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If you are a subscriber to my free ‘Business Brainwaves’ newsletter, please check your e-mail, because I’ve just sent you a download link for a product that is being sold for $47.

Look out for an e-mail with the subject line:

Business Brainwaves - A gift from a fellow subscriber…

It’s a free gift from a fellow subscriber, and it comes complete with master resell rights. I’m only making this available to anyone who opens the e-mail I just sent out.

If you’re reading this, and you haven’t subscribed yet, I’m afraid you’ve missed out on this particular free gift.

As time goes on, I plan to give out more ’subscriber only gifts and content’. Call it my way of saying thank you to my subscribers, for continuing to open my e-mails and read what I have to say.

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Wishing you success,

Jason Lewis

As human beings (and marketers), it’s in our nature to take shortcuts.  I’m not immune to this myself, as I’m always looking for faster ways to do things.

However, sometimes you have to take a step back and look at the ethical and moral side effects of what you do, and consider the impact those actions could have on your own business and reputation.

Last month a new software product was released, which was touted as being able to get you a flood of traffic from other people’s Blogs.  I  haven’t used this software, but I’ve got an idea of how it works, and I’ve definitely seen the mess it can make on unsuspecting Blogs.

In a nutshell, you pump a few bits of information into this software, like keywords and your website link.  This ‘clever’ but unethical software will go out and find hundreds, if not thousands of Blogs, and post tons of ‘pretend’ comments from you, with a link back to your blog.

Thankfully, it seems to be only infecting Blogs using the Blogger service, but that could soon change.  I’ve seen Blogs that were getting no comments or very little before; then all of a sudden they’re getting 100+ comments a day from people who have clearly never read the posts, or been to the Blogs they are commenting on.

So How Is This Causing Any Harm?

What I don’t like is that the sales letter for the software implies that it’s a win, win situation.  You get loads of traffic from the Blogs you auto post comments on, and the blog owners get lots of comments making their blog appear popular.

I have to say that is a load of c#@p!

As someone who wants to create a useful and informative blog for my readers, I encourage anyone who ‘READS’ any of my posts to make a comment, whether it be a compliment, a comment on the topic I’m writing about, additional useful information on the topic, or even some constructive criticism about me or my particular viewpoint.

Are You Committing Reputation Suicide?

Let’s look at this from the perspective of the people using blog comment submission software…

In the short term, I have no doubt that after using this software, users of it will indeed get a nice injection of extra traffic to their websites.  Just as they were promised when they bought it.

But at what long term cost?

Will their opinions carry the same weight as they did before?

It’s Like Groundhog Day For Blog Comments

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about…

I came across this blog that is getting over run with these auto generated comments.  Duplicate comments are being made from the same people every day. Sometimes, twice or more a day saying the same thing. Each time they go something like:

"Yo, This blog is pretty neat. You should check out mine sometime. It pretty much covers [their keyword stuffed link goes here] related stuff."

Now, on it’s own, there’s nothing overly wrong with that comment, although it is a bit too obvious that it was only made to get a link back to the comment poster’s site.

Tell me honestly…if you saw multiple blog comments like the one above from the same person, almost daily, saying virtually the exact same thing, on the same blog, week in week out, making it abundantly clear that they have never even been to the blog they are commenting on, would you think of that person as someone whose opinion is worth something? Someone worth listening to, learning from, buying from, and whose recommendation you could trust?

NO!

Now, imagine dozens of comments from different people that are similar to the above, underneath every single post being made on thousands of different Blogs.  What happens is; the real comments from genuine readers of the blog, get completely lost in the middle of the spam.  For me, the comments on that site are now not worth reading.  It’s not worth my time wading through all the spam to find the genuine comments.

A snapshot…

One blog post I saw on someone’s blog had 109 comments.  I thought blimey, they must get a lot of traffic. Then I took a closer look at the comments…

• 7 people posted 2 comments
• 8 people posted 3 comments
• 1 ‘idiot’ made 15 comments

Every single one of those 109 comments was almost identical.  Just a few words changed here and there, and different keywords used for each link. From what I could see, every one of the comments were made by people giving the impression it was the first time they had been to the blog.  Problem was, they had been making the same multiple duplicate comments for days, and will probably go on making them indefinitely.

These poor blog owners have worked hard to create a blog worth visiting.  I’m sure they’d love to get ‘real’ comments from genuine people, who have actually read their blog posts, but not all this spam which just devalues their blog.

Imagine…100+ comments being made against each and every blog post, saying the exact same thing, day in day out, for weeks and months.  Who is going to read that?

Think Before You Do This!

If you are considering using a piece of software that is essentially going to send spam to other people’s websites, ‘think’ about all the angles before you jump in with both feet. 

Jason Lewis

P.S. A caveat: As I’ve said, I haven’t used this software or seen it first hand, which is why I’m not going to name it here.  It could be that it’s just a minority of rogue users who are using the software unethically, without any consideration of the harm they are doing (to both themselves and blog publishers).  If that is the case though,  I think the software publishers do have a responsibility to put some restrictions in place, to prevent people miss-using it in this way.

P.P.S. All the people using this software to post these auto generated blog comments, are using keywords in the links back to their sites, with the aim of improving their link popularity for those keywords.   The sad part is; they won’t get ‘any’ credit for those links in the search engines.

Most blog software these days, including Blogger, automatically inserts the "no-follow" tag in the HTML code for any links added in the comments area.  This stops the spiders from search engines like Google from following the links.  The "no-follow" tag was introduced to help combat blog comment spam.

If you’ve read through my newsletter archives, you will have heard me talk about making money from material that is in the public domain.

I want you to go and have a look at what’s available on this website:

http://www.archive.org

Now, you’ve probably already seen lots of info on public domain books and the like.  However, on the archive site above you can get hold of stuff like feature films, music and even things like superman and popeye cartoons.

You will find that much of this is in the public domain and free to use for commercial use.  Which basically means you can repackage it and sell it for profit!

A Word Of Caution: Not everything on this site is allowed to be used for commercial use.  You should check the terms for each item, and or check with the contributer before you start selling anything. 

How Can You Make Money From This Stuff?

There are lots of different ways, but one great way would be to create packages of related products and burn them onto a CD.  Maybe add your own review of each film, cartoon or music clip, and you’ve just created your own unique product.

You could sell these CD’s from your own website or even on auction sites like eBay. If you initially burn the CD’s to order, it would be a very low cost venture to start up.

Another option…

Write a sales letter for each CD, and then sell the resell rights for the CD’s for other people to sell.

Have a good look around the archive.org website, I’m sure your creative juices will start flowing with excitement.

Tip: There are loads of ‘open source’ music files available.  Audio is being used more and more on the web, for intro’s to personal audio messages and on-screen videos etc.   There are websites ’selling’ royalty free music to these website owners, and making a real killing.  Want in on the action?

Jason Lewis

P.S. If the idea of using public domain material is all very new to you, check out the Public Domain Reports