The devilishly slippery slope

13 August
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Associate Programs Newsletter #533

I’ve been researching comment spam on blogs and was staggered to discover the same item of spam appearing on more than 4 MILLION websites.

You know that slightly suspicious looking blog comment you approved yesterday? Well, your instincts were probably right. It might have been posted to a million or so other blogs, too.

Yes, that’s what the blog spamming industry is achieving these days.

Google’s latest Penguin algorithm updates have slowed blog spammers a little, but they’re still churning out millions of garbage comments, written in a way that’s designed to trick you.

Are you confident you know how to recognize comment spam? Have a look at the deceptive examples I discovered.

How many of them appear on YOUR blog?

Some of them fooled me.

Are the spammers fooling you?
 

Plausible Lies Blog Spammers Tell

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The devilishly slippery slope
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It seems to me there’s a devilishly slippery slope involved in comment spam.

It goes something like this…

 1. It all starts so innocently… First, you do searches in Google, find relevant blogs in your niche, and take part in the conversation. You post helpful, thoughtful comments. You make friends and build business relationships.
 
 2. Next, you hire an employee to do the commenting for you. The quality suffers a little, but you’re freed up to do other things.
 
 3. Then you decide you can save money by hiring an overseas assistant to post comments on blogs. The quality suffers some more, but you put up with that.
 
 4. You experiment with using a blog commenting service, which promises “relevant” results and posts hundreds of comments for a few cents each. If you receive any complaints, you ignore them.
 
 5. Then you step up (or is is down?) to buying a tool which “spins” comments and promises that you can post thousands of comments in minutes. Perhaps to start with, you use it just to find relevant blogs quickly. But those other options look tempting…
 
 
There should be a law against it.

Maybe there is already.

If the CAN-SPAM Act can be applied to commercial messages in Facebook, perhaps there’s nothing to stop it being applied to comment spam?

But how on earth would you decide who to prosecute, and at which stage of the slope?

Where are you on the slippery slope? I’d be interested in hearing your views.

I’d also like to know if you are allowing disguised comment spam to remain on your blog. Is it fooling you?

And if any of you are posting auto-generated blog comments by the thousand, how’s that working for you? Surely Google has figured out exactly what you’re doing, so why are you persisting with that garbage?

I’m curious to know what you think…

Plausible Lies Blog Spammers Tell

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A mini-directory of REAL results
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SBI has just updated its impressive mini-directory of SBI sites.

These are sites owned by SBI users in the following niches and sub-niches…

Electronics
Entertainment
Finance & Investing
Food & Cooking
Health & Medicine
Hobbies
Miscellaneous
Misc Business
Self-Help
Sports & Fitness
Travel

All these HUNDREDS of SBI sites are in the top 0.5% of sites for traffic. And what you see is just a small sample of all the SBI sites that are in the Internet’s top 0.5%.

Check out the updated mini-directory here…

http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/results

By the way, this mini-directory exists AS WELL as the SBI case studies. You can see a heap of SBI case studies here…

http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/proof

I’ve been using and recommending SBI for a decade. As the Internet has changed, it’s been fascinating watching SBI evolve and grow along with it.

No other company online can offer anywhere near the same level of detailed proof of success.

The Internet now has 200 million websites and blogs with their own domains. Don’t worry about that. The vast majority of those 200 million are NOT serious competitors. Most get a mere trickle of visitors, if any. To succeed – to get traffic and make sales – what you need are good tools, good preparation and an Action Guide that provides advice that WORKS. That’s exactly what you get with SBI.

The SBI mini-directory shows you some of the most well-done, informative sites in the world. There is no limit to the niches you can conquer.

If you’ve been thinking of trying SBI, have a look at some of the sites in this updated mini-directory to get an idea of what you could achieve.

http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/results

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COMING SOON: Successful affiliate process
================================

I’ve interviewed a successful affiliate who has developed a smooth process for generating traffic and making sales. I’ll tell you about it in the next newsletter.

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Thought for today: What to do
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“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” – Epictetus.  

All the best

Allan Gardyne