Wednesday Writerly Way ~ Spams-a Positive or a Negative?

This week I'm talking about spams, in case you haven't guessed. Back in November I talked about SEO and the importance of using keywords (HERE), this practice will also open you up for SPAM! But overall, it is a paltry nuisance compared to the attention you derive from using them.

I'm allergic to Spam both types. The pork variety because I'm allergic to pork and the internet variety because it wastes my time. I am allergic to anything that wastes my time. My time is valuable and limited as it is for most of us. I get violently ill with both and yet I refuse to put any "I am not a robot" devices such as Captcha on my blog.

Wouldn't it be easier just add a Captcha? For whom? Me...probably, but not necessarily for my readers. Ease for my readers is everything. Captcha are hard enough for me to decipher with all the skewed letters and obscure photos of numbers, I can think of no other reason not to post a comment. I think I'd comment more if it wasn't for them.

The prior approval is a good idea, if you monitor it properly. If you wait a week to
approve comments it doesn't work so well. I'm the sort of blog reader that makes comments (sometimes). If I take the time to comment, I believe the commenter is owed a response. I actually go back to check if there is a response or click the email when comment is made box.

I understand if you are someone like Alex J. Cavanaugh who gets 100 + comments per blog post not answering each and every one, but my blog doesn't get the response his does. If it did I might take his tact on the subject. But I digress.

Spams are either complaints (negative) or flattery (positive). I have yet to see any of the spammers show up on my feed burner, although they promise they are following my blog. Maybe they have it bookmarked as a site where they can post their spam. I dunno. But I am vigilant. I take as much care of my blog as I do my other writing. It is my baby, my child that I'm sending out into the cold, hard world. Am I too attached to my blog? Probably. It's something I'm proud to say is mine.

Either way all spams ruffle your tail feathers. On any given post, the spam filter which catches bogus links will catch or I will delete, about ten emails. That amount may be irritating but I tend to look at the positive. That's only 3% of my total comments or emails I receive as a result of this blog or my books.

That's 97% bonafide contact points which isn't bad. If my blog wasn't getting such a high number of hits each day...spammers wouldn't bother with my site. That's also a positive point.

Yes, spams are a part of doing business on the web. There's no fighting it. Look at it from the positive point of view.

Did you know that spammers now have a way around the Captcha? They'll enlist the help of third world nations. They hire people who sit at the computer all day long who do nothing but copy and paste the same spam, and type in the Captcha.

Thanks to analytic software they can pinpoint which sites get the most traffic. When I blogged once a month I got a few spams, but nothing like the first of the year when my hits spiked to almost 300+ page views a blog post. As you can see from the chart of all time page views a tremendous spike occurred when I started blogging more in August 2012.

For March of this year, I topped over 8,500 page views. No that's not cumulative but the figure for last month alone. Now if you take the 3%, that's a lot of spams in the month. To date, I've published 327 posts and received 325 comments. Yes, I've accounted for my replies to comments and subtracted them, and the spams in my spam folder are not counted. That's not too shoddy of a record. So if I have to go in a manually delete some spams from my blog...it's worth it.

So spammers beware. I will delete you within a couple days of you posting a spam. All of my readers are savvy enough not to click your links.

What am I talking about...they don't actually read the blogs they are spamming.

Anyhow, keep writing and loving the Lord.

Tuesday Tumbling Term ~ Spam

It's that time of the week again for the term of the day for indie and regular authors. Today I'm talking about spams...

Spam
1. Trademark. a canned food product consisting especially of pork formed into a solid block.
noun
2. ( lowercase  ) disruptive messages, especially commercial messages posted on a computer network or sent as e-mail.Spam
1. Trademark. a canned food product consisting especially of pork formed into a solid block.
noun
2. ( lowercase  ) disruptive messages, especially commercial messages posted on a computer network or sent as e-mail.

I'm not talking about the canned meat variety as you may have guessed. Although I've come to think of it as canned BS. Now to take it a bit farther...

 spams , spamming , spammed
1. to send unsolicited electronic mail or text messages simultaneously to a number of e-mail addresses or mobile phones
 — n
2. unsolicited electronic mail or text messages sent in this way

This is what I'm really talking about. Go into any website on the internet and it registers your ISP (internet service provider number) that in turn is linked to your email. There are companies that collects and sells this data for a price.

Sort of like those companies that promise to email the release of your book to 50,000 readers as promotion. Nine times out of ten, in my humble opinion, this is a sucker's bet. What guarantees that the recipient of their email really reads their emails? 1 out of 1000 or 10,000, possibly. Why spend your hard earned buck on possibilities? Yes, these companies operate within the law. Buyer beware. Know what you are actually getting before you pay out a cent. Do your own research. Don't depend on their testimonials and figures. Dig deeper.

It's the old self-publishing stigma coming back to haunt indie writers. They prey on the desperate writer. That's another reason I pulled Adsense off my blog. Fly-by-night companies were advertising their services on my site and I just didn't agree with it. Sure an extra few pennies doesn't hurt, but I couldn't justify it with my conscience. I actually looked at the ads. It was another sort of spam and I won't be a party to it.

As I said yesterday, Spams have a purpose in life...mainly to be deleted. It's an irritant, but it is also a fact of life via the Internet. I've never said I was single. I'm an old married lady, but what kind of spams do I get? Singles ads, dating sites. What Einstein thought I was a good candidate to visit their site? The whole thing about spams is that they are nondiscriminating and also useless. What ever happened to target marketing versus blanket marketing? Blanket marketing just doesn't work.

Why post a spam for handbags or penile implants to a writer's blog? And yet, I'll bet I've delete forty or fifty of them from my filter folder or my blog in the past month. What moron thought, "Let me see...the three finger method of posting my advertising on which spot. Somebody might click on my ad."

Spams are not only irritating but they are the death toll of my computer. Spams are now synonymous with viruses.Nobody in their right mind would open a link if they didn't know the person. If I didn't care about my livelihood, because that's what my computer is, I might click an unknown link. Yes, I use links on my site that link to other blogs and articles, but I know those sites and their authors. And honestly, have you ever gone into a site and been directed to site after site? I have. After the first two redirects, I back out and close down my internet.

I look at buy-my-book tweets the same way. The same with FaceBook and a few other spots online. It's spam people. If I didn't buy your book the first time I saw it, chances are I won't when beaten over the head with it.

How many of you hit the mute button when a television ad you've seen more than twice come on during the commercial break? Come on, raise your hand. I'm raising mine and waving it wildly. Even if it's cute, you may watch it twice max.

I used to run my "spots" on various sites once a week for six months just to see what would happened. Did my sales increase? Not a smidgen so I stopped. As much as spams irritate me, they irritate others. I actually got a better response with my hat from Zazzle...mostly "Where did you get that?"  "I want one!" "You wrote a book?" The first two were from other authors. The third was from a friend I hadn't seen in years.

So as an indie author, do you promote spam?

Keep writing and loving the Lord. 

Monday Mailbox ~ Spams with a Point

Spams are just irritating. Does anyone with half a brain, like me, actually click on the links or buy their products?

In the 50s to 60s, it was door-to-door salesman from vacuum to insurance and everything in between. In the 70s thru the 80s, it was mass mailings where your mailbox may held two pieces of bonafide mail you wanted to read. Starting in 90s it was the age of telemarketers which continues today. Now with the internet being huge, it's spams.

I hit delete or spam on most of them. There is one exception. That's where my blog is concerned. I must sift through EIGHTY pieces of Spam a day. Why do I put myself through the this? Even though spams are regurgitated  mass e-mail to anyone who does not have a filter in place, some have points for thought. No, I don't take them all that seriously so you don't have to call those nice, young men wearing white coats.

They do have some key thinking points for me like...

• Blog header
• Is the title of my blog effective
• Content
• The overall look and feel of my blog

They spams keep me always questioning, "Can it be better?" and "How can I make it better?" I know I'll never reach perfection, but settle with what I'm happy with right now. Yearly I evaluate my blog/website performance overall with tweaks made during the year. It got just plain tiring to change everything every three or four months.

I've been spending time with Ali Cross, who I "met" during the Indierecon online conference developing a logo and tagline to better emphasize my blog. I've got the tagline for the newsletter set that perfectly describes what I write, Suspense with a Soul.

No, I'm not going to change the look or background of this blog because it works for me right now. The good Lord knows, and my readers, this blog format has gone through numerous changes over the last couple years

The logo and design are a bit trickier. I am too much! Literarally.

I have too many nterests! To narrow it down to two or thee elements is short changing who I am. While I dream of narrowing my creative talents, I ask myself, why should I? Personally I'm thinking of a juggler with items I do up in the air.  But I digress...

My blog header is Murphey Saga because < cue the soap opera music> my life is a bad soap opera.

My tag line about writing but life gets in the way, is true and something all writers face. I didn't only write about writing or strictly for my readers, but how life impacts everything we attempt to do. A real picture of the writing life, family, and about me. Isn't that what people want to know?

As far as titles of my blogs go, I'll admit sometimes they need a little help. I've seen the "7 Ways to Improve the Widget" type titles and may actually click on them. But mostly it is inane clicking and browse reading.

That's just not me. I like to chat and that's the way I approach my blog. I believe in the soft sell and relationships. Now don't get me wrong, I can do the hard sell. I was once described as being able to sell salt to man man in the middle of the Dead Sea. At times, that approach is necessary, but in a "Meet the author" type website? 

Yes, this blog is a sales tool. Over on the right, I have my books and where to get them, about the author, book trailers, and assorted other sales pitch things. If someone wants to take the time to read it. Yes, I mention certain books I've written and writing because that's what I do, I am a writer, but I am so much more.

Because I'm an eclectic, but focus individual. I write about everything. Be it my stroke, my writing, my family, or vent about injustices or food for thought. That's my content. I could focus all my attention on one aspect or other but then I would be writing thirty blogs instead of just two with bleed overs in both. Sometimes with some adjustments one blog written will have ramifications on the other one, and I'll cheat and publish it on both sites. Wherever life impacts me at any given moment, that's what I write about.

So do you look at spams any differently?

Keep writing and loving the Lord

Saturday Saunter ~ Blogger/Blogspot

Here on Blogger, in the overview section, is a heading called "Spam." I virtually ignored it up until now.

I knew it caught most of the "Anonymous" and link added comments that appear in my email account for this blog.  Although a few have been posted and subsequently deleted by me. This is a neat feature on this site. It allows me to be Captcha and "prior approval" free on this blog with a minimum of effort on my part.

That's a huge benefit for folks like me who are typing one-handed, with a "dyslexic/ADD" and poor vision. My stroke left me with two blood dots in my field of vision in my left eye when looking at light colored things. Don't worry the opthamologist says these will minimize with time. With the Captcha, I often find myself hitting the reload key several times before I find one that I can read clearly. Still after two missed attempts, I'll not leave a comment. It is too frustrating.

Anyhow getting back to the "Spam" feature. I actually clicked on it today. All two thousand spams came up. I'd never been in there to clear it before. My first inclination was to hit check all and delete them, but a little voice in my head, old Abby again, told me not to.

I started started skimming and checking each comment in my folder. It only took an hour. I found sixteen bonafide messages that got misdirected. People who commented and signed their names but no link and were appropriate to the subject. These "anonymous" messages have since been reported as "not spam" and will appear on proper posts.

I'll do this weekly from here on out or daily as the need arises.

Have you checked your Spam folder lately?