Work-at-home offers may be scams

Christina Macone-Greene

The old saying “If
it’s too good to be true, it probably is” unfortunately seems to be
ringing true for many work-at-home job opportunities.

Many of these so-called businesses are, in fact, predators,
preying on adults who yearn to make an income while being a
stay-at-home parent and on seniors with fixed incomes who are looking
to make an extra dollar.

“Unfortunately, there are a lot of scams out there,” said
Noelle Nachtsheim, Director of Law Enforcement Services for the
National Consumers League Fraud Center.

The newspaper classified advertisements and online classifieds are flooded with false offers.

“These scam companies prey on some of the more vulnerable people
who are out of work and need work; they can’t afford to be ripped off,”
said Nachtsheim.

Are there red flags to help people avoid being swindled?
Absolutely; something is always awry when a company asks for money up
front and/or for a registration fee. “Usually you will never hear back
from them,” explained Nachtsheim.

What about those jobs stuffing envelopes and doing assembly that promise thousands of dollars?

“Sometimes they will actually send you materials for assembly
work or to do crafts at home, but when you send in a finished product,
they will reject them and never pay,” said Nachtsheim. “In other cases,
they will ask you for money and then send you a booklet telling you how
to scam people the same way.”

Nachtsheim educates people by letting them know that a
legitimate company that hires people to work from home will not ask a
potential worker for money.

Another warning bell should go off in your head, explained
Nachtsheim, when a company is eager to hire someone without meeting
them, reviewing a resume or requesting additional information about the
applicant.

“If someone is willing to hire you sight unseen, for an amount
of money that does not match the type of work they are offering, you
really need to be wary,” she said.

The advent of cyberspace has brought its fair share of Internet
job scams. One popular sting is when a company offers to set up online
retail packages and shopping carts galore. This online store doesn’t
make money for a lot of reasons.

“You usually don’t make a lot of money because all of these
hits you are supposed to get on your site don’t arrive or people are
not buying the items for sale,” explained Nachtsheim.

“Very often, the people who set up these sites try to add on very expensive options, milking you out of more and more money.”

These online business scams can be ruthless and money stolen from unsuspecting people every day.

In checking the legitimacy for a work-at-home opportunity,
Nachtsheim recommends that people contact the Attorney General’s Office
in the state where the company is located to see if there are any legal
issues on the horizon.

Double-checking on a business with the Better Business Bureau
(BBB) and State Board of Equalization is also advisable. “We like to
advise people to stick with businesses in their own area.”

Nachtsheim cannot reiterate the work-at-home scams warning
signs enough to the public. “Never pay for anything or divulge any
personal information which could harm you or cause identity theft.”

Work-at-home scams are currently at an epidemic both nationally
and internationally, said Nachtsheim. “It’s a minefield out there and
you really have to watch out.”

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Great Tips for Working with AdSense

By Philipp Lenssen

1. Ads can work well in-between other stuff.
   On a games site of mine, some of the games don't contain ads next to
   the game area; the AdSense ad will only be shown in-between game
   rounds. This is the time the visitor is not concentrating on performing
   a task but might take a small break, and be open to the option of
   visiting new sites.

2. Put too much emphasis on AdSense and your site may be linked to less.
   The more available space you dedicate to AdSense on your site, and the
   less you differentiate between ads and content in your design, the more
   money you earn with the program, right? Not quite. While pushing the
   AdSense may result in short-term gains, it might also convince some
   visitors that the site is too crowded to be worth visiting again. And
   some of those visitors may also be bloggers or other people who might
   otherwise help to promote your site with links to it. And the less your
   site gets linked to, the less traffic it gets, meaning AdSense revenues
   may go down in the long term.

3. Even if you get huge traffic, the AdSense income from the site is more dependent on the site type and audience. Google targets AdSense ads automatically to the site content. Or at least, it does so ideally
   – but some types of content fare better than others with this
   targeting. I noticed for instance that AdSense does better on a games
   site than on a technology blog. I also heard people say that AdSense
   does quite good on product oriented blogs; say, one post solely about
   the iPod; another post solely about Gadget XYZ, and so on.

4. Image ads can be relevant and work for you, but they might also apall some visitors.
   Google's AdSense program gives you the option to choose between a
   couple of different ad formats. Two main groups are text ads vs text
   & image ads. When you choose the latter, Google will deliver what
   they deem works best for your content (or so one would hope, and it
   would be in Google's best self-interest to serve you the best possible
   ad, it seems).
   
   However, Google doesn't really know your layout
   preferences, and they don't really understand when your audience thinks
   ads are "too much"; and considering image ads include Flash animations
   (which you can't disable, once you go for image ads), Flash animations
   may well push some people away. One thing you can do is to only show
   image ads in areas where they don't disturb the content, e.g. at the
   end of posts. Also, you might want to listen to visitor feedback on the
   ads being served; I received emails before that the blinking ad on this
   or that site made a person want to leave the site, at which point I
   blocked the specific advertiser via the AdSense Setup -> Competitive
   Ad Filter option.

5. When it comes to context sensitive targeting, you can increase or lower the importance of certain parts of your page.
   To help Google find a matching ad for your content, you can use the
   HTML comment syntax by encapsulating more important parts with
   

   <!-- google_ad_section_start -->
   ... your important site content here ...
   <!-- google_ad_section_end -->.

   Or, to lower the importance of a section, use:
   
   

   <!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
   ... your not so important site content here ...
   <!-- google_ad_section_end -->

   (Google notes that it may take up to 2 weeks for this change to your site will be taken into account by the AdSense.)
   
   
   What if your site doesn't have any good matchable content to begin
   with, though? Say, the page just includes an image. Well, for the
   reasons of search engine optimization but also ad optimization you
   might want to consider using at least a descriptive title, an
   explanatory footer containing the important keywords or keyphrases (the
   kind of footer that actually helps the human visitor by explaining what
   the page is about). In the case of image content, reasonable alt and
   title attribute texts should be used as well.*
   
   *Whatever
   you do, don't resort to "keyword-stuffing" as it doesn't help your
   visitors and may get your page ranked lower in search engines.

6. Be aware of risks when you change ad layouts too much.
   I once had a system on the server to randomly differ between various
   AdSense layouts on the same page. Doing so I was hoping to add some
   good variety to keep the ads at least somewhat interesting and notable.
   Shortly after I stopped doing so and simply included a rather big
   static area for the AdSense to "do what it wants," the AdSense revenues
   for that site increased. Now, I don't know if this was a coincidence of
   some sorts, as revenues often go down or up even when you don't do
   anything, but it might well have been that there was a connection
   between adding too much homemade randomization, and lowered revenues.
   
   
   At another time, during the redesign of this blog, I switched from one
   ad format to another for the end-of-posts AdSense ad space. This,
   combined with perhaps other layout changes, suddenly cut the ad
   revenues in half for the blog. It took me some time to realize that I
   had some ad channels* set up for the specific old layout size, and by
   changing this I must have kicked out all those advertisers who were
   pushing their ads through the channel.
   
   *This setting can be found at AdSense Setup -> Channels.

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