Telemarketers Are Everywhere - Including Internet Marketing

Phone calls during dinner. Deadbeat salesmen. Stuff you don’t want or need. Telemarketers…

A staple in the offline business world, telemarketers are almost like spammers. Depending on when they call, they can be just as annoying.

Unfortunately, you can’t escape them, even in online business. They’ll pull your number from public Whois info, or just buy a list from some less-than-stellar online agency that scraped all the Whois data. (Or if you are a legitimate marketer, they picked the phone number right off your Contact Us page.)

Luckily there are a few things we can do to hinder these telemarketers. (The DO NOT CALL list is for personal/home phone numbers and they find lots of ways around this, especially if you operate a website.)

The first thing you could do is use a Private Registration on your domain name. That would probably deter most telemarketers, although it’s still possible for them to get your number.

Next, especially if you skip the private registration, get a PrivatePhone number. It gives you a nice phone number with voicemail, free of charge! It’s great for adding to your Whois details.

Finally, strike back at the telemarketers! Go to Who Called Us and check out the reports of annoyances from telemarketers. If you get a call, report it on that site. It’s simple - just enter the number, time of call, and some details.

Thanks to WhoCalledUs, we can block those numbers from getting to us or just not answer if the number looks suspicious.

Maybe some Web 2.0 company will come out with a service that tracks all the numbers from WhoCalledUs and setup an alert system that flashes “SLEAZY TELEMARKETER - DO NOT ANSWER” whenever they call you!

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