Finalists have been divided into five categories, and Wildfire Marketing Group has been selected as one of the finalists in the “Best website for generating business and leads” category.

Winners will be named at the BizTech Innovation Summit on March 17 at the Tampa Convention Center.

Wildfire Marketing Group’s Creative Director, Jeremy L. Knauff says “We’re grateful to have been selected as a finalist and are excited to be a part of this event. I feel it will help us generate exposure to the local business community, which will give us the opportunity to help even more of our fellow business owners grow their own companies.”

Sadly, some people will never learn.

The latest scam that’s been brought to my attention is someone masquerading as Wildfire Marketing Group via email with offers of a work from home Consumer Survey Specialist job. These people are not in any way affiliated with us, the job does not exist and we do not provide consumer services evaluations. It appears that they are trying to pull a variation of the Western Union scam along with identity theft as you can see in the email at the bottom of this post.

They’ve even gone as far as listing our actual business address in their emails, but instead of our real phone number, they’ve listed a disconnected phone number and so far, we’ve seen them use dozens of email addresses from free services (Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, etc.). We are currently working with law enforcement to track down and prosecute these fraud artists.

If you receive an email from anyone claiming to be an employee of, or affiliated with Wildfire Marketing Group, make sure that it is a legitimate email address. We only send mail from our own domain, never Gmail, Hotmail, AOL or any other free service – it will always be something like someone@wildfiremarketinggroup.com. And if you’re ever in doubt about an email you receive, you can always call us at 800-718-9072, our phone number is listed on every page of our website.

Below is a copy of the email that they’ve been sending out. Please help us spread the word on your blog, Twitter, Facebook and any other way you can so we can make sure no one falls victim to these fraud artists.

WILDFIRE MARKETING GROUP

3111 W. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. BLVD.,
TAMPA, FL 33607
Tel: (888) 621-4487

CONSUMER SERVICES EVALUATOR

Our online data source has identified you, through our affiliate Consumer Survey Specialist, as a candidate interested in an additional income part-time job. We are pleased to invite you to participate in a paid Consumer Research Project in your area of residence as a Consumer Services Evaluator also referred to as CSE. Consumer Services Evaluation is a tool used by marketing research companies to measure quality of retail service or gather specific information about products and services. CSEs posing as normal customers perform specific tasks – such as purchasing a product, completing a business transaction, asking questions, registering complaints or behaving in a certain way and then provide detailed reports or feedback about their experiences. Just about every kind of shop, service or store uses CSEs to improve their service quality. These businesses need to know what average consumers – just like you, think about their products and services, and they need to know whats going on when management isnt looking over their employees shoulders. They accomplish this by bringing in CSEs. Our company, WILDFIRE MARKETING GROUP (listed with the Better Business Bureau) is a service provider for the Consumer Services Evaluation Industry. With over 5,700 Evaluators and a roster of over 109 companies that we refer new evaluators to every day in US, we are the leading service of our kind. Every company we deal with is fully certified and consistently offers top-paying evaluation jobs. As one of our possible research personnel selected for this project, you will be under cover and visit selected businesses in your area and pretend to be an average customer. While there, you will secretly evaluate things like customer service, store cleanliness and product quality. If you accept this offer, the current consumer services evaluation you are undertaking will attract a pay of $250.00 a week. After this first assignment, your salary will be reviewed upward to $500.00 per week for the first three months. Additional increment up to $700.00 per week is possible after six months; depending on the company you will be assigned and the tasks involved. Upon accepting this offer you must keep your identity and assignment as a Consumer Services Evaluator CONFIDENTIAL in order not to introduce any form of bias to the data you collect. You must not take this or any of our letters to your assignments. This assignment has been put together to be completed in two different locations. The first evaluation will take place at a WESTERN UNION agent near you. You shall pose as a potential customer evaluating a WESTERN UNION money transfer agent by sending the stipulated evaluation amount (subject to change without prior notification your pay remains the same regardless) to one of our following training agents in: 1. WASHINGTON, DC; 2. BALTIMORE, MD. The objective of this exercise is to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency and speed of the payment system. The second evaluation assignment will take place in one of these major retail outlets: SEARS, WAL MART, HOME DEPOT, JCPENNEY, TOYSRUS, DILLARDS OR MACYS. The objective of this second evaluation assignment is to determine the customer service quality of the retail outlet you choose to shop at. This offer expires 7 DAYS from the day you receive this letter since the program is run on a weekly basis. Once you accept this position, we will make a direct deposit to your bank account as time is a key aspect of the assignment. However, we will only make payments into Bank of America accounts so if you do not have one go ahead and open an account before replying to this ad, its free to open an account. Upon receipt of the funds, it must be expended as follows: 1. Your First Weeks Pay – $250.00 2. Evaluation Amount (Amount you will use to evaluate the Western Union Service) 3. Western Union Transfer Charges All assignments MUST be completed within a 2-hour period and not later; if you complete your assignment in a 45mins period or less, every extra minute before the 2-hour count is up (1hr15mins) will post 1 point to your next assignment. 1 point = $0.50. The count starts the moment you receive notification of availability of funds for an assignment. To accept this position, kindly Click Here to write us an e-mail with your Full Name, Address, Phone #, Best 2 hours that work for you and ID # (can be found on the lower left hand side of this letter) and we will be more than happy to reply you with more information. As for banking information we will not need anything other than your account number. Once the deposit has been made you will be given a call and your 2-hour count starts so its best you give us an exact time when you can work. You can withdraw the funds with your ATM card or go to the bank and withdraw (which ever will be time efficient for you), then proceed to the nearest Western Union Money Transfer agent location in your area and get your first assignment taken care of. Immediately after, inform your coordinator and fax your market report forms and all receipts.

****Due to an unusually high volume calls weve been receiving, we advise you send an e-mail for prompt response and better results****

Sincerely, Richard Stanford
ID NO: 93029-440
OFFICE HOURS: MON-FRI, 9AM-7PM EST AND SAT 10AM-2PM

The faster your pages load, the more likely your visitors are to stay around longer and view more of your pages, and Google recently announced that page load speed is now a factor in their ranking algorithm.

That means faster-loading sites will potentially rank better and make more money than slower sites.

There are a lot of factors that can affect load speed. Some can be quite intensive to fix, like poorly structured code. Others, like the file size of your CSS file (which is loaded on each page), are easy to fix and can result in a significant increase in speed.

That’s why we’ve developed our free CSS Compressor tool, which makes it easy to compress your CSS file by 15-30% with the click of a button.

Take it for a spin, and if you have any feedback on how we can improve it for you, we’d love to hear it.

If you’re presenting your company as one that creates original ideas, you should actually put in the leg work and CREATE ORIGINAL IDEAS, after all, that’s what your being paid for.

Tracking these people down, filing DCMA take-down complaints with the hosting company and initiating any necessary legal action quickly becomes time consuming and costly, so we think we’ve come up with a better solution. We are considering taking these thieves to the public, by posting the details along with a screenshot on our blog. Maybe over time, people will realize that the risk just isn’t worth the reward – especially when the information about their illegal actions outranks their own website.

What do you all think?

Well if you’ve been recently laid off and you’re ready to leave the 9-5 rat race, there may be a silver lining to your seemingly dismal cloud because you can win over $26,000 worth of professional services to start your own business! See the story on Fox 13 below.

What do you need to do? Just complete the application, which is available on the Tampa Jumpstart website, have a good idea and an intense passion about what you want to do, and then take action. It’s as simple as that!

This project has taken us close to six months of planning and development, and now that it’s come to fruition, we’re all really excited about helping someone to turn their dreams into a reality.

Please help us spread the world! Share this information with all of your friends, family and associates. Thanks for your support!

On a personal note, despite the fact that everyone has presented this as my idea, I couldn’t have done it without the incredibly generous business people that came to the table to help make this a worthwhile venture. I especially want to thank Julie Heidelberg, from Heidelberg PR and Karen Gillman, from Intelligent Office, who have played a critical role in the organization and planning right from the beginning.

“It’s no secret that small companies are struggling right now,” said Heidelberg PR owner Julie Heidelberg. “For many, it’s time to learn a few new techniques about media relations and grassroots marketing.”

The “Mastering Public Relations” seminar, scheduled to run from 9 a.m. – 12 noon in Tampa, will emphasize three key elements, including

1. How to identify and generate your own news
2. How to share and spread your news
3. How to build strategic alliances to generate grassroots support and more news

For more information or to register for “Mastering Public Relations,” call 813-784-6288 or send an inquiry to Julie@heidelbergpr.com. Future seminars include “Successful PR Writing” and “Strategic PR Campaigns.”

You probably already know how important an effective website design can be, and that over 83% of your potential customers will visit your site at least once before making a decision to do business with your company. What you may not know is that you can have the best of both worlds; enjoying the benefits of a powerful website that delivers results while still managing your cash flow in these tough times because we now offer website financing at 0% interest.

With a small down payment and easy to manage monthly payments, you’ll reap the rewards that a professionally designed website can produce without tying up your revenue. In fact, you even have a full year to finish paying for your website! How much ground you can gain on your competitors while they’re sitting on the sidelines? Why not find out today?

Well, in the spirit of helping others get ahead, Donna Fontenot, an Internet marketing coach, php guru and all around outstanding woman, has come up with a brilliant idea. It’s called Project Jump Start, and the idea is that she and a handful of other Internet marketing experts have come together to provide seed capitol, resources and mentoring. Starting on the 25th of January, Project Jump Start will be providing $175 in cash and over $1,000 in valuable tools and services to one person each and every month this year!

Any more excuses?

Feel free to post your comments and let us know what you think.