RIGHT ABOUT THE TIME this blog shed 200 daily page views, I figured that something other than a disinterested readership or a distracted community was at work. In fact, Six Apart's spam filters were suggesting that more than 20% of the visitors to my blog were potential spammers. Something about Typepad's anti-spam controls caused unwanted commentators to be flicked away without notching up a page view. I could see that happening in reports that StatCounter served me. Over time, I noticed my daily visitors decreased from more than 1200 to less than 900. At the same time, I also reduced the admin time required to clean up spammy comments, especially those concerning hotels (not the nice one at left). Then something interesting started to happen. The spammers started writing me with offers for text links and embedded content. I train copywriters to produce this kind of work so I listen when approached because some of the requestors often come from my academic classrooms. I'm also interested in carving out an online ecosystem for like-minded merchants in County Tipperary and text linkages are a natural place to start.
It's easy to disregard the stupid offers from people who want to buy a placement because those stupid offers overflow with spelling and grammatical mistakes. It's also easy to attract very straightforward offers for embedded text references in years-old blog posts. And as long as I disclose the presence of those hyperlinked references in my archived content, I believe I comply with Federal Trade Commission guidelines on the matter. For the record, I won't handle a micropayment that's less than the cost of one night's stay for my family in Cork or Dublin. My former students know that already. They're the ones requesting paid embedded placement on five-year-old blog posts that still feature in the top 10 of Google search engine results.
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