that will improve your page rank with the search engines.
Another direct approach is email marketing. Email marketing is rated the most effective way to drive traffic to your website behind only search marketing. Targeted opt in lists can be purchased or generated using squeeze pages, email sign-ins on your site, and webinars. Put something interesting out there for free and encourage people to sign up to be on an email list. Even if they don’t buy the first time out, you can establish communications and stay in touch with regular emails.
Getting quality traffic is all about being in the right place at the right time. The web is a global market, so there really is no wrong time, but the right place is where you can most likely find those who are looking for you. Social networks, another good way to drive traffic, can be a good place to find out who some of those people are. The broad prospect base on sites like My Space and Facebook can give you traffic from demographics you never considered, opening up new markets for you to target.
