The 7 Graces of Marketing – ethical marketing for social entrepreneurs

Lynn Serafinn shares 5 practical strategies to protect your blog from SPAM, and send a message to spammers that spamming is both illegal and unprofitable.

Last week, in ‘Invasion of the Blog Snatchers’ Part 1, we looked at how to recognise SPAM on your blog. Then, in Part 2, we looked at what I called ‘The Mythology of SPAM’, where I explained the mistaken rationale spammers have, and why SPAM simply doesn’t work as a web marketing strategy.

Today in Part 3, we’re going to look at 5 practical and assertive strategies to take against blog SPAM. While I’m fairly certain that most experienced bloggers will be familiar with the first two strategies, I believe adding steps 3, 4 and 5 to our practice can help send a collective message to spammers that we will not tolerate the ‘Deadly Sin of Invasion’ on our blogs.

Before we begin, I want to apologise to bloggers out there who use platforms other than WordPress. I know these first 2 tips are catered to WordPress users, but please be assured this is only because that is the platform I know and use. In no way is it meant to be a commentary on the merits of one blogging platform over another. In fact, if any of you reading happen to use Blogger or Blogspot, and you know some great anti-spam tips, please share them in the comments below.

STEP 1: Set WordPress Discussion Settings

On your WordPress dashboard, go to ‘Settings’, and then ‘Discussion’ and make sure that the following boxes are checked:

• Comment author must fill out name and e-mail
• Email me whenever anyone posts a comment
• Email me whenever a comment is held for moderation

Then, if you’re a new blogger, I also recommend checking the box that says ‘An administrator must always approve the comment’. This requires more time and attention, but it’s the best protection for your site.

Later, if you feel confident about your ability to discern genuine comments from SPAM (and you also have confidence in your regular readers), you can select ‘Comment author must have a previously approved comment’. That way, any comments posted by your loyal blog fans will be automatically approved without the need for you to approve them. Of course, you can remove them later if they turn out to be inappropriate.

STEP 2: Set Up Akismet

The Akismet plugin is a vital ‘must have’ for any WordPress blogger. In fact, it’s so vital that it is already included with your WordPress installation. Akismet is a VERY accurate ‘SPAM catcher’ that will capture and quarantine just about every SPAM comment that will ever hit your site. In fact, it’s so good at what it does—and requires almost no work at your end—that it is often the only anti-spam strategy many WordPress bloggers use.

NOTE: Akismet used to be a free programme. It now has different pricing plans according to whether or not your blog is used for particular purposes.

Although already installed, you will need to activate the plugin before it will work. I recommend doing this as SOON as your WordPress blog is online. To activate Akismet, you’ll need to go to WordPress.com (not .org) to get an ‘API key’. ‘API’ stand for ‘application programming interface‘. It is a technical protocol that allows two pieces of software to communicate with each other. Don’t get hung up on the technical jargon; all you need to do is get an API key. This ‘key’ is essentially a complex password that tells WordPress that it’s ok to run Akismet on your site. Never share this key with anyone other than your webmaster.

When setting up Akismet, I recommend checking the boxes that say:

• Auto-delete spam submitted on posts more than a month old.
• Show the number of comments you’ve approved beside each comment author.

When Akismet detects SPAM, it puts them in a special SPAM folder inside your comments folder. Most people I ask tend to delete them all without reviewing them, but there is good reason to look them over first. First off, because a stray ‘legitimate’ comment might have found its way into the SPAM folder (although this hardly EVER happens). But more than that, if you take a few minutes to go through the IP addresses of the spammers, you can actually block them from having access to your site…which takes us to STEP 3.

STEP 3: Block Spammer IP Addresses

If you look at the comments being held in your SPAM folder, you will see an IP address. ‘IP’ stands for ‘Internet Protocol’. An IP address is a unique string of numbers separated by decimal points that identifies a specific computer attached to the Internet.

Every IP address is comprised of 4 SETS of numbers, each set being 1 to 3 digits in length. Each set is separated by a decimal point. For example they could look something like this:

12 . 123 . 67 . 0

1 . 0 . 255 . 78

111 . 220 . 34. 255

NOTE: In an actual IP address, there are NO spaces between the numbers and the decimal points; I’ve only put them in here so you can see the groupings of the numbers more easily on your computer screen.

TIP: If you’d like to see your own IP address, just type in the words ‘What is my IP address?’ in a Google search, and it will appear on your screen. Cool, huh?

Sometimes, you’ll notice that the same IP address has put more than one comment on your site. They’re counting on the fact that, if you approve ONE of their SPAM comments, the others will automatically get approved as per the WordPress discussion settings. That’s why, if you don’t know what you’re doing yet, I recommend manually approving ALL comments, even if you have Akismet installed and configured. Otherwise, if you don’t log into your site very often and you’ve accidentally approved one of these spammers, you might find your site flooded with SPAM the next time you log in.

Which is why it’s a good idea to BLOCK all spammer IPs from accessing your website. There are several ways to do this, but here are the two easiest, safest and most effective I’ve used:

Method 1: Comments Blacklist
In your WordPress dashboard, go to ‘Settings > Discussion’. Scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see a big box labelled ‘Comments Blacklist’. Simply copy and paste the IP addresses of spammers into this box (one IP per line) and save the settings.

There are several WordPress plugins that also perform this function. With the exception of one I saw where you can upload IP addresses via CSV file, I’m not sure they have any particular advantage over the default feature in WordPress.

PLEASE NOTE that putting an IP address in the ‘Comments Blacklist’ does NOT block spammers from accessing your site, but it WILL ensure that any comments they make are automatically placed in the SPAM folder.

Method 2: IP Deny Manager

If you want to BLOCK specific IP addresses from having access to your site altogether, I recommend using a different method called ‘IP Deny Manager’. Another advantage of using IP Deny Manager over the Comments Blacklist is that it blocks these IP addresses from ALL your sites hosted through that provider (HostGator, GoDaddy, BlueHost, etc).

Here’s how to do it:

1. Log into your CPanel
2. Scroll down to the ‘Security’ section
3. Look for a feature called ‘IP Deny Manager’ and click it to open it.
   
   
4. When the programme opens, paste in the IP addresses of any spammers you wish to block from accessing your site:

TIP: If you go to http://whois.com and enter in the IP address of the spammer, you might also find that it is part of a range of IP addresses. In fact, you might even notice that some of the other SPAM comments on your site are within that range (because they’re coming from the same spamming operation). If you wish, you can copy and paste this entire IP range into IP Deny Manager and EVERY IP address within that range will be blocked. The range will look something like this (note the dash between the two sets of numbers):

60.166.0.0-60.175.255.255

NOTE: The above range includes IP addresses of some reported spammers from China. However, bear in mind this range contains up to 16 million IP addresses. Blocking the range means you are blocking ALL 16 million computers in that IP range, even if they are not spammers.

That said, I have noticed a significant reduction in SPAM comments since blocking IP ranges of known spammers. This is because spammers often operate within a block of IP addresses, frequently changing their IP within that range. Before I started using this strategy, I would routinely get between 30 and 50 SPAM comments every single day. That’s gone down now by about 90% (3 to 5 SPAM comments a day) and some days I don’t get any SPAM at all.

And don’t be led to think that blocking batches of IP addresses will cut down on your web traffic. If you’re careful to block ranges only in countries you are not specifically targeting for your readership, it should have little or no negative impact on your traffic. My visitor stats have steadily increased in spite of blocking these ranges in IP Deny Manager.

STEP 4: Check Out and Report Spammers to Black Lists

This step might only be for the die-hard geeks out there (like me), but I think it’s worth sharing because I believe it can really make a difference in the long term.

There are many dedicated people on the Internet who have taken it upon themselves to compile and manage up-to-date ‘public block lists’ (or black lists). You can find several of them listed at: http://www.selectrealsecurity.com/public-block-lists.

Most relevant to the subject at hand are the ‘IP Address Block Lists’, which you will find if you scroll down the page. The one I found particularly interesting is ‘The Directory of Comment Spammers’ on a site called ‘Project Honey Pot’. Here’s a screenshot I took this evening of the list at: http://www.projecthoneypot.org/list_of_ips.php?t=p.

Look at how many reported comments some of these spammers have!

I find looking at data like this to be fascinating. If you look at it closely (and especially if you filter the content by looking at different countries), you will see clusters of IP addresses around a certain range. This makes it easier to block the ranges of IP address that appear to be used consistently by spammers. I like to check in periodically (maybe once a week) to find the latest offenders, and put them into my ‘IP Deny Manager’.

These ‘public block list’ collectives also enable you to submit known spammer IP addresses to them, should you feel motivated to do so.

PLEASE NOTE: Project Honey Pot does give this disclaimer: ‘Please note: being listed on these pages does not necessarily mean an IP address, domain name, or any other information is owned by a spammer. For example, it may have been hijacked from its true owner and used by a spammer.’

STEP 5: Report Spammers to Internet Service Providers

This last suggestion is not something I expect most of you to do, as it takes time and doesn’t always get any results. However, I believe sometimes it is appropriate to REPORT spammers to their Internet Service Providers (ISP). Here’s how:

1. Copy the IP address of the spammer on your site.
2. Go to http://whois.com
3. In the upper right-hand corner, paste in the IP address of the spammer and click ‘search’
4. A new page will open up with all the information about the ISP. Amongst other things, you’ll be able to see the country of origin of the computer.
5. If you read through it, you will see instructions on how to report abuse (such as SPAM). This will be either an email address or a URL to a page where you can report the issue. The email address is typically something like: ‘abuse [at] webhost’s name [dot] com.
6. You MUST include all the relevant information in your email: The IP address, the time of incident (in UTC time), the actual comment and the URL and/or email of the spammer. You must also give the URL of the page where the comment was left on your site.

I would ONLY bother doing this if the spammer’s IP address seemed like a ‘misfit’ (i.e., coming from a large, reputable Internet provider). If you see this, it’s often because the company’s IP has been ‘hijacked by spammers’ (as Project Honey Pot said). In such a case, they would probably be very pleased to hear from you, so they can take action.

Don’t bother trying to report abuse to lesser known or unknown companies (or those in China, the Ukraine or other high-spam regions) because 9 times out of 10, your email will bounce and you get nowhere at all (I learned the hard way).

Reporting spammers takes time and energy, but I think it’s worth doing, at least every now and then. You might not catch the spammer, but you might help out someone whose IP address was hacked.

Why Bother?
If you have Akismet in place on your blog, you might wonder why I’m suggesting that you take assertive action in Steps 3, 4 and 5, while Akismet is catching all the SPAM for you without any effort.

Well, it’s got to do with the SPAM that gets away. Akismet catches SPAM after it’s submitted to the site. This means random SPAM comments will inadvertently be approved on some people’s sites (as we’ve seen in the screenshots from Alexa in Part 2). This means the spammers are getting results. If spammers can show evidence of these results to their clients, they will get paid for their illegal activity. And as long as spammers are getting paid, they’ll continue to do what they’re doing.

This means that taking the ‘passive’ approach of depending entirely on Akismet might cut down SPAM on our sites, but it doesn’t do a thing to get rid of SPAMMING as an activity. As long as they get at least SOME results, spammers will continue to do what they do.

BUT…imagine if every single ethical marketer out there were to take assertive action and block the IP address of every spammer on the planet. That will surely make things more difficult for spammers to operate. Of course, spammers are pretty savvy, and they typically hide their IP addresses behind public or private proxies. But every time a proxy becomes obsolete (owing to their appearing on too many blacklists) it costs a spammer time and money to switch. Spammers won’t bother with things that are too hard, and they certainly won’t work for free.

So, my reasoning is this:

Let’s make spammers so fed up with being blocked
and with constantly needing to change their IP address
that they simply GIVE UP what they’re doing.

Let’s send the message to spammers that it’s utterly futile and unprofitable to engage in this activity of spamming. When it becomes so hard that it takes too much time and effort and costs more money than they are earning, they’ll have no choice but to quit.

Call me naïve, but I believe it will happen if WE take the assertive route rather than the passive one.

So what do you think about all that? Am I crazy?

Next time, we’ll conclude ‘Invasion of the Blog Snatchers’ by looking at a few simple ways to protect your site from a truly aggressive breed of cyber-invader—HACKERS!

I hope you’ll subscribe to the 7 Graces of Marketing blog to catch that article, and all our future ‘grace-full’ articles on ethical marketing.

As usual, I welcome your spam-free comments and feedback below.

Lynn Serafinn
14^th May 2013

Like this blog?

Then please subscribe using the form at the upper right side of this page, so you can receive our articles to your inbox.

KINDLE users 
You can help subsidise ethical marketing training courses for young social entrepreneurs in need. Just subscribe to the blog on Amazon for 99 cents a month (77p UK), and you’ll receive all our articles delivered directly to your Kindle device. All profits go to our 7 Graces Scholarship Fund. You can take a 14-day free trial before you decide. You’ll get a new article 2 or 3 times per week. Check it out at Amazon US or Amazon UK.

Looking for a Tribe? 
Come join our 7 Graces group on Facebook, and join us at our monthly meetings. They’re free to attend and we have them both in person and online, so you can participate from anywhere in the world. This is NOT a “business group” but an active community where people actually know and support each other.

Find out more about how changing the paradigm can help make the world a better place:

The 7 Graces of Marketing: how to heal humanity and the planet by changing the way we sell, by Lynn Serafinn, where you can learn how the 7 Deadly Sins and the 7 Graces impact the world through media and marketing.

Brit Writers Awards Finalist
eLit Book Awards Silver Medal in Humanitarian & Ecological Social Issues

Tweep-e-licious: 158 Twitter Tips & Strategies for Writers, Social Entrepreneurs & Changemakers Who Want to Market Their Business Ethically, by Lynn Serafinn, which can help you learn how to create meaningful collaborations through Twitter and other social media.

eLit Book Awards Bronze Medal in Business and Sales

Get instant access to a free 90-minute Twitter marketing class at http://tweepelicious.com

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LYNN SERAFINN, MAED, CPCC is a certified, award-winning coach, teacher, marketer, social media expert, radio host, speaker and author of the number one bestseller The 7 Graces of Marketing — How to Heal Humanity and the Planet by Changing the Way We Sell and Tweep-e-licious! 158 Twitter Tips & Strategies for Writers, Social Entrepreneurs & Changemakers Who Want to Market their Business Ethically. She is listed in the Top 20 of the Top Marketing Authors on Twitter by Social Media Magazine and was a finalist for the prestigious Brit Writers Awards. She also received the eLit Book Awards Silver Medal in Humanitarian and Ecological Social Affairs, as well as the Bronze Medal in Business and Sales.

Lynn’s eclectic approach to marketing incorporates her vast professional experience in the music industry and the educational sector along with more than two decades of study and practice of the spirituality of India. Her innovative marketing campaigns have produced a long list of bestselling non-fiction authors through her company Spirit Authors. Lynn is also the Founder of the 7 Graces Project CIC, a not-for-profit social enterprise created to train, support, mentor and inspire independent business owners to market their business ethically, serve society and planet, and restore all that is best about humanity.

  Twitter: http://twitter.com/7GracesMarketng
Facebook: http://facebook.com/groups/7GracesGlobalGarden
MeetUp: http://www.meetup.com/7-Graces-Global-Community-London
(not just for Londoners, as we meet also on Skype)

Who are spammers? Why do they do what they do? Does it work? Ethical marketer Lynn Serafinn discusses SPAM mentality and why spamming is a waste of time.

In Part 1 of ‘Invasion of the Blog Snatchers’, we looked at 4 different ways to recognise SPAM comments on your blog. The last thing I left you with was the ‘cliff-hanger’ that you should never, ever allow such comments to appear on your blog.

That probably left you asking how you do that. I had originally intended to use Part 2 to show some simple strategies that can help keep spammers off your site, but I’ve decided to save that for Part 3. Before we go into the practical side of things, I’d like to take a deeper look at the rationale behind the actions of these persistent cyber-invaders. When we look at the facts instead of the mythology of SPAM, we’ll see that spamming is not only unethical, but illogical and ineffective.

Who Are Spammers?

For the most part, SPAM comments that pop up on your site are posted by professional spammers. They work either as freelancers preying upon naïve business owners, or they are hired by unscrupulous people who run dodgy businesses.

Take a moment to examine the SPAM comments on your blog. Typically, they come from websites selling porn, sex aids, designer knock-offs (fake designer label clothes, handbags, watches, etc.), loans, gambling, guns or cheap pharmaceuticals.

Apart from these obviously shady businesses, you might also find links to sites selling SEO or mailing list services. These companies are never legitimate, so please don’t ever be tempted to hire them. If they are marketing by SPAM, rest assured all they want to do is sell you SPAM services (if they can even be trusted to deliver that for you).

Why Do These Invaders Do What They Do?

It would be easy to answer this question by saying ‘because they have a criminal mentality’, but that would not give the full picture. Spammers do what they do because of their mistaken understanding about Google and other search engines.

Here’s how they see it. Let’s say they post a comment on your blog and you happen to approve it. In their comment is a link to the website of one of these dodgy businesses. That link now appears on YOUR blog. Google and other search engines pay attention to how many external sites link back to a website, as it is regarded as one way to measure the popularity of a website.

This is called a ‘back link’ or a ‘site linking in’. Having a large number of back links can increase a site’s chances of appearing near the top of Internet searches. In other words, if a site has 100,000 sites linking back to it, it is much more likely to be on the first page of Google than a similar site having only 100 sites linking back. And if a page gets on the first page of Google for any chosen keywords, it means it is more likely that people will visit that site. This is the theoretical rationale behind blog SPAM.

Does SPAM Actually Work?

No. The key words above are ‘more likely’. Having lots of back links does not guarantee your page will rank higher in searches. If there is no actual traffic to your site, back links will do little or nothing to help. To demonstrate this point, let’s look at some numbers.

Here are screen shots of statistics for three very popular and high-ranking sites: YouTube, Mashable and The Guardian Newspaper online (taken from analytics website Alexa.com on 9 May 2013):

You can see that YouTube is ranked #3 out of ALL websites in the world (surpassed only by Google.com and Facebook). Nearly 4 million sites link back to YouTube, owing greatly to people embedding YouTube videos on their own websites and social media.

As we go down the list, The Guardian has a global rank of 203, with Mashable at a quite respectable 356. The Guardian also has more than twice as many back links as Mashable. This kind of evidence leads many a spammer (and their unwitting victims) to believe that back links will ALWAYS increase the traffic rank for their websites.

However, when we compare the sites of two recent spammers to the more humble statistics of this 7 Graces site, we see a different picture entirely (I’ve intentionally blacked out the link to the spammer’s site):

The first spammer’s site is to a tanning bed company in India. The second is to a pizzeria in the US. Notice how both spammer’s sites have WAY more sites linking back into their website than the 7 Graces site has. The pizza place has a whopping 2,489 more back links. We can safely assume all these these back links are the result of aggressive spamming activity.

Now notice that the global rank for 7 Graces is massively higher than either of these sites. In fact, it’s over 3,300,000 places higher than the pizza place (for some reason our UK rank for 7 Graces isn’t showing, but when I last checked it was in the top 100,000). I should also add that all our back links are legitimate, and we did very little to get them other than create good content.

Traffic rank is only one statistic. There’s also something called Page Rank, which ranks your page on a scale of 0-10. I’ve checked the page ranks for these spammers on http://www.prchecker.info and both of them returned a page rank (PR) of 0 out of 10.

In contrast, the 7 Graces site is a respectable PR3.

I’ve compared several spammer sites this way on Alexa.com, and invariably they return similar statistics.

This evidence would imply that the notion there is a guaranteed correlation between back links and traffic rank is simply a myth. And, aside from back links, it also puts a nail in the coffin of the idea of keywords in comments helping to drive traffic to the commenter’s site.

In short:
SPAM doesn’t work.
It’s not just invasive marketing;
it’s utterly pointless marketing.

So Why Do Spammers Bother?

God only knows. I suspect it has nothing really to do with web traffic, but with money.

Some spammers appear to be freelancers who make their living by snookering technologically naïve business owners into paying them to get back links to their website, leading them to believe this will help their business. That’s what’s happened with our pizza place and tanning bed company above. After all, the spammer can ‘show’ the evidence of their work to their clients by showing them the statistics on Alexa.

Apart from these, I suspect the majority of spammers are contracted by dodgy, unethical and certainly less-than-legitimate businesses that represent a new kind of ‘organised crime’. Given the sad reality that the VAST majority of SPAM I receive is either from the Ukraine or China, I cannot help but feel that some spammers are (in some perverted way) themselves victims of the system. I remember when I visited Moscow in 2000, and there were literally thousands of ‘ordinary’ people selling pirated software and black-market electronics on the streets just to make a living in the economically repressed post-Soviet world.

Either way, there’s something tragic about it all—for us, for the spammers and for our world.

Shifting the Paradigm

SPAM is unethical marketing, pure and simple. It is one of the most blatant examples of the Deadly Sin of Invasion I can think of.

When we are invaded, our natural inclination is to protect and defend ourselves. To that end, in Part 3 of this series, I’ll (finally!) be sharing some simple strategies to do that. Then, in Part 4, I’ll show you some strategies for protecting and defending your blog from another breed of cyber-criminal: the hacker.

While protecting and defending our sites may be necessary at this time, pushing back is NOT the ‘antidote’ to the Deadly Sin of Invasion. Building bigger walls or making stiffer jail sentences does not eliminate home break-ins. Similarly, pushing back spammers will only, at most, buy us time before those of criminal mentality create new ways to trick the system.

To put an end to SPAM (or any kind of invasive marketing) once and for all, we need a paradigm shift—we need the Grace of Invitation. Invitation alone is the antidote to Invasion.

Bearing that in mind, even though I will be showing you practical preventative measures against spammers and hackers in the upcoming articles, I’d also like to open up the dialogue for ways we can turn the rationale for SPAM on its head. Let us get curious about the possibilities:

• How can we encourage more honest and relevant ways to support each other’s web traffic?
• How can we create systems where everyone benefits—a website owner, their readers and those who link to/from a site?
• How can we defuse the need for spammers to engage in their activities by inventing ways to invite each other into our collective space?

Let’s hold these questions in our intention as we move on to Part 3 of ‘Invasion of the Blog Snatchers’. Until next time…

As always, please do share your thoughts, reflections or questions below.

Lynn Serafinn
10 May 2013

Like this blog?
Then please subscribe using the form at the upper right side of this page, so you can receive our articles to your inbox.

KINDLE users 
You can help subsidise ethical marketing training courses for young social entrepreneurs in need. Just subscribe to the blog on Amazon for 99 cents a month (77p UK), and you’ll receive all our articles delivered directly to your Kindle device. All profits go to our 7 Graces Scholarship Fund. You can take a 14-day free trial before you decide. You’ll get a new article 2 or 3 times per week. Check it out at Amazon US or Amazon UK.

Looking for a Tribe? 
Come join our 7 Graces group on Facebook, and join us at our monthly meetings. They’re free to attend and we have them both in person and online, so you can participate from anywhere in the world. This is NOT a “business group” but an active community where people actually know and support each other.

Find out more about how changing the paradigm can help make the world a better place:

The 7 Graces of Marketing: how to heal humanity and the planet by changing the way we sell, by Lynn Serafinn, where you can learn how the 7 Deadly Sins and the 7 Graces impact the world through media and marketing.

Brit Writers Awards Finalist
eLit Book Awards Silver Medal in Humanitarian & Ecological Social Issues

Tweep-e-licious: 158 Twitter Tips & Strategies for Writers, Social Entrepreneurs & Changemakers Who Want to Market Their Business Ethically, by Lynn Serafinn, which can help you learn how to create meaningful collaborations through Twitter and other social media.

eLit Book Awards Bronze Medal in Business and Sales

Get instant access to a free 90-minute Twitter marketing class at http://tweepelicious.com

---

LYNN SERAFINN, MAED, CPCC is a certified, award-winning coach, teacher, marketer, social media expert, radio host, speaker and author of the number one bestseller The 7 Graces of Marketing — How to Heal Humanity and the Planet by Changing the Way We Sell and Tweep-e-licious! 158 Twitter Tips & Strategies for Writers, Social Entrepreneurs & Changemakers Who Want to Market their Business Ethically. She is listed in the Top 20 of the Top Marketing Authors on Twitter by Social Media Magazine and was a finalist for the prestigious Brit Writers Awards. She also received the eLit Book Awards Silver Medal in Humanitarian and Ecological Social Affairs, as well as the Bronze Medal in Business and Sales.

Lynn’s eclectic approach to marketing incorporates her vast professional experience in the music industry and the educational sector along with more than two decades of study and practice of the spirituality of India. Her innovative marketing campaigns have produced a long list of bestselling non-fiction authors through her company Spirit Authors. Lynn is also the Founder of the 7 Graces Project CIC, a not-for-profit social enterprise created to train, support, mentor and inspire independent business owners to market their business ethically, serve society and planet, and restore all that is best about humanity.

  Twitter: http://twitter.com/7GracesMarketng
Facebook: http://facebook.com/groups/7GracesGlobalGarden
MeetUp: http://www.meetup.com/7-Graces-Global-Community-London
(not just for Londoners, as we meet also on Skype)

Spammers and hackers invade 1000s of blogs without the owners even realising. Lynn Serafinn shares strategies for assertive action against these malicious attacks.

In The 7 Graces of Marketing, the 3^rd ‘Deadly Sin’ is ‘Invasion’. To be honest, I consider nearly all forms of so-called ‘legitimate’ marketing these days to be ‘invasive’, including television and radio adverts, billboards, magazine adverts, product placement, and so on. But while many would argue that this kind of advertising is necessary, our modern world has given rise to a new breed of cyber-marketing that I believe we would all agree is invasive—spamming and hacking.

Blog invasion is such an important ethical issue, and it really is time we got serious about addressing it collectively. Spammers are the curse of many a well-meaning blogger, and for many of us, spam comments are an everyday occurrence.  Every couple of years, I also see a wave of widespread hacking into WordPress sites (one such wave occurred within the past couple of months).

To address this wave of invasion, I’ve written this 4-part article series ‘Invasion of the Blog Snatchers’:

• Part 1: Recognising SPAM
• Part 2: The Mythology of SPAM
• Part 3: Taking Action Against Spammers
• Part 4: Protecting Your Site from Hackers

Being able to recognise SPAM is the first step in being able to protect your site against it. So today, in Part 1, we’ll look at the many different (and sometimes amusing) ways spammers will try to fool you into allowing their comments to appear on your blog.

Blog SPAM – What it Looks Like

When we think of the word ‘SPAM’, most of us think of all the junk email we receive from people we don’t know talking about web services, fake designer watches, cheap pharmaceuticals and other unsolicited (and typically irrelevant) communications. But SPAM is also a common occurrence on blogs, although some who may be new to blogging may not immediately recognise it.

Usually, SPAM enters your blog through comments on posts or pages. When blogging was new, and bloggers were unsuspecting victims, spammers were pretty easy to detect. SPAM comments would not really comment on the post at all, and would instead talk about other websites and other products.

But as bloggers have become savvier, and many technical tools have become available to identify likely SPAM automatically, spammers have become even more deceptive (Deception being ‘Deadly Sin’ number 5). Below are some sure-fire signs of SPAM to help you identify it on your site.

SIGN 1 OF SPAM: Buttering You Up

Sometimes you might see comments on your blog that seem to be very ‘flattering’ (although not always understandable). Here are a few examples I copied from my blog’s SPAM filter today:

‘I never thought I would agree with this opinion, but I’m starting to see things differently.’

‘I saw your post awhile back and saved it to my computer. Only now have I got a chance to reading it and have to tell you good work.’

‘There is certainly a great deal to find out about this issue. I love all of the points you made.’

‘Oh my goodness! Incredible article dude!’

SIGN 2 OF SPAM: Total Gibberish

Here’s a couple of my recent SPAM comments, which I thought were hysterically funny:

‘This article made me become shiny. After doing some reading of this article, I learned a lot. I will follow your blog. I wish everyone like me here bring in happy, gains moved…’

‘Metal roofs become quickly heated compared to other synthetic drugs which are not
a part of that. It promises results, backing up a camper trailer is nothing like an official recruitment agency per se, but the second offence was to be given a jury trial. Of course, the above reasons justify the popularity of the office, absolutely everything is part of the lighting portion.’

Huh?

When comments are gibberish, it’s not necessarily that the person can’t speak English well (although a shocking amount of SPAM I receive comes from former Soviet States, China or South America), but rather because these are simply spun and tossed together using online translators. Often, gibberish is also a sign of SPAM Type #3: Flooding You with Keywords.

SIGN 3 OF SPAM: Flooding You with Keywords

A third type of SPAM is when it is flooded with keywords. Sometimes those keywords have to do with the spammer’s website, while other times they are dancing on the heels of the keywords on your site. I’ve even received comments here that were copied and pasted dictionary definitions of keywords like ‘ethics’ (ironic, ain’t it?). Other times, the comments are just crowded with keywords that get a high number of hits (like ‘computer’ or ‘mobile phone’ or even ‘help the earth’), hoping it will show up when people do Google searches. Here’s a particularly amusing example:

‘An online magazine shares some features with a blog and also with online ‘To be sure wholly with hamster, presently connected with mobile phone plus computer swindles ppl cannot trust without knowing it properly, my hubby has been extremely intrigued but wait, how is it possible to Your acquire required heat and also M integrate right into a home process if it might be manufactured nevertheless produce more than enough capability to in fact aid individuals lowering consumption, an individual show myself it truly does work and anyone say and we will enjoyably spend all of our salary that will help the earth.’

SIGN 4 OF SPAM: Goading You to Comment Back

The fourth type of SPAM is when the commenter not only butters you up, but also ‘appears’ to be desperate to connect with you. Here are two I received this week (spelling/grammar errors are in the original comments):

‘Oh my goodness! an incredible article dude. Thanks However I am experiencing concern with ur rss . Don’t know why Unable to subscribe to it. Is there anybody getting similar rss downside? Anyone who knows kindly respond. Thnkx.’

‘I’m not sure why but this web site is loading very slow for me. Is anyone else having this issue or is it a issue on my end? I’ll check back later on and see if the problem still exists.’

Rule of Thumb

Many an inexperienced (and unsuspecting) blogger will approve such comments, thinking these were honest, enthusiastic responses to their writing. But if you read all these comments closely, you’ll notice they say NOTHING whatsoever about the specific topic of the article or blog. And that’s because the spammers who posted them haven’t read a word you’ve written.

RULE OF THUMB:
If you see comments like these on your blog, you should never EVER approve them or allow them to appear on your site.

That’s what you should NOT do with them, but what SHOULD you do with them? And how do you make sure they don’t sneak through onto your site?

• In Part 2 of ‘Invasion of the Blog Snatchers’, we’ll look at the reasoning behind these seemingly nonsensical SPAM comments and why SPAM is such a great example of the Deadly Sin of Invasion in marketing.
• Then, in Part 3, I’ll also share some practical strategies on how to make sure SPAM is dealt with effectively so your blog remains an example of the ‘Grace of Invitation’ for your legitimate readers.
• Finally, in Part 4, we’ll look at hackers and how to protect yourself against this particularly aggressive breed of cyber-invader.

Please be sure to subscribe to the 7 Graces of Marketing blog. That way you will be sure to receive all 3 articles, and all our future ‘grace-full’ articles on ethical marketing.

As usual, I welcome your spam-free comments and feedback below.

Lynn Serafinn
7^th May 2013

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Find out more about how changing the paradigm can help make the world a better place:

The 7 Graces of Marketing: how to heal humanity and the planet by changing the way we sell, by Lynn Serafinn, where you can learn how the 7 Deadly Sins and the 7 Graces impact the world through media and marketing.

Brit Writers Awards Finalist
eLit Book Awards Silver Medal in Humanitarian & Ecological Social Issues

Tweep-e-licious: 158 Twitter Tips & Strategies for Writers, Social Entrepreneurs & Changemakers Who Want to Market Their Business Ethically, by Lynn Serafinn, which can help you learn how to create meaningful collaborations through Twitter and other social media.

eLit Book Awards Bronze Medal in Business and Sales

 

Get instant access to a free 90-minute Twitter marketing class at http://tweepelicious.com

 

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LYNN SERAFINN, MAED, CPCC is a certified, award-winning coach, teacher, marketer, social media expert, radio host, speaker and author of the number one bestseller The 7 Graces of Marketing — How to Heal Humanity and the Planet by Changing the Way We Sell and Tweep-e-licious! 158 Twitter Tips & Strategies for Writers, Social Entrepreneurs & Changemakers Who Want to Market their Business Ethically. She is listed in the Top 20 of the Top Marketing Authors on Twitter by Social Media Magazine and was a finalist for the prestigious Brit Writers Awards. She also received the eLit Book Awards Silver Medal in Humanitarian and Ecological Social Affairs, as well as the Bronze Medal in Business and Sales.

Lynn’s eclectic approach to marketing incorporates her vast professional experience in the music industry and the educational sector along with more than two decades of study and practice of the spirituality of India. Her innovative marketing campaigns have produced a long list of bestselling non-fiction authors through her company Spirit Authors. Lynn is also the Founder of the 7 Graces Project CIC, a not-for-profit social enterprise created to train, support, mentor and inspire independent business owners to market their business ethically, serve society and planet, and restore all that is best about humanity.

  Twitter: http://twitter.com/7GracesMarketng

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(not just for Londoners, as we meet also on Skype)