11 Unsustainable Promotional Activities by Out of Control IM’ers

Last month I hired someone on good faith that they were going to register the Rich Sage at a bunch of Web2.0 directories, input relevant comments in blogs and in general work with me on a monthly basis on the rest of the networks’ sites.

I said “do a good job and I’ll let you do the same for the rest of the network and add a good bonus to top it off after the project is over”.  So, I paid and held a carrot expecting to see good results.

The project got off to a good start and I started to see the traffic generated from the various posts. Then I proceeded to check out some of the links and ran across a post that discussed “my kids watching Discovery channel”. That prompted me to ask my new consultant, what was that about? To which she replied “I’ll have to talk to the person I hired to comment”. Well, then I realized the idea was too good to be true.

The moral of the story: If you are promoting a website, do it yourself, pick the most effective sites to work with and be truthful.  While you’re at it, stick to the manual methods and just provide great content.  When you fake it, it will so, and lead to doom.

That lesson led me to these “11 Promotional Activities that Online Marketers Need to Avoid”:

1. Comment Spam: There are lots of people going from blog to blog posting comments just to get a link back to their own site.  That process has now taken another twist –with automated ‘bots’ doing the comments.  Guess what?  Filters already pick up that up as spam and blocks it.  This is a total waste of time and will make you look very bad.  It’s a week to week business model. That’ s all. It does not work.  Take for example, on the Rich Sage blog, the plugin Akismet blocks 99% of the spam very effectively.  I can then take 2 minutes to delete the rest before I reply to real comments.  I notice that they’re starting to charge for it, but that’s not a problem –your blog will stay under the limits they have set. I on the other hand will purchase a commercial key to support then and make sure my services are continued.
2. Reciprocal Link Spam:  All of these items create problems with reciprocal links.  The major problem with this idea is that getting a ton of links fast may actually punish you!  So, watch out. The search engines know that you’re out to fool their engineers and believe me, an entire room full of PHD’s are working on making sure you fail.  So, any success with such a setup is short lived.  For the long-term, stick to good content.
3. Track-Back Spam: This is a rather cleaver way to get a link.  Most blog’s allow the editor to create a post and then link to the content of another blog and say “I’ve created an entry about your post, and I am now linking to it”  When that is done by you, the admin, the blog will “ping” the tracked blog and let it know that you’ve written about it. In return the “linked” blog will ping back creating a “trackback” and another entry that your blog update exists.  You can see how quickly the links can build up.  The problem is that it’s rather easy to fake this process and not really put up good content.  After all, what good does it do when you have 1,000 visitors from all this work and NOT ONE READER of the content?  Nothing. You’ve wasted your time. That’s about it, and I see a lot of people doing a lot of that.
4. Email Spam: Well, this is the granddaddy of spam. I’ll not get into it, but suffice it to say, keep it up and you’ll do jail time. If you’ve just started, count on losing and getting your domain blacklisted.  This is definitely not the way to go!
5. Flooding Directories:  I’ve seen a lot of ads to get listed on directories.  Upon doing a close inspection of the directories, I found that a lot of them are just replicated sites from one domain and ONE IP address.  That does not do any good.  The idea that works is to pick around 20 good directories that are niche related and to create an account in them. Then manually go to each and list your site.  Better yet, while doing that, make a good list of sites to advertise in. You’ll get real traffic from that.
6. Spam Publishing Sites:  As you may have seen there are sites like Digg >> and Sphinn >> that publish your articles.  It’s then ‘ranked’ by the readers by giving each publications a vote.  There are ways to manipulate these votes by working with a few people.  However, once again, how long can you keep doing that?  How will you keep maintaining the content that you need to keep the readers’ attention?  This is a very short term strategy that will implode given a bit of time.
7. Forum Spam:  This has to be the most annoying spam that I’ve encountered.  I have several forums and it seems that one of them is hijacked by a bunch of porn promoters.  I just let the “thing go” just to see what happens. Well, it does not stop. These guys are using automated ‘bots’ to post all kinds of pictures and posts in the forum.  I’ll just wipe out the database sometime soon for all message above a certain size and that will clean out these morons.  If you are running any of these setups, just install a “CAPTCHA” that asks for a visual confirmation before posting and your problems are solved.
8. Coming Soon, Blog Spam: I say coming soon because I see more and more of this daily.  The problem is when webmasters use automated programs to post content to their blog –usually using RSS feeds that are then posted by category to a blog.  The idea is to automate the content and then have search engines deliver the visitors.  Nice idea.  How would you like to read the automated New York Times or Washington Post?  I don’t think that will fly for more than a day or two.  It’s bad enough when content is plagiarized!  However, if you extend that to automated content posting, it’s just a matter of time ’til your visitor clicks away.  It may work once or twice, but after that, your blog will be like “road kill” –smell bad and stayed away from. So, once again, very short term thinking that will cost a lot of heartache down the road.
9. Article Spam:  This is not so nice at all.  There are a bunch of light headed people who go around taking articles –either ones they plagiarized or bought and dumping them on article directories.  Once again, very short term thinking.  You may fool the reader once, but good luck getting the same reader to bookmark your site or content and return to it later.  It will never work.  My suggestion is to have a list of the best article directories and post to them your best content on a regular basis and get to be known as a provider of great advice in your niche.
10. Stats Spam:  I have no idea what kind of genius came up with this idea, but the strategy is this:  You run a program that creates a visitor from a site or pc over and over so that in the stats (visitor rankings) it appears that you’ve gotten 1,000 visitors from somesite.TLD.  Well that prompts the curious webmaster such as myself to checkout where the visitor came from… Once again, very short term thinking.  The idea that spamming a stats program with “hits” creating it to list your site as a big sender of visitors works when a site has a few hits.  However, take my site –you’d have to deliver a few thousand “hits” to register in the stats program.  Ouch. That almost a Denial of Service attack!  That’s serious harassment if you ask me.  That when an ecommerce company calls the Feds on you “kind of stuff” –very serious. Not for the faint hearted or the shy geek to initiate.  Definitely not recommended!
11. Video Spam:  Well, this is a relatively new one.  Suddenly the flavor of the quarter is to run a program that will post comments to video sites like YouTube.  Great.  That’s only going to take them a day or two to block.  I am sure by the time I post this, they’ll have a way to prevent such spam.  And you’re out the $97 dollars you paid for the software.  Why bother?  Just a waste of time, money and you’ve pissed off a lot of people who drive a lot of “bad karma” in your directions.  That’s so uncool!

The best solution to all of this is to keep your costs as low as possible and present a realistic business model that you can manage long-term.  You’ll find that your Internet blog or computer related business will last a long time and get a lot more respect from your friends, customers and the ‘Net community in general.  Trust me, what goes around comes around and you don’t want to be in the receiving end of any of the above problems.  To add to that, they don’t work, especially, for the long-term!

Success!

Rich Sage