Yeah, just send the money to that bank account and I swear your advert will get shown to loads of people. 1,800 in fact.

Welcome to Simplified Sparky Marketing.

A member came to me with a bit of a predicament about an opportunity to advertise in a local suburb magazine, and I thought about this and I was like, this is actually a great podcast to put out, more so to protect yourselves, so you don't fall into these silly traps that are out there.

So the backstory of this is it's a suburb in Sydney's Inner West. Whoever's listening to this may have signed up to something like this, and I'm surprised at the people that have, but this is the reason why: you don't know how to background check these things.

One of their pitches to get people in was that it would land in 1,800 inboxes. I'm not too sure if that was weekly or monthly. I'm sure it is weekly. So this is the gag. They are suggesting that they have a local newsletter that gets emailed out to 1,800 people in this particular suburb in Sydney's Inner West. And that is cool. That is believable of some sort. But all this magazine, this little newsletter, is, is recent house price sales, what's going on in the local pub, local news, stuff like that, but it's particular to one suburb. So they claim to have 1,800 subscribers, you could say, on their mailing list.

Now, I call bullshit on this, because I'm a very skeptical person, and I always like to second guess things that are put in front of me because I've been burnt one too many times. And that's my job, to protect the people inside my group. Immediately I smelled a rat, and I took it upon myself to rinse the website through a little smart tool that you can use to check the SEO of a website, the hits on the website and the traffic, essentially. So what this does for me is prove whether their model is getting traffic, whether it's getting hits on the website, and whether it's getting subscribers. Because if you're getting 1,800 subscribers, that is a lot of subscribers. Even if that was a 25% conversion rate, that would mean for every four people that land on the website, one of them signs up.

Now, what I did was I rinsed this through the tool, and it gave me some very interesting insights. It flagged that the website was only really launched in February. I believe this was about July when I was speaking to this person inside the group, and the analytics were hilarious. The website averaged 12 visits per month from February up until approximately July. It equated to 50 hits on the website, grand total. And they're claiming to have 1,800 people on their subscriber list, which I call bullshit on, to be brutally honest. The math does not add up. I don't believe there are 1,800 people on that list.

But let's just do some quick math on that if it was 1,800 people in reality. Let's say there were 1,800 people and they were sent that email. Now what can happen is you can get bounces, you can get emails going into spam, emails going into promotions. Let's just say, for instance, it had a 50% delivery rate, which would mean 900 people get it delivered. Of that 900 people, let's just say again you've got 20% go into spam and 20% go into promotions. I don't know the exact math on that off the top of my head, but let's just say it was 25% and 25%, so we are left with 50% of that. So we're down to 450 people, and that might sit in their inbox right in front of them, and unless you've got a very intriguing headline, that email may not get clicked and opened. So you may get a delivery rate, but now you mightn't even get an open rate. So that might get whittled down again. This is what I'm speaking about. They said it gets opened by 1,800 people.

If someone tries to pitch something to you cold like this, odds are there's something amiss with it. And I want you to take this strategy and remember it, because if you ever get approached by someone cold, in particular SEO mobs, they will consistently reach out to you promising you the world, and they don't have one client under their belt that they can actually point to and have that client back them. Some do. The good ones do, and the good ones will show you. But this is what I'm saying: if something's too good to be true and cheap, there's a reason behind it.

Ask to see the actual analytics. Jump on a Zoom call and have a look at their analytics. Ask them to show their email open rates so they can prove, in this instance, that it's the truth. Always, always question. Always question before you hand over that hard-earned.

That's it for this week. I'll be back in Sydney next week where I won't have to shout into my laptop. I'll have a microphone. See you next week.