Spam Followers on Twitter

Now that there's software that will automatically follow people on twitter if they tweet certain keywords (and then unfollow them a few days later if they don't follow back), spammers on twitter are heating up.

As an experiment, I posted a tweet that had the phrases "make money online" and "internet marketing". Within 6 minutes I had 5 new followers.*

I'm starting to wonder if Twitter is going to find away to prevent this. Perhaps everytime you follow someone you're going to have to type in the characters from one of those images, like this one:


Getting a lot of people listening to your tweets and sending a small percentage of them to whatever links you post is just too good for people to pass up these days.

* Now 6 followers in 8 minutes

How to Keep Your E-mail Marketing From Getting Snatched Up by Spam Filters

Composing your e-mails doesn’t end when you’ve perfected the body copy for sales effectiveness. You also have to take into consideration how your copy will be “read” by spam filters.

Studies show that more than fifteen-percent of permission-based e-mails don’t make it through the spam filters of major e-mail account providers like Yahoo!, Google, and Hotmail. And for query e-mails (non-permission-based e-mails) the rate is much, much higher. People just aren’t receiving these messages!

To avoid having your hard work intercepted by spam filters, consider these important rules when editing the text of your e-mail blast:

Rule #1: Be Careful With Your Vocabulary

Spam filtering programs use an entire dictionary of common words and phrases that pop-up consistently in spam e-mails. Avoid words like “free,” “prize,” “offer,” the names of major pharmaceuticals, the names of celebrities, etc.

Rule #2: Be Professional

Writing in all-caps, increasing font-size, using lots of punctuation (such as multiple exclamation points) and highlighting words in rainbow colors are all tell-tale sign for spam-filters that your e-mail is suspicious. Keep it simple and clean. Let your words do the talking.

Rule #3: Don’t Send Attachments

With the prevalence of viruses and other corrupting software, very few attachments make it through spam filters. Today, with the ability to safely embed both images and web links in your e-mail, sending attachments is becoming increasingly unnecessary.

Rule #4: Become a “Student of Spam”

Study the spam messages that make it into your inbox. How do you think they got through? What elements turn you away from reading it? Does the subject line make you want to open the message, or delete it? Knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing the rules for success.

Rule #5: Use a Tool to Check Your E-Mail

There are countless e-mail analyzing services and software available on the web. Some of them are even free, like the cut and paste word-checker at SpamDance. By running your text through such a tool, it will help you optimize your language and ensure success of your direct e-mail campaign.

You Got Digg in My Google!

I read this story on TechCrunch a couple days ago, and the title says it all -- "Is This the Future of Search?"

The article contains a video demonstration of a closed beta version of Google's newest way of determining search results -- by adding Digg-style voting to the results pages.

Quite frankly, I'm not sure what to think about this. For starters, I'm not the biggest fan of Digg -- I think the voting system is rather arbitrary, susceptible to spam, and frequently ignores better stories in favour of more "popular" items.

In my opinion, there's no reason to believe that these new Google search results won't also be maliciously manipulated and spammed to produce less than desirable results. After all, it's not as if Google is immune to spam -- just check out the constant buffoonery on display at the new Google Trends tool.

On the other hand though, if used wisely (of course, this is the Internet we're talking about, so that is highly unlikely), the voting system could actually be used to vote down obvious spammers and keyword stuffers, clearing the first couple of search results pages for, you know, actual related content.

As one of my main roles at Marketing Breakthroughs is that of web copywriter and SEO specialist, I'm very interested in seeing how this turns out. What effect will this have on search engine optimized web content? Will keyword-rich copy be less important if your site can simply be voted off the first page? Will web marketers have to spend countless hours clicking thumbs up and thumbs down icons to counteract the Google-bombing being done to their clients by their competitors?

We shall see.