Give Me A Break!

Everyone wants a magic wand to get traffic to their website.  And, wherever there are unfulfilled wishes, there are always lots of people who take advantage of that yearning by offering useless solutions.  Drives me nuts.

The latest in this solution mill came and slapped me in the face the other day, and I can’t help but write about it.  I was pleased to see that someone had left a comment on this blog, and reviewed it in order to respond.  This is what it said:

• Has anyone tried [vendorname] viral internet marketing service. My friend suggested them to me after sucessful 10 day campaign, he had with them. I am going to give this a try today to see how it works. http:// [vendorname].com (this was a live link)

The person who left the comment didn’t use the vendor’s website linked to their name, but their email address was located — guess where?  Yup, the commenter was an employee of the vendor “recommended” in the post.

How stupid do they think we blog owners are?  To me, this is right up there with the emails I get from people who want to give me a few million dollars if I help them transfer money out of some country I’ve never heard of.

Anyone who has a blog, do you look at the comments that are left on your blog?  Do you catch comments like these that don’t make any sense?

The only reason I can think of for people to leave such stupid comments is that they get away with it a large percentage of the time.  For the sake of the rest of us, if you don’t monitor your comments, please start!

Out of curiosity, I visited the website of this company with the great viral marketing service.  Here’s a summary of how they explain their service:

• one of a kind internet viral marketing delivery platform that avoids the issues related to pay per click fraud.  Huh?
• publishers create a message about an advertiser’s product or service, including a link to advertiser website
• the message is posted on a variety of highly related and visited forum, blog and other sites.  Great grammar. . .
• we carefully analyze the rules and regulations of each website before posting their message there to see whether posting such message would be allowed and to ensure that posting is completely relevant to the target audience  Well, they didn’t do a very good job on this blog – their comment was immediately deleted.
• Advertisers only pay for posted messages which remain for a “settle-in” period, a minimum of 5 days or 120 hours  Wow, such a deal!
• advertisers receive fair amount of direct traffic and to benefit in SEO process, while other people talk about it in their own circles and market the product or service even further.  So, in 5 days they think a website will get SEO benefit from an incoming link?  What have they been smoking?
•  Normally messages that “Settle-In” should remain for a very long time, if not indefinitely.  What they’re saying is that if someone hasn’t deleted the message after five days, they probably won’t.  That leads me to believe they’re posting on a lot of abandoned sites, or not enough of us are paying attention!

And, evidently, this company thinks people are going to pay for this service.

The sad thing is that some people probably will.