Archive for February, 2008

Spam Karma that is… If you use WordPress as a blogging platform and you have any visibility at all, you are probably very familiar the daily challenge of deleting spam comments. I just installed, and can now recommend, Spam Karma 2 by Dr.Dave. It is a free WordPress plugin and takes minutes to install.

Spam is a real annoyance, and a time killer. The good news is there is no need to deal with it. If you aren’t getting any blog spam and have not addressed the issue (and you aren’t using a hosting blog platform), then you probably need to work on building your web traffic and online visibility

This should have been Friday’s rant. I will use being under the weather as an excuse because I really was, although I don’t think I would have had this particular post.

So here I am working on a late night project, and I got side tracked with Digg. I actually added a few new Digg friends today and went to preview some of their submissions. One gal had lots of different topics on multiple blogs, but here was the problem with all of them. Upon arriving at each of her websites, you saw her picture which confirmed it was the same person, but also 3/4 of the screen was taken up by a header followed by not one, but two 600 x 120 ad bars – HOW ANNOYING! The sad part for her is that she had some fairly decent content, but I don’t think the message would be clear enough to those arriving at her site to make it worthy of submitting or promoting. I guess if you are networked with a bunch of other bloggers pushing people to articles buried amidst contextual ads, then perhaps you will still get some action. Does anyone think that perhaps, that is one of the reasons that search marketers get a bad rap in Social Media circles?

It’s a Friday Rant from OldSchool and while I’d love to rant about the Mayo Clinic and our disappointment in the care that they’ve given my wife, I won’t. I will stay on course and talk about good old SEO.

One of the things that REALLY annoys me is the “hey, I’m rich and I don’t have any education, but you are reading my blog, so I don’t care if I can’t spell or have poor grammar” attitude that I see in the blogosphere. I have seen this more in the affiliate marketing circles, but today I was reading an uber-bloggers blog and I just got disgusted. As a professional, it is such a turn off to think “how can this guy have this large of a following when he doesn’t respect his readers intelligence (or himself) enough to use a spell checker or a grammar checker”. It’s a little step, but it goes a long way in my opinion. Especially if you are not an A List blogger (yet); do you think a journalist would respect your work if they found it, or would they just pass it up?

And yes, the poor grammar in the title was intentional

What are your thoughts?

It seems that SU is offline for some odd reason. I trust it will recover, but that usually not a good sign.

Check it out: http://www.stumbleupon.com/ (time 10:50AM, PST – Feb 6, 2008)

(update: 10:58AM, PST)

As expected – the site did recover – but here is the screen shot for those that missed it.

I had not used Yahoo Paid Search for some time, but I recently signed up for a new account based on a promo offer that I received. Anytime anyone wants to offer me free traffic, I am all ears.

I paid my $5.00 activation fee and got free credit ($30) on my account. Here is where the problem came in. I had set my daily spend to $10 per day for a certain campaign and had just under $30 in the account after a few days (I was taking it slowly). I then received an email saying that I had been charged $30 to add funds to my account. I was told that if I wanted to reduce the frequency of these messages and charges to increase my charge amount.

Here is my problem with this. Unless you write to them and change this, you are not in a position to now be able to stop the charges because every time the account gets below three days worth of charges, your credit card will automatically be billed. Sure, you can turn the account off, but they still have your money.

I don’t recall if there was a prepay-deposit feature when I set the account up, but if there is, this would be the option to choose if you want to control your spending. I am just glad I didn’t set my daily limit to $100, or I would have been charged $300.