Becareful not to spam the people you are trying to target

The more time I spend moderating blogs, checking emails the more I reflect on: what drives people to try and spam their target audience with the hopes of increasing business? It is probably ignorance, relying on bad information and/or desperation that these tactics are used. A year back or so I was sending unsolicited emails to a target audience trying to recruit from the job pool and the responses I got ranged from “remove me from my list” to “I am happy where I am”.

So I got to thinking what could be done do to improve the conversion of the recruiting emails and then the light bulb went off; am I spamming my target audience and just annoying the target audience? The obvious conclusion was yes! From that time on I have not sent any unsolicited emails no matter how much the temptation was.

But spamming is not just limited to emails but takes another form on blogs and any blog knows what I am talking about; the bots that run automatic comments on blogs with the hopes of generating a backlink to increase their SEO. On an average day this blog receives 40 spam comments from programs that are looking to do this horrible tactic. It is a waste and an annoyance that is clogging the internet with a bunch of junk.

I have also seen spam commenting by individuals on their peer’s, or what could be determine to be their peers, website. Comments like “nice post”, “great information and “I am bookmarking and reread later” are spam comments in my opinion. These comments offer the author, readers and other blog participants any sort of value and are just used to get a link on another person’s website.

Blogging and commenting generates discussion which can sometimes out weigh the content in the original post. Discussion is what makes blogs valuable because of the thought provoking discussion that comes out of it. But not all blogs have to generate alot of discussion to have value. This blog does not do a lot of comments and that is perfectly ok with the owner, because that is not the goal of the site.

It may seem that we are stuck with email and comment spammers for ever but thank goodness that is not the case. Spam.Abuse.net is a website that is taking spam fight to the front lines with there Stop Spam on the Internet website.

Just be watchful of your actions and you should be ok. A simple question to ask yourself: is what I am about to do be construed as spam by a larger community? If you answer is yes or maybe then it is time to rethink the strategy.