Tag Archives: spam

Friday Fun with Stupid Comments Turns Out to Be Not Much Fun

Blogs and blogging,

What the heck, I said this morning, it’s Friday, the last Friday before a holiday week next week, so let’s have some fun. I set out to explore the creativity embedded in blog comments that are distributed en-masse but disguised to look like they’re actually individual comments for individual posts.

I see patterns. Comments like this…

Good stuff… Just killing some time browsing searches and found your post. Great looking website. I’ll have to save the page to come back. Cheers

…look reasonable at first glance. But then you discover they’re posted in excruciating mass repetition on multiple posts on multiple blogs, to embed links and gain artificial search engine advantage. That exact same comment, word for word, was posted on four different posts on two different blogs by four different people at almost exactly the same time.

I thought I’d seen some that reminded me of the Mexican comedian Cantinflas, master of double talk. Or of the Dilbert mission statement generator. But not really. These just aren’t that good. Here are other examples:

I do trust all of the ideas you have presented on your post. They’re very convincing and can certainly work. Nonetheless, the posts are very short for starters. Could you please lengthen them a little from next time? Thanks for the post.

Good point. I i never thought of it this way before.Very very informative. We have learned alot through your blog many thanks. Ill put your advice to work. Thanks!

Hey man! I completely agree with your thoughts. I really appreciate what you’re providing here.

I thought it was going to be some boring old post, but it really compensated for my time. I will post a link to this page on my blog. I am sure my visitors will find that very useful.

Each of these appeared on multiple posts on multiple blogs. Clever?

No, actually. Not that clever at all. I just went through ten pages of this crap without one of them clever enough to merit a post. Dammit. I thought I’d seen some Cantinflas-like doubletalk as the spam comments scrolled by, but actually, no. Not clever, just annoying.

So much for Friday fun. Damn you spammers.

How Can These Over-used Tactics Work?

Marketing, , ,

I saw an offer the other day, on the web of course, something with a normal price of $495.00 knocked down to $19.95. I thought to myself that nobody would ever buy something offered with that patently absurd insult to intelligence. 

But I’m pretty sure people do.  I learned that the hard way.

I once decided to overrule a direct mail marketing expert, who I had hired, and send out a direct mail campaign for a software product priced at $100 instead of $99.95. He was a real expert too, but I thought I knew my market, and my customers, better than he did. I didn’t.

And spam? Every so often I wonder how spam still exists. Who can be so naïve as to click on those emails and buy the stupid stuff the spammers offer? Is there anybody left? Obviously the answer is yes, because the spam keeps coming. So somebody buys it, right? Or else it wouldn’t be worth sending?

Somebody must buy that stuff. Go figure.

Take That, Spammers!

Advice, Personal Productivity, Web/Tech, , , ,

Do you want satisfaction after all the annoyance of spam?

I just finished clicking full pages of spam with one click, and then deleting all of them with a second click. The view below (warning: the subjects include stupid and offensive subjects) shows the page just for that satisfying click that sends them all to oblivion. Boy that’s a good feeling. Take that, spammers!

view of spam

If you don’t have a spam filter, then you need one. My company uses Postini and I also use SpamArrest and MailWasher. I recommend all three of them. Anything to not see the spam.

About Dumb Obvious Blog Comments

Marketing, Weblogs, ,

Is this funny, or just annoying? It’s an alleged comment to one of my posts on this blog. And get this: the same comment also appeared, word for word, on another post on my Up and Running blog on entrepreneur.com. Two different posts, but the identical comment, as follows:

Great post, I agree. I think a great addition that might help others would be learning how to outsource. It’s really helped my business. I found a free outsourcing mini coarse and I learned a lot from it. It’s amazing what you can do when you can hire someone for $4 per hour to help you run your business.

And it has a URL, that I haven’t included, because I don’t want to promote it. A link that people are supposed to click to take part in the “amazing” gains of hiring someone for $4 per hour to be you. And I didn’t approve the comment, so don’t look for it, you won’t find it.

  • Re: “Great post, I agree.” Oh come on, how dumb do you think I and normal readers are? How obvious is that?
  • Re: “free outsourcing mini coarse.” I guess it doesn’t include spelling.
  • Re: hiring someone for $4 per hour to run your business. Yeah, you just put this comment on a post about how social media requires authenticity, which is hard to leverage. And on another post about overused words in advertising. I can see how that’s working for you.

Still, that’s a poorly executed waste of time commenting on blog strategy, which, I sincerely hope, will never work for you.