Eghads! See if you can spot the obviously inflated claims in the following press release. Hint: For the first overblown claim, most trade-type business books sell so few that they’re little more than oversized business cards.
“Glen Hopkins’ new book, Lucrative List Building is poised to hit the International best seller list on August the 8th 2006 as hundreds of thousands of eager buyers eagerly wait to get their hands on a copy,” began the highly exaggerated press release.
“The highly anticipated book will reveal how everyday people with no experience can build huge, highly profitable opt-in e-mail lists from scratch to make millions online.”
The press release ended with the following claim:
“To learn more about Glen Hopkins visit Google.com and do a search for his name. You'll find over five and a half million references.”
We searched Google under “Glen Hopkins”—in quotes to be sure and omit results with documents containing “Glen” and “Hopkins,” but not necessarily the two names together. Indeed, the search results turned up thousands of Glen Hopkins: 10,400, to be precise.
Oh, and we found lots of different Glen Hopkins. We found Glen Hopkins the boxer, Glen Hopkins, the actor; Glen Hopkins, the driver of a street sweeper who allegedly ran over an 83-year-old woman; Glen Hopkins the director of research and development for Hewlett Packard’s commercial and business platforms; Glen Hopkins, a provider of services for the mentally ill in Newark, OH; Glen Hopkins, the fictional district attorney in the book, “First Offense;” Glen Hopkins, a trustee of the New York State Snowmobilers Association, Glen Hopkins, the Melbourne Zoo horticulturist; Glen Hopkins of Hopkins Propeller Service in Covington, LA; Glen Hopkins, the North Carolina commercial fisherman, and Glen Hopkins, the training and research manager for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Phew! That Hopkins is apparently a regular Renaissance man. We guessed there were probably many more Glen Hopkins on Google, but we were getting carpal tunnel syndrome.
Hopkins, the author/e-mail-list builder, may be a perfectly fine consultant. But we’d suggest avoiding taking any claims he makes at face value.
