This blog attracts a lot of comment spam, possibly because it ranks quite highly for some good business-related keywords.

Also, I suspect, because lots of idiot blog spammers just randomly target ANY WordPress blog they can find.

Last month I came across one comment which had been held for moderation and had been left under a post on the subject of Mike Filsaime.

It said:

“Discover The Most Viral Replicating Website
Online That Literally Blows Away Instant Buzz,
Banner Exchanges, Traffic Exchanges, And
Even Pay Per Click! Submit Your Link For Proof!

Guaranteed Viral Visitors!
==> [URL was here but has been removed]“

Now, the person who left this comment didn’t hide either his name or his email address – he obviously WANTED to be recognised, perhaps he is trying to brand his name.

I’m not going to mention who it was as I don’t want to give him any credit or lead anyone to go looking for his products.

I’ve said before many times, this is not a free advertising blog and it gets on my nerves that people like this think that they can come and leave adverts on my blog.

Worse still, the advert is not even related to the content of the post he was commenting on.

It was irrelevant junk.

Still a bit mad and annoyed, I fired off an email to him:

“I’m not particularly happy that you consider my blog a dumping ground for adverts for your site.

I received this junk on my blog last night:

[I repeated the advert here]

It didn’t appear on the blog and this morning it was deleted from the moderation list.

I have now added your name, email address and URL to the blacklist on my blog.

Although you claim to be a “master marketer”, advertising via blog comment spam suggests you are desperate for sales.

This is pretty pathetic, certainly not the way to make friends.

I’m disappointed.”

Happy and sufficiently calmed from venting my spleen, I went about my day.

About an hour later I got a reply from Mr Comment Spammer:

“You have a comment section on your blog. I placed a comment you are not particularly happy about, fine. The stuff you call junk is what every million dollar earner online uses to create traffic and affiliate sales.

Desperate for sales?

The answer to that is no way.

Do you even know who I am?

Every successful marketer utilizes every tool at his or her disposal and that is why they’re successful beyond measure.

Whether it be black hat or white hat methods it’s all about one thing… Money.

That’s what markering is all about and a GOOD marketer, a MASTER marketer knows this.

He doesn’t give a damn about what others think or what the guru crowd does, or what is permissible or not. He only does one thing… makes money.

How long have you been in this game?

Do you even know who I am?

Been here for 6 yrs marketing online successfully and have done joint ventures with Mark Joyner, Mike Filsaime, Mike Chen, Gary Ambrose, etc… I can go on and on…

Dissapointed? why?

You should be more dissapointed that you’re using a blog.

How many millionaires online utilize blogs?

I’ll tell you… None that I know of.

I know a lot of traffic secrets and marketing secrets and the viral visitors script is one of them. I never pay for traffic, never had to for all the 6 yrs online.

So if you want to call that junk, I think you’re wrong.

[Name Removed]“

Now, I found this reply quite fascinating for a couple of reasons…

Number 1: He says “Whether it be black hat or white hat methods it’s all about one thing… Money”

I’ve always suspected that there were a lot of people who don’t care who they step on or what they do online, as long as they manage to get people to take their credit card out.

Mr Comment Spammer here is obviously one of them, and he is even happy to boast that he uses black-hat techniques.

Number 2: He asks a very strange question “How many millionaires online utilize blogs?” then answers “I’ll tell you… None that I know of”

The problem is, a couple of paragraphs above that he is telling me that he is a great online marketer who JVs with a whole host of successful and well known internet marketers. And, forgive me if I am wrong but, don’t they all use blogs?

He’s attacking me for using a blog but he seems to forget that all his “best mates” use blogs too.

I don’t understand his point there… and don’t think he does either!

So, what can you take from this?

Well, the main message is, Mr Comment Spammer is a “Master Marketer” which means that he “doesn’t give a damn about what others think… He only does one thing… makes money”

Yep, sod morals, he’s only interested in cold, hard cash. And he’ll use you in any way possible to line his own pockets.

Sadly, this person isn’t the first internet marketer to think like this and he won’t be the last. There are some real low-lifes out there…

I’m certainly starting to feel a little jaded by some of the goings-on in the internet marketing world. Certain black-hat marketers giving everyone else a bad name.

Which is why I have been looking into alternative investments such as the domain name market. Check out the Domain Profit Guide for more on this fascinating subject…

In August of last year I made what I thought was quite a brave decision and bought a ticket for Robert Puddy’s Birmingham seminar.

Why did I think it was brave?

Well, for a number of reasons:

(a) I didn’t know who was going to be speaking

(b) I didn’t know anyone else who was going to be there

(c) I didn’t really know much about Robert Puddy and

(d) I didn’t have any real longing to attend a seminar

Looking back it was a pretty silly decision to buy a ticket!

As it happens, just a week before I was due to get the train to Birmingham I was seriously considering refunding my ticket and staying home.

However, come the Thursday evening I left work, went straight to the train station and caught the train down to Birmingham.

I’d decided to ‘bite the bullet’ and give it a go…

And what a great decision it was!

The three days flew by and I had a great time meeting lots of like-minded online entrepreneurs and listening to presentations by a handful of extremely successful marketers.

It was a real eye-opener…

And over the last year, the little nuggets of information that the speakers shared have really paid off for me:

Just one thing speaker number 2 said has ensured that all my new websites are indexed by Google within a couple of days.

A little snippet of information from speaker number 3 increased my AdSense earnings by 137%!

Speaker number 4 told the attendees something that I started using as soon as I got home. I reckon it has made me at least 5 figures over the last 12 months.

And that’s not all. I met several other “low key” marketers who were attending, not speaking. A few weeks after getting back, one got in contact and we did a JV.

It was by far the best and easiest JV I have done and netted me $1,200 from just one email.

This was only possible because we met over a beer and got talking.

The point of all this is:

Attending that inexpensive seminar has increased my earnings, increased my email list FIVE-fold and also allowed me to meet a bunch of other marketers with whom I can JV.

It was a superb weekend and so as soon as I heard that Robert was running another, I got my ticket.

The seminar is being held in Coventry this year, from:

Friday 5th October to Sunday 7th October

Obviously, I can’t promise that you’ll come away a millionaire but I highly recommend that you attend as these seminars are excellent in content and also in networking opportunities.

They aren’t massive 1,000+ attendee events, they are small 50-100 strong get-togethers where everybody is able to mingle and network and get face-to-face time with the speakers.

To find out more, go here:

[link no longer active]

And if you have any questions, let me know and I will do my best to get some answers directly from Robert.

I realise that you may be wary of attending seminars, and I was in the same position last year. However, the opportunities that open up when you turn off the PC, get on a train and get out there meeting people really are well worth the time and effort.

Such is the cut-throat world of biz opps that in order to sell an opp it seems you have to over-state your earnings.

Nothing fraudulent, obviously, but a lot of promoters seem to constantly talk about how much they “pull in” rather than their actual profits.

The trick, it seems, is to word the sales letter so that a reader is given the impression that you are talking about your profits when you are actually talking about the total sales amount you made.

If your sales for any particular month add up to £5,000 but you spent £4,500 on advertising and other costs, you’ve only made a profit of £500. However, the common concensus would be to state your earnings as £5k on the sales letter.

The only way you can tell if the promoter is telling the truth is by looking at their accounts submitted to Companies House.

Unfortunately you can only do this if they run a limited company.

Take for example one enterprising UK internet marketer who as early as September 2005 was boasting about how he pulled in between £2,000 and £15,000 per month selling information products.

For £1 you can order this particular person’s accounts for the 2005-2006 tax year. If you did you would find that his total profit for the year was just under £4,000 – around £330 a month. In other words, far from the £2k – £15k claimed on his website.

So, this person may have “pulled in” £15,000 a month but he must’ve spent £14,000+ on related costs.

Not quite as impressive when you look at it that way…

Another biz opps promoter claims to make up to £25,000 a month but his loose talk on a forum reveals that the actual profit is closer to £1,000 after he has paid for all the incidental costs.

Unfortunately this particular marketer doesn’t run a limited company so his accounts cannot be checked but £12,000 a year isn’t quite as impressive as the £300k that his website suggests he makes.

Moral of the story? Well, don’t assume anything when you read a sales letter – some marketers use specific words and phrases to suggest that their earnings are higher than they actually are.

“Pulled in” usually means total sales, not total profit and as you may well know, advertising in the national newspapers and also via PPC can be very expensive…

Just got an email through from one enterprising fellow who has decided to start calling himself “The UK’s Top Internet Marketer”.

I’m not going to mention his name because I don’t want to give him any exposure at all – but I can say that he is certainly NOT the UK’s top internet marketer. Quite where he got the idea that he is I don’t know.

No-one is backing up his claim… His sales page has no testimonials and he is demanding £4,997 for mentoring.

I have previously read one of his products and I wasn’t impressed in the slightest. It was poorly written and almost impossible to follow because of the lack of a promised “step-by-step” method.

Since then the only only product he has offered is a gambling-related software program sold from a very 90s-esque website (read: poorly designed and buggy with a Word document for an order form – you have to print it off and send it through the mail. Not quite “internet” marketing!)

What he’s decided to do is offer a “one-on-one” mentoring course for just 10 lucky students. For their 5 grand they get 12 one hour phone calls and 6 month’s “access” to this so-called expert internet marketer.

At least he’s trying I suppose but I can only see the most gullible of people even considering this poor offer.

This is a small part of his sales letter – note the cop-out where it comes to offering any proof that he has actually made more than one or two products:

“I’m [name removed], creator of the highly successful [product name], which along with several other cash-rich Internet ventures, have made me one of the UK’s richest and most formidable Internet marketers this decade.

As well as developing and marketing my own products, I have worked with and still do work with many of the top guru’s (sic) helping them develop and launch some of the most successful products on-line. (Due to contractual agreements, I am unable to divulge any specific product names or details)”

I’m extremely sceptical when people cite poor excuses like “contractual agreements” to avoid backing up their claims.

Mr Mysterious here does offer some proof that he is one of the “UK’s richest” internet marketers by showing some screenshots of a merchant account. Unfortunately, the most recent transaction on these pictures is from March 2006 so perhaps he hasn’t been very successful recently.

So, be careful if you get a typo-ridden email from someone you’ve never heard of who calls himself the UK’s Top Internet Marketer. I’m not convinced that he is I’m afraid, especially after seeing some of the awful sites he has thrown together…

I love WordPress blogs because they are so simple to use.

You just login, write a short message, click ‘Publish’ and it is up on the web.

An added bonus is that people can add comments to your posts to discuss what you have written.

Of course, as with anything good on the web, spammers and scumbags have to try and take advantage of it.

WordPress blogs, unfortunately, attract idiot comment spammers. These people run automated programs which visit your blog and leave comments about all kinds of unwanted subjects – porn, drugs, get rich quick schemes etc.

If you don’t moderate comments, your blog could pretty quickly get filled up with crap.

After almost a year of running this particular blog, I think I have pretty much stopped the spammers now. I get the occassional junk comment but now it is just one, rather than the 50 or so I was getting daily.

What I did was ensure that every comment had to be moderated before it could appear on the blog, EXCEPT for comments by people who had been approved before.

So, if you’ve written a comment on here which has been approved in the past and you write a new one, it should appear immediately – no moderation required.

As I was deleting all of the spam, I kept track of all the stupid words that the spammers were using.

Every time I got a new comment about a certain drug I would add that drug’s name to the Blacklist.

This means that any comments written that mention “cialis” for example, are deleted immediately so I don’t even see them.

Soon I also noticed that the spammers were using similar domain names everytime so I would add part of the domain name into the Blacklist.

Almost all spammers on this blog were using dot info domain names.

I was tempted to add “.info” to the Blacklist but I decided not to just in case someone genuine was using this kind of web address.

So far there are about 250 terms that trigger deletion of comments on this particular blog and they seem to be keeping it clear of any crap.

And good thing too.

I’ve seen blogs that are left to rot and it isn’t pretty once the comment spammers take hold so if you value your own blog, please make sure to keep your Blacklist up to date!

Thanks for reading,

Ben

P.S. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out The How To Lay Off Your Boss Home Study Course – surprisingly good!

P.P.S. By all means leave a comment on this post but please don’t use any dodgy words…