Once you’ve moved up in the world of blogging and have done
your marketing properly you start getting all sorts of attention and sometimes
you get emails and comments from spammers.
One of the things I love about Blogger is their great filter
software that sorts them out. I get an email asking for approval before any
suspicious comments are posted. My readers never see them but I get several
every week.
What is spam?
Were not talking about the salty canned meat variety. This
spam comes in the form of emails or comments usually soliciting a service you
don’t want.
I say usually because one man’s spam is another man’s bread
and butter.
Examples of spam
Recently I’ve gotten emails telling me my website was
difficult to find but with their service I can increase my audience. I must not be too hard to find if they found
me.
Others are prostitutes and don’t even bother to find out I’m
a woman. The reason I suspect them to be ladies of the night is because their emails
say they are looking for a nice man to get to know better. I realize some
countries might not know that “Pamela” is a woman’s name but my picture is on
my websites. Maybe they are hoping I have
a lonely desperate male assistant.
Most of us have read the emails from Ethiopia telling us
we’ve won or inherited a large sum of money and if we will give them our bank
information they will gladly send it to us. Unfortunately
people fall for this one on a regular basis.
I get emails asking me to be their pen pal. While many of
these people are probably harmless, in this day and age one can’t be too
careful so if I receive a short note in my webmail with little information
about the sender, you aren’t going to get a response.
There are many other scams out there but these are the ones
I’ve gotten lately.
Should you put your
email on your website?
For a long time I didn’t post mine for just this reason and figured
if anyone wanted to talk to me they could just post a comment on one of my
blogs or articles but I have read in many marketing books as well as online
articles that it is a good business practice to give your customers a way of
reaching you.
I have gotten a few writing jobs this way so it is a good
idea, you just have to be careful who you accept work from since many
correspondences are spam. Not all writing offers are legitimate so be sure and
check them out before taking the assignment.
Oh and I am not interested in buying Viagra or any other
pharmaceuticals from strangers. Surely you don’t think I’m that gullible.
