166 | More scammy or super scammy things to avoid in your professional organizing business
After I posted the epsiode about scams/scammy things we encounter in our organizing businesses, I got so many emails/messages from people who had examples or things that I forgot about, I wanted to add a second podcast to make sure you're staying away from the messes that can be created. Today's episode talks about "partnerships", more details on bad advertising decisions, and lots of other scammy or super scammy things that can happen to organizers.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
Hey organizers, it's Melissa and I just wanted to get on here and do a kind of an addendum podcast. I don't think I've ever done that before. I have been getting so many emails and messages on social media and other things since I put down the scam episode. I'll just call it the scam episode of please don't be scammed in your organizing business.
I wanted to do a quick follow up because there are some things that I didn't put in the original podcast that people are bringing up as an issue, and I just, I want all of these things to be out there so that you know what to be on the lookout for. And the biggest thing that I want you to take from this is have a healthy level of skepticism. I understand. I really do understand that when you get an email and it has a pitch of some kind you are like, Oh my gosh, this is so exciting. And it's not to say someone actually came. To someone on Instagram said something that I thought was interesting, which is they are so skeptical that they're concerned that they have turned things down that are legit.
And by the way, that can happen too. So I want you to have what I call a healthy level of skepticism. I want it to be a level that prevents you from being scammed but that also you realize that there are good opportunities out there. And I don't want you to miss out on those. But the real opportunities will still be there after you ask the questions after you do some of your due diligence.
Okay? So the first thing that I want to talk about is a comment that I got and I didn't address this in the podcast and this is important. So someone responded, I got scammed so badly that I may need to change my company name because I won't own my citations if I ever quit using this company.
Okay. So this is an example of when you are hiring a service provider. You need to be super, super careful and ask a lot of questions. There are so many scammy businesses out there that purport to do certain things for you. So that would include fixing a broken Google business profile making sure that your business name is on all platforms.
So for instance, they'll say, Hey, we'll take your business brand and we will amplify it to 20 different platforms. You don't have to do any work, all of that. The scam is on this one, they then essentially own your business properties. This is something that I have dealt with, not even with organizers, but I do marketing for some other non organizing businesses.
And this happened to one of those businesses. She tried to stop paying this company like 500. It was either 500 or 750 a month that she was paying them for this quote unquote work. And then they said, sure, you can stop paying us, but then we are going to remove your business entirely from the internet.
Basically, like they were going to wipe her internet out of her business out on the internet. And I'm not going to go into details because it would be too boring, but there are services out there. That they will essentially hold your business hostage. SEO, in particular, there are billions of SEO providers out there in general.
You guys, I will be happy to teach you what you need to know about SEO for professional organizing businesses. You do not need to hire an expensive SEO person in general for your organizing business. There are very few instances in which and expensive SEO service is needed for the kind of businesses that we run.
So SEO services, any sort of website services, here's another thing about website services you have to be very careful of. If you are going to hire someone to do your website, there was a situation that I knew of years ago when I first started being a coach for organizers.
There was a woman who had a company make her website for her and they charged her a hundred dollars for anything. If it took them one minute to change it, it cost her a hundred dollars. Like she literally asked them to put a period at the end of a sentence and it cost her 100 and they basically owned her website.
She did not own her own website. There are just so many things out there you have to be careful of. So any of these business services, please be exceptionally careful. Anyone that reaches out to you, suggesting to you that they can fix something for you. Anyone that says that they are a company that for instance, works with Google ads.
Basically, people who are reaching out to you versus you reaching out to find them, I am immediately skeptical of, okay? The other thing that's going to happen to you, and I don't care if you're brand new in your business or if you've been in business a long time like I have, you are going to get emails that come into your contact page of your website.
So if you're anything like me, I said in the last episode, I always get excited when I think that there is a new inquiry for my services. And I'm like, Ooh, a potential new client. And often that comes through the contact page on my website. You are going to get a lot of emails that come from the contact page of your website and the people will fill it out and it will be like a joke, right?
They'll fill it out properly, but it will not be remotely about organizing services. They're trying to sell you SEO services, they're trying to sell you website services, they're trying to sell you all sorts of things. They're just trolling the internet looking for people who are vulnerable. In general, if someone reaches out to pitch you a service that you are not looking for, please be very skeptical of that. Anything in the space, especially of SEO, website building, Google business profile, anything like that, please be immensely careful. The other thing about these services, I want as much as possible for you to be connected with people who are service providers for these things that are a legitimate B, I know they're not going to steal your money and see they know professional organizing.
If someone is reaching out to you out of the blue, they're not people who know about professional organizing. So I want you to work with people who are attuned to our service and what we do for people.
Here's the other thing that I want to say about these people that are going to reach out to you on your contact form. They're going to try to scare you and say that there's something wrong with your website. They're going to tell you you have broken links and you can check those by clicking this.
Please don't click that link. They are going to tell you that your SEO is not working properly. They're going to tell you that you're missing out on clients. They're going to tell you something that is going to make you question what you have going on in your digital properties. I want you to just resist those urges.
Oh, the other thing that they're going to do is they're going to say, Hey, can I send you a no obligation video about your website? Or can I send you a no obligation, like look at your website? Please just resist the urges. Delete the emails. They are almost all complete garbage.
If you feel like you have an SEO problem, I want you to find a provider that can actually help you. By the way, I can help you. A lot of the SEO problems that professional organizers have are pretty simple to solve, but these people who are reaching out to you are not the right people for you. I will also probably say this again at some point.
If someone wants to help you with SEO or anything digital, okay, anything pertaining to your website, if they have an email address that is at gmail. com or worse like hotmail yahoo, whatever. Run away. They are not legit. Any legitimate SEO company is going to have a proper email address, which is like hello at name of their company.
com. All right. That is just always 100%. My biggest red flag is when I get these things, which I get them all the time. And it's like some jumbled email address at gmail. com. It's total crap. You guys delete it, move on.
Okay, so this next one, I'm just going to put this as the category of partnership pitches. This is a message that I got. I had a meeting for what I thought would be an opportunity to join a podcast network this year. I was so excited. Nope, just a really expensive pitch to have an ad on their network.
There are a lot of things that fall in this category., one example of this are Realtors. I have had a lot of people this year, I could do probably a whole podcast on Realtors. I'll do it another time, but there have been a lot of people who have been called by Realtors and they say, we would like to have a meeting with you about.
Partnering. And they really specifically use the word partnering because we all love that word and it feels really good. Okay. And then what you find out the partnership is you think like, Oh, maybe it'll be that we're partnering on using our services for clients or something. And what the quote partnership is, is you buy and pay usually four figures to be a preferred vendor in their directory.
And they give you a song and dance about you'll be featured on our website and you'll be featured in this. You'll be featured in that guys run away. I know you think it sounds good. This is just a cash grab, 100%. There is nothing about this that is going to be good for you.
You're just going to have a huge outlay of money with zero ROI. If you want to partner with realtors, this is kind of the biggest headline that I'll give you for pretty much any of these things that we're talking about is if you want to network and if you want to partner with people, I want you to do that too.
But it requires reach out work on your end, and it's going to be work that you do versus things that are just coming to you. In general, the things that are coming to us are going to be pay to play opportunities. And there's plenty of networking that you can do that does not involve pay to play. Anything in this partnership category, I'm not telling you that every single one of them is crap and that you shouldn't consider it.
But if you take the meeting, please have a healthy level of skepticism. Please ask a lot of questions and please do not ever, ever feel pressured into spending a penny of your money on something that you don't feel good about.
All right, the next category, I did touch on this in the podcast, but I want to give a specific example to you.
Talking about some of those neighborhood magazines, so high end luxury neighborhood magazines where their sales people will reach out and be like, this is where these are where your ideal clients are, and they are neighborhoods that you're like, man, I would love to get into that neighborhood, right?
This is one of the comments that I got. I spent 13, 000 in three years for zero clients. I thought that it was going to be the key to my success in the affluent neighborhoods that I loved working in. Literally, all these people slash agencies want is your money.
They don't want to help you or watch you succeed. They just want your money. I know that these advertising opportunities sound good, but when you peel back the layers, in most cases, they have three year minimums for the advertising, sometimes it's less, but often it's three years, and the costs go up each year.
In my experience, the costs might start reasonable, where you say, okay, I'm willing to do that, but then the costs go way up the next two years. In general, People do not read these magazines and then go out and go, Oh my gosh, I'm going to go use XYZ. A lot of times these magazines They might just be things that are used as decor in the model home.
They are not something that actually gets in the hands of your potential clients. I would much rather you target those people in a different way. The other thing is, too, a lot of times these ads are extremely expensive.
What hurts my soul even more is when people come and not only have they agreed to spend the money, but then they find out that their ad is teeny, teeny, tiny. I want you to ask yourself, for all these things, Would I want To find a vendor this way. If I just randomly saw a vendor in a magazine, would I pay attention to that or would I not?
Ask so many more questions, but please run away from neighborhood luxury magazines, golf course advertising, really any print advertising, I will tell you, in our business. This is extremely expensive for zero to extremely minimal ROI. We have example after example in our Inspired Organizer group of people who ask this question and every single person was like, Oh my gosh, before I had a group to ask questions of, I signed up for this and here's what happened to me.
So please just say no to those.
The other one that I talked about that I will be very specific about because There have been a lot of people coming to me the podcast thing I was talking about when you get a thing in your email saying, Hey, we really want to feature you for five minutes on our podcast.
And we're going to ask you five questions that is called the professional podcast network. And they are inundating professional organizers. I have email after email of people who are saying, Oh yeah, they reached out to me. And you may choose to go ahead and do that if you want to, but here's what I'm telling you.
It's going to be a total waste of your time. You're going to get pushes to advertise afterward. And it's really not going to help you. And the amount of time, so this is a thing that I think about a lot, is the amount of time that you're going to spend Preparing for the interview, answering the question.
The interview itself is very short, right? But are you going to get anything from that? What I would rather you do is spend the time that you were going to spend on that, pitching local mom podcasters, cause trust me I don't care where you live. There are podcasters in your area. Everybody has a podcast.
I have a podcast. You're listening to it right now. Find some podcasters, local ones in your area that you could pitch yourself to and be like, Hey, I would love to comment on your podcast and talk about organizing. Outward pitches are more likely to attract attention and to get you your desired result than these, than answering the pitches that come to you.
but I don't care. It's 5 or 5 minutes of your time. This podcast, it may only be 5 minutes of your time, but it's 5 minutes that you could be spending.
doing something else, reaching out to a client for a maintenance package. That's something you can do with five minutes. If you're really, really fast, you could probably type an email to your people in five or 10 minutes. Okay, I just I want you to spend the time working on things that actually help or go to your website.
I saw two organizer websites yesterday that did not have any information about where they were located. Anywhere on their website, spend five minutes going to your website and making sure that it is very, very clear the physical geographic area that you serve for your organizing clients. That's what you can spend five minutes working on today.
You guys, I swear it'll be beneficial. It'll be so much more beneficial to you.
Okay. The other thing that I touched on very briefly in the podcast, but I want to touch on it a little bit more here is a lot of the times you can tell. That's something is totally not legit by the amount of pressure you are getting to sign up for it. Okay. That just shows you that all their goal is to sign you up for the X, Y, Z thing.
I had someone who came to me a few weeks ago who was talking about I'm getting a pitch to be in XYZ and it was a print ad and she goes, Oh, it started out as really expensive, but as the day's gone on, like he's brought it, brought the cost down a lot and it's pretty reasonable now.
And I'm like that's red flag number one, because if the cost keeps going down, then it's really not that valuable of a thing. He's literally just trying to sell any sort of ad space he can. And there was a lot of like really high pressure techniques of this offer is going to go away if you don't tell me yes, then the next.
20 minutes or whatever. And she's like, Hey, I really need to think about it. He's like, Nope, it's about to go away. All of those high pressure sales techniques is a really good example as to why it's a great reason to just walk away.
This is one of the things that we talk about in our Inspired Organizer group a lot. People will come in and they will bring us like, hey, I got pitched XYZ. What about it? People will come back and they'll say, please learn from my mistake. Don't do it. And here's why. And here's what happened to me.
Zero ROI. I want all of us to be really, really good in our businesses at figuring out what our ROI is return on investment. And almost all of these things that I'm talking about right now have either a zero return on investment or a very highly negative return on investment.
Okay, I'm sure that there are a hundred other things that I have left out of this, but in general, here's what I want you to do.
Have that healthy level of skepticism. I'm not saying that every single thing that comes to you is not legit, because I have been pitched some things that end up being great, but it's because I was skeptical enough to make sure that I was asking the right questions, and then I was reassured for a hundred other reasons.
Please ask questions. Go to people that you trust. Now, I understand, some of you may be listening to this podcast and you have never worked with me directly and you're like, well, why should I trust you?
Great question. Ask me questions about why you should trust me. I actually do know what I'm talking about. Ask me questions about why you should trust me. Okay, I'll tell you why you should trust me and that sounds scammy doesn't it? I just told you trust me now I'm scamming you just kidding. No, I'm not but you should ask me questions too.
Okay? Ask the questions and people who are legit will answer the questions. I said this on the other podcast, but I want to say it again. If you are interested in working with me, I'd like you to ask me questions.
Why should I work with you? What are your qualifications? Why are you a person that I should want to work with? People who are legit will happily answer those questions. I will. Alright, I am going to have just a real moment with you guys. It's Friday. I was awake most of the night, so my voice probably doesn't sound great.
Not feeling spectacular today. Uh, spectacular. Um, that's actually a combination of spectacular and bad, isn't it? , feeling spectacularly bad? I don't know. Spectacular. Uh, it's cold and rainy here today, which is perfect because it really kind of matches my mood. It's actually kind of gloomy and halloweeny outside, so I.
I'm going to end this podcast and just say thank you again for listening to my off the cuff, uh, random rant. And, uh, again, the rant is only because I care so much about you guys, many of whom I have never met before, but I care about you, and I care about your businesses,
so, if you have anything that you would like to throw my way, hello at pro organizer studio. com. bye guys.
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