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by afew
The recent spam attack on ET left us with hundreds of URLs cleaned out of disabled user accounts (and copied into notes for evidence and later reference). We began following some of them up right from the start, whenever there was any doubt about a homepage or a link in bio notes - for example, a link containing the words "get out of debt" or "no more hemorrhoids" is an easy call, but what of a "university" dot edu site, or a "social work" dot org? This ambivalence continued throughout, though we're now pretty much satisfied we've sorted the wheat (small pile) from the chaff (huge pile).
Digging into the huge pile now the rush seems to be over (touch wood) opens up an interesting picture. Yes, lots of what we traditionally consider spam: sales of goods like pills, creams, dietary supplements, sales of online goods like e-books, games, and software, sales of financial services, gambling, advice, training, health information. But it's rare you get there in one go: this is One Click Not. Between you and the goods comes a networked interface of articles, reviews, blog posts... Read and comment on the urgent social phenomenon of "masculine enhancement issues" (sic) before clicking on over to the site that will give a four-star review of a contraption you can follow a link to read more about before clicking through to the sales site. If you so have a mind. Or read a moving personal testimony before following a similar route through to the special-offer teenage-belly-fat-shrinker pills. Or whatever. So here I'm attempting a review of today's networked spam, with reference to a few explanatory concepts, some of which may be familiar, others less so. All the citations and screen grabs in what follows are from sites linked to in user account spam and/or by following links from same, but no URLs will be given here. A little Gogolology can get you to these sites, but I'm not out to send them traffic.
A reasonable starting-point is the comment from yanv we left up. You can end up clicking through to the sales pitch at yanv's place, but first you get this:
An engaging photo, personal presence, a story to tell in datelined posts, comments enabled (though there are none) - it looks bloggy. And in fact this is a Wordpress blog. Our interesting hot New Jersey night Jaguar rest stop lady has a couple of Instablogs. Several spammers link us to Blogger. Others do their own, like this one: Baby Pushchairs, Prams and Buggies (UK) How do find out what's hot in the world of baby pushchairs and prams? Great theme for a blog complete with paparazzi photos. But the blogs are not only about celeb stuff or my fight with face wrinkles. A number of spam entries feature the word social, for instance, and the word appears in several user nicks. So, user "socialwork" sends us here:
Which is warm and social consciencish, though a big scroll down takes you to this:
Education features in this article, linked to from another ET account: College Online Buyer's Market! Colleges online are coming of age. They have been questioned and tested. Now with economic conditions worsening in many countries around the globe, students are taking a breather while they explore the advantages of studying online. This will have a viral effect over the next two years. The outcome for brick-and-mortar campuses could be critical. Click on over to an online university site: Inexpensive, Accelerated Online Degree - Traditional Classic Style Education
How about I hand over the fee and you give me the diploma in 1% (ie <10%) of the time usually required? Deal? (This case was special because the ET username is human ie forename and family name, and that name can be found on the "university" site as Marketing/PR director, with full postal address and tel. The address is in Panama City...) Green is the colour, too (surprised?). A whole slew of bloggy interfaces deals with feelgood greenwashy stuff. Here's one:
A blog, with the same poster recycling stuff from elsewhere (no, he's not offering the $1,000 prize), no comments... Stuff on sale and links to stuff on sale, or links to links to stuff... Here's a different blog interface with a different technique and a tighter green-home focus:
That's a blog that applies crowdsourcing to the full: the users post the questions, the users post the answers (at least, if the pitch is to be believed), so there's an appearance of disinterested content. Other ET spammers link us to creative dwellings, green homes, solar panels, gardening supplies, etc. Nothing on general principles regarding energy, the environment; everything about stuff you can get to green up your home. Networks is another theme: many of these interfaces promote:
The RSS subscription and Twitter are particularly pushed; here's an example of soliciting for a Tweet:
Gogoling for usernames also points up their presence, in quite a few cases, on Answers and How-To sites. Reviews are the other big thing, apart from blogs. Here's a standalone example, claiming to provide "independent product reviews":
Looks serious? See the pitch to a "Friend", and the parts I have highlighted in orange. By far the most common platforms for reviews are dedicated sites: E-zines and article directories. They are transparently unobjective and mostly poorly written. Here's an excerpt from an offering by a spam user who posted a comment on ET - this is taken from the article directory he linked to in his bio notes:
Are you loosing your hair? Are you experiencing excessive hair loss that may lead to baldness? Are you afraid of baldness? It is likely that everyone in this world is worrying about this. Discovery of hair loss is a stressful experience for both sexes, especially for men. The reviews and "articles", of course, link on to "information" or blog-type sites, or directly to sales sites or squeeze pages, so called because they squeeze the user between the options of giving an email address or leaving the site: here's an example of a squeeze page:
I want so much to learn about organic gardening, but there are no links here to let me browse anything, and if I want to get a taste of that book I have to give personal information... So? So what are we seeing? Fairly standard Internet saleables, including the good old stuff that exploits human foibles and anxieties, but also newer, more socially and environmentally "aware" products; up front, networked and interlinked informational and bloggy interfaces. Some obviously questionable practices, but there's nothing illegal about selling stuff, even with hard-sell techniques, even (subject to rarely-applied limits) with fake endorsements and product assessments. Are officially above-board business practices in terms of advertising, sales, and communications, really much better? Perhaps not, or not always. We're not in the habit, though, of having this forum massively solicited by officially above-board businesses. In other words, all these things I've been looking at came to us via a big, well-organised spam operation using innocent bystanders' IP addresses - which ipso facto means these businesses have one foot at least on the dark side. I won't come back to this aspect, but it shouldn't be forgotten. Secondly, why so much interlinking? What are the cash flows involved here? Just sales? If that's the case, here's a sketch of how to get higher search engine rank by multiplying Web sites:
That's where you have a product to sell and you do the promotion around it yourself - but there's also business in clicks. Paying for click-throughs can be open and above-board, and is common. These faux blogs and article directories are often there to get clicks and capture cash flow as they drive traffic towards sales. Since there may be one payment for a click-through, but a higher one for a concluded sale (a "conversion" in Internet marketeers' lingo), there's an effort to pre-select and deliver likely prospects to the sales sites. The aim is to generate traffic, as far as possible "pre-sold". We're looking at a fairly strenuous - or maybe just tacky - instance of affiliate marketing. Checking out spam links on ET can, in itself, lead to information about this. Here's some from the tacky side:
To start affiliate business is very easy: Notice you're not selling anything here - you're out to make money as a traffic generator. How do you "generate high traffic to your website or blog"? Setting aside the obvious spam solution for the moment, the answer is to make your site as lively and interesting as possible. Keep fresh content coming, good and on topic. Tie people in with the RSS feed, get their email addies, get them to contribute comments if possible (moderate ruthlessly, goes without saying). Get them bookmarking you, Tweeting you, etc. Pay other sites a commission for click-throughs to you. Put up more sites and drive traffic from one to the other. Do this to raise your search-engine ranking, which will start you on an upward loop of more traffic, better ranking (Search Engine Optimisation, SEO). Don't look too spammy, or the search engine may treat you as such. On the contrary, make your content look as serious as possible, and get your keywords in the right place. Read this carefully: Affiliate marketing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Websites consisting mostly of affiliate links have previously held a negative reputation for underdelivering quality content. In 2005 there were active changes made by Google, where certain websites were labeled as "thin affiliates".[21] Such websites were either removed from Google's index or were relocated within the results page (i.e., moved from the top-most results to a lower position). To avoid this categorization, affiliate marketer webmasters must create quality content on their websites that distinguishes their work from the work of spammers or banner farms, which only contain links leading to merchant sites. This is sounding less simple, isn't it? What's more, I may not really be a specialist on gout or solar panels, or even be particularly able to write. And I have to write fresh, original stuff about these topics regularly? This leads to new search engine indexing, new RSS feeds, emails re new post, updated look to the interface - yes, I've got to do it, but how? Well, there's a solution to every problem. And ET's spammers have it on offer.
Or this one: Unlimited free traffic using autoblogs and autoblogging Just an ARMY of dedicated blogs, tirelessly promoting your stuff for you! Unleash the autoblogs for an unlimited stream of free traffic and massive Page Rank boosts! Autoblogging? Huh? What follows comes from a forum found when following up an ET spam user's links: looking for the best Wordpress Automatic Content Generators Plugins - Blah Blah Forum which wordpress content generator is the best? Wp-o-matic? Wp-autoblog? wp-blogger? feedpress? response 1 I create a blog with wordpress with my own domain, then use [feed]wordpress content generator plugin to generate content response 2 I use RSS2Blog for my wordpress domains. (From another poster on the same forum, this example of a successful autoblog). Now hold on - these things will write blog posts for me? No, but they'll fetch other content (articles, the like, and news items) and handle the posting for you. And you can subscribe to RSS feeds and get content coming in from there. But, but -- I still can't write! Yet more solutions. Buy content from other sites under a system called Private Label Rights (PLR). Make a few changes to adapt the copy to your needs and feed it to your autoblogger. Here's what one content provider offers:
But First, the PROBLEM... (and your dilemma) And here's how you adapt the content to your needs:
If your Internet marketing efforts have brought in lotsa cash, you can go the Rolls Royce way with a different provider:
So you can set up as an affiliate with a niche and specialised content for several sites, no sweat, no tears. Well, quite a bit of work, and some outlay in software and e-books and content, and paying other affiliates for click-throughs to your places. What's more, those "beneficial affiliate programs" mentioned above probably have a hierarchical structure. You signed into the system with a higher-level affiliate than you, who gets a commission when you score a click. What's the relationship between the money going round in circles there (the upper echelons creaming off a percentage), and the money from real sales of what we have seen are products from fairly limited niches? Does this look a bit like the financial sector and the real economy? Is some kind of leveraging going on? Leveraging Web 2.0? The money goes to the top guys while down below are the losers? Losers The striking thing, from an overview (not a rigorous survey) of the spam posted here, is that the biggest single niche in this market is selling Internet marketing expertise to newbies. Here's a green and gentle example:
leads to:
leads to:
Neat, how the modest green-home lady's About page turns into a hook for an Internet marketing (IM) product. A lot less demure is this pitch:
The recession is here, you need money, moms need to work at home to round out the family finances: here's an easy way to make $$$. And here too is a mentor, a guru, one more in a long list. These guys don't hide (apparently). They have a name and a photo (yeah). They can sell you a method, an e-book, a DVD, special software, advice, a training course. In fact, they are surrounded by students. Here are three different styles: "A.J."
My title was lifted from there. More "A.J.":
"H.S."
"K.R."
I went through lots more of this kind of stuff, again, directly via links posted here, or a link or two further on. A picture emerges of the successful IMers who not only hold, in all likelihood, the better-paid slots in the pay-per-click game, but also have efficient operations marketing their brand and knowhow. And out to both sell the latter and to bump up the former by bringing in new low-level players. How long the newbies last is anyone's guess. Fresh blood needed weekly, probably. The argument that this is not a pyramid scheme can be glimpsed here and there, which at least means that the meme is out there. It sure looks and feels like something of the kind. Complete with appeals to the usual self-help Protestant work ethic stuff, Horatio Alger references, to entice people in. That sickly motivational atmosphere that can slide into the fake inspirational. Can and does, in one case. This is from a review of a book: The Millionaires Of Genesis The Bible's laws of health, wealth, and happiness are as applicable today as they ever were. It's easy to see why this book is one of the original "self-help" guides. Here's what this high-minded gentleman is touting on his own site (featuring the terms cash with a true conscience): RBs Keys To Prosperity And Successful Cash Gifting Cash gifting is a great way to introduce yourself to a new way of living. You can attract wealth while having fun but it's important to first conduct your due diligence before accepting an invitation. Gifting is a way of "attracting wealth", and this is not a pyramid scheme? And was it the One Creative Force that drafted this page?
And wrote this?
As an online entrepeneur I am constantly searching for knowledge which will expand my creative mindset. Punk.
Don't flush the toilet, I want to get out. |
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Blogging To The Bank | 44 comments (44 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
Blogging To The Bank | 44 comments (44 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
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