Facebook is huge. Email is even more huge. Online, any place where there are a lot of people is a ripe target for scammers.

The latest to hit many email inboxes is the Facebook email scam. At first glance, it looks very official. The sender’s address looks like it could have come from Facebook…

“The Facebook Team” confirmation@facebook.com

The subject line is compelling…

Facebook Password Reset Confirmation! Please Attention!

The footer looks official with the correct Facebook address…

This message was intended for info@yourdomain.com.
Facebook’s offices are located at 1601 S. California Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94304.

The email usually says…

Dear Facebook user,

The Facebook Team

There is a “click here” button to change your password and/or a file attachment … And that is where they get you.

Here is how to defend yourself from this latest email scam.

1) Never open any attached files. These emails often come with an attachment that contains the computer virus.

2) Never click on the “click here” button. That sets off the script that takes you to a page that looks like a real Facebook page.

3) Never hit the “unsubscribe” link. That helps the spammers verify that they have hit a real email.

The bottom line is that you cannot prevent email spam. This is in spite of all the fancy email spam filters created by the email providers. The fact is spammers are smarter than any computer algorithm designed to catch them. The email spammers are also relentless.

The best that you can hope to do is to not get your email onto a spammer’s list in the first place.

This leads me to my last tip:

>> Never put your email on your website.

Spammers use programs to harvest emails from websites.

Instead, use an email address like info[ AT ] yourdomain.com.

This method is not fail-safe, but it can fool the majority of the email harvesting robots out there.

If you want to incorporate a business online, it’s easier and more convenient now than ever. The only thing you need to do is to choose the best legal entity for your business. Your basic choices are sole proprietorship, partnership, corporation, and limited liability corporation (LLC). Each of these legal entities has their own pros and cons. But once you decide what’s best for your business, it is straightforward to incorporate your business online.

When I start a business, the two things that I consider in terms of legal entity selection are personal asset protection and tax treatment. I am not a lawyer or an accountant. So take what I say from a businessman’s perspective. You should always consult with your own professional advisers.

There are some key differences between the basic legal entities. A sole proprietorship, for example, offers the advantage of being quick and easy to setup. In terms of taxes, you as the owner would report your profit and loss on your personal tax return. The downside to this entity is that you as the owner are personally liable for business debts.

Another type of legal entity that I consider is an LLC. In an LLC, the owners have limited liability for business debts. Profits and loss can be allocated independently of business ownership interests. And you can choose being taxed as a partnership or a corporation. The downside is that LLCs are relatively new so there aren’t that many precedents.

The type of entity that most people are familiar with is a Corporation. There are two flavors S Corporation or C Corporation. For both entities, the owners have limited personal liability for business debts. In an S-Corp, owners report profit or loss on their personal tax returns. In a C-Corp, owners can split corporate profit among the owners of the corporation. The main downside is the complexity of maintaining the paperwork.

This website contains a lot more detail to help you learn more about the various legal entities.

You can also use them to incorporate a business online. I have used them for many years and they work well with very reasonable rates.

It’s tough to run an honest business these days. On the customer side, you have the late payers, the non-payers, and the outright cheaters that suck away your profits. On the supplier side, you have the offline scammers, the online scammers like the Nigerian internet scam, and the outright hackers who consume your attention and resources. You have to deal with your competition. And now there is a new impediment to running an honest business — the FTC.

Wait a minute, isn’t the FTC supposed to protect honest consumers and businesses from unscrupulous scammers? Before 10/5/09, that would be true. As of 10/5/09, I’m not so sure. You see, the FTC released a new guideline on Monday that affects how businesses can use endorsements whether online or offline.

The document is here:

http://ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005endorsementguidesfnnotice.pdf

I’m not a lawyer and I don’t play one online so I can’t provide any legal advice. What I am is a marketing specialist. As a marketer, I know that in order to sell products via copy, you need a good headline, a description of the problem or pain, your solution, your benefits, social-proof via endorsements or testimonials, and a call to action thrown-in with some scarcity. If you miss any element of that marketing chain, your sales argument becomes weaker. In other words, the prospect is less likely to buy from you.

From what I’m reading about the new FTC ruling, sellers who use endorsements no longer have a “safe harbor.” In other words, I will need to go to great lengths to add disclaimers about the testimonials and endorsements. The worst part is that this also applies to my affiliates who may not be as diligent. As I understand it, even if my affiliate breaks an FTC rule, I will be liable. Ouch!

Yes, I know that there are real scammers out there online and offline. Yes, I understand the argument that this type of regulation was designed to catch the bad guys. But on balance, the FTC has thrown the baby out with the dirty bath water. Besides, consumers should also be responsible for their own behavior. Come-on, who in their right mind believes that an acai berry – a blue berry cousin – for goodness sake, can make you lose 30 pounds in 2 weeks? Do we need the FTC to protect us from being gullible?

What is an honest business to do? I suggest you consult with your attorney today regarding this new FTC guideline. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t give legal advice. And if there are links on my site, they are likely affiliate links where I get compensated in some way if you buy through my links. Any testimonials on my site are for informational purposes only. Your results will likely vary because you are a totally different person than the one giving the testimonial. In fact, just don’t even read the testimonials. The same is true for any endorsements. Who cares what others say anyway, right? “If you were a sheep and noticed that the sheep in front of you just jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?” Anything else that I need to disclaim in case the FTC is watching?

Cute blog title — Alex Tran. Other than that, why would anyone want to put their name as the title of their blog post? Bad form aside, I am using this as an illustration of how to rank for a keyword phrase like your name.

A while ago, I wrote that the two things that a website needs in order to survive in the wild are content and links. It is still as true today as it was when I wrote that article. Since search engine spiders are nothing but fancy “if-then-else” programs, you need to feed them what they expect to “see” according to their knowledge base. For your content to count and get ranked highly in the search engine results, it needs to 1) contain your chosen keyword, and 2) have links with your keyword as the anchor text.

Most people think that these links need to come from external websites. This is true from my observation. Ideally, externally links from reputable sites count a lot to the search engine spiders. But I have also observed that links from within your own website count too.

For example, if I wanted to rank for the keyword Alex Tran, and didn’t have an external source where I could link from, I could use my own website for links. By putting my keyword as anchor text and pointing them to my homepage, I could alert the spiders that my homepage is about my keyword.

This article, in fact, is a working example of this technique. I used the keyword in the title, the description, and twice in this body of the content. I have one link with my keyword pointed back to my homepage.

Keep in mind that this technique may not stick. In other words, for long standing listing on the first page of Google, you will also need external links. But for short-term effect, this technique does the trick.

By now, if you have not heard of Twitter, I hope you enjoyed your nap Rip Van Winkle. It seems like every net denizen and wannabe celebrity have taken up Twittering or Tweeting as their past time. Nowadays, it’s a badge of honor to have 10,000 or more fans and 2,000 or more Tweets. At 140 characters per Tweet, that’s 280,000 characters! How long do you suppose it takes to type 280,000 characters?

I don’t know about you, but Twittering takes time … too much time perhaps.

Fortunately, a few other people besides me have taken it upon themselves to solve the Twitter time management issue. Here is a video that explains how this new start-up, Flutter, is approaching the problem of not enough time to Tweet. Consider them the next wave of micro-blogging. They call it nano-blogging. Enjoy.

2009 is definitely a challenging year for many businesses as many of them try to stay afloat despite the global economic slowdown. I am going to review some online trends that are already being used by businesses as they struggle to grow and maintain their presence online. Some of these advertising internet marketing online strategies are ahead of their time and may likely be adopted by many businesses in upcoming years.

One of these trends is the continued rise of “keyword cost-per-click inflation.” As the marketplace moves toward digital, it can be expected that the internet will become increasingly crowded. This ensuing demand will result in paid search costs going up, especially in first tier search engines like Google. Cost-per-click inflation will likely continue to go up. As a result of this, the advertising internet marketing online community will concentrate on improving conversion rates if it is to offset the keyword inflation. This move towards improving return on investment by offering end-to-end optimization will best be achieved by controlled testing. Such things as click-tracking and eye-tracking projects will become defaults and a necessity within any website improvement program.

As the recession bites, online behavior will be shaped by consumer thrift. Most consumers continue to shop online for deals and bargains and will likely continue to do so. So auction sites and ad listings will see their traffic rocket despite the downturn. Since retention of marketshare is considered crucial during a downturn, advertising internet marketing online businesses will need to be aggressive by offering incentives and shaping consumer perceptions to keep them coming. To achieve this, great creativity will be required. Landing pages will need to be user-friendly, disruptive advertising strategies will need to be employed and websites will need to be trustworthy.

Advertising internet marketing online players will also need to use qualitative date in analytics and decision making to understand not only what website users are doing, but also why they are doing what they are doing. Such things as user surveys, internal search analysis, email questionnaires, FAQ feedback, user complaints, customer service forms, A/B and Multivariate testing, eye tracking and click-density analysis are going to be essential tools in optimizing return on investment. The information gathered from these analyses will be used in making decisions on optimization with a much greater certainty. Localized services will also see remarkable growth since they result in more relevant search results, more accurate targeted advertising can be done and search advertising internet marketing online search networks will get massive additional inventory to sell at a more local level. Undoubtedly, these marketing trends will shape future online behavior.

With the recent string of “Google Slaps” aimed at affiliate marketers using PPC to CPA offers, many online advertisers have had to find alternatives to paid search. For the last few years, it was relatively easy to throw up an advertising campaign and generate almost instant traffic to a website. Since it was so easy, this form of search advertising drew many people online. The best part was that it worked… perhaps too well. So advertisers became lazy. They simply did not add any value to their landing pages.

Here is an example:

If a searcher typed “Banner Maker” into Google.com, a paid search result might read –

Banner Maker Scam?
We Compared 12 Banner Makers
Which Was Best? See Results Now:
BannerMakerReviews.com

The above paid search ad with link directly to the vendor landing page. Cookies set. Commissions paid if the searcher buys.

As the pool of advertisers grew and competition swelled, Google became stricter and stricter with the way that people could advertise. Google introduced quality scores, click-through-rates, landing page requirements, account history, and a host of other hidden factors. But even that didn’t stop the masses from wanting to throw advertising money at Google.

The latest fad in internet marketing is to promote CPA offers with rebills. At times, it was “ridiculously” easy to make $25 to $40 per lead online. Smart advertisers would spend $1 and make $2 to $3 in return. How many times would you want to do that? Of course this led to even more competition, which led to shady affiliate tactics like fake blogs and fake newspaper articles, which led to Google shutting down the whole party.

Now everybody who was advertising CPA offers (especially with rebills) have lost their very lucrative advertising channel — thanks to a few bad apples.

So what’s next for online advertisers? How about advertising via banners?

Advertising banners are not a new of promoting your business online. However, it seems to be one of those methods that seem to linger on and that are used by many websites and companies and even reputable ones. This is because, advertising banners employ the use of one of the most influential ways of advertising, appeal to one’s emotions and look. To outshine their counterparts, many websites thus use highly graphical and animated banners as part of their advertising campaigns.

Nearly all major players on the internet use banners as a form of advertising. Simply open up your Yahoo mail and the first thing that captures your eye is the flash advertising banners that are located at the top. There are different types of banners that are used, the common ones being flash advertising banners. This is because flash banners can employ movement. Movement has a long-lasting impact and as a result, it is more likely to influence a viewer more than a static banner would. Furthermore, over 90 percent of computers around the whole have the flash software installed. From basic static banners to advanced interactive banners, many website developers seem to favor the use of flash advertising banners both in web development and also as an advertising platform.

Click-through rates, conversion rates and cost-per-click have shown that consumer search and purchase behavior are greatly influenced by what they see. Simulations conducted on search engines have shown that advertising banners do result in more sales and targeted traffic as opposed to traditional advertising methods that do not use banners. It can be expected therefore that this trend will continue.

Making banners is however not an easy task. Making advertising banners that sell is even harder. It requires a lot of creativity and originality. You are more likely to employ an advertising firm or an individual with banner development know-how if you are to make a selling banner. Usually, your competitors will give you an idea of what sells and what does not. If you find a banner appealing, it will most likely have the same effect on your target market. Like I mentioned, advertising banners play on one’s emotions. Their message should be short, to be point and have a punch line. Having a punch line allows viewers to associate what they see with your website or the products you have to offer.

If you don’t have Photoshop or a similar tool and you’re on a budget, here is a banner maker site that you can try:

http://bannersketch.com

Good luck in your effort to create website banners for advertising your product or affiliate product.