Ever scroll quickly through your eMail and see subject headers that aren’t really there? Instead, as you scroll quickly, you’ll see the first part of one and the second part of another, which can give you some interesting headers! Thus, the title of this post. The actual word was probably p0rn to get past the spam filters, but you get the general idea.

And, despite spam filters (which occasionally block legitimate messages too), I still get a lot of spam. I’ve had the same eMail address for over 10 years and, after that amount of time, it seems just about every spammer has it.

I haven’t checked eMail since Monday night, so when I checked this afternoon, I had over 1500 messages waiting for me. Of those, a little over 120 were not spam.

One has to wonder why there is so much spam. I’ve never purchased anything advertised in a spam message. I’d bet that you probably haven’t either.

But, spammers wouldn’t keep spamming if it didn’t work. Remember, for most of them, sending spam to millions of eMail addresses doesn’t cost them much, if anything. It’s not like direct mail where each mail piece costs the sender a small amount of change. With direct mail, there is incentive for mailers to target their mailings to likely buyers. But, spammers, they just blanket everyone. All they need is a very, very small percentage of people to buy, and they’ve made money.

The curious thing is that people do buy from spam. So many messages have misleading headlines, nonsensical wording and so forth, usually in an effort to get past spam filters. Right away, you would think that such deception would set off a red alert in terms of trust. Why would you buy medicines over the Internet from someone whose eMail header was “acorns”?

I think that must be how those spammy looking websites and blogs out there make money. Most of us are turned off by trickery or dodgy looking sites. When we get stuck on one, we leave right away. We delete comments left by people representing those sites. Yet, for the majority of us that run like the wind from those sites, there must be people out there thinking, hey, this looks interesting…

And, spammers are an enterprising lot. Just today, I received a comment (to be moderated) on a blog I haven’t even linked, advertised or finished yet! Already, the spammers have found it. Never mind that there aren’t any posts besides the generic “welcome” message. Never mind that it has no page rank or content or anything meaningful on it. Nope, they’ll try to get their link up anywhere.

Also, in this week’s eMail, was someone who wanted to exchange links with my web site, as they found my content interesting and thought it would be a good match for their site. So, the guy was asking for a reciprocal link. I marked that as spam. For one, he didn’t mention my name, so there’s no evidence he actually visited any of my sites. For two, he didn’t mention which of my websites he thought would be a good match. I have more than one website! So, with both of those pieces of information missing, what it appears to be is a generic form letter sent to anyone with an eMail. Even the “little blue pill” spammers do a better job of personalization! But, a lack of personalization just hints at spam.

On top of that, the letter even mentions that they have several websites. One would think they would know better, if it weren’t a generic mass-sent form letter, and actually identify the site they claim they found and that they want a link on. Instead, they are probably just hoping for any link they can get, and probably never even visited any of my websites at all.

I occasionally get similar letters that actually do indicate a website, but they’ll say how great my website is, even though I have nothing more than an “under construction” page or some such page.

So, no link for them! And, I am not even going to even visit their website to check it out. So, massive FAIL all around.

Mind you, I don’t mind legitimate people with legitimate websites or blogs asking to share links, but I want to see some indication that they actually visited my website or blog. I don’t mind an overall generic form letter either, but that still needs to contain some amount of personalization of information that clearly demonstrates they actually visited the site they want to exchange links with.

Anyway, it just goes to show that you can spend a lot of time maintaining your site and making it look professional, and still make less money than some spammer that just slaps together a site and puts it out there.

You know what else is somewhat discouraging? I have a blog that I haven’t updated in quite a while. Months actually. Meanwhile, except for this past March, this blog gets updated on a daily basis.

Guess which one makes more money?

Not this one…

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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