Advertising on Blogs and spamming

spam comments with hidden ad links

Hello dear fellow bloggers,

this is an open letter to ask about your experience with advertisers and your blog.

I am bogging for eight years now (since end of 2006) and when my blog had started to reach a Google Pager Rank of 3, enquires of advertisers dropped in. It was fun! And rewarding! Some bloggers, the professional ones, who posted 3 posts a week (that was a target back then), could probably almost live from their blogs. I only made little pocket money, but it would have paid the cost of web hosting and some cups of coffee.

Advertising back then was a text link or banner on your blog roll (blog list) for a certain company that paid by month or year in advance via paypal.

Some companies would even send sample products that bloggers could review on their blog. You would get the product for free. Sometimes a partner program was also in place. Bloggers would earn for every click or product sale referred from their blog. I am sure that still works with the top bloggers.

Then the more sneaky offers came. "Can you do a text link somewhere inside a blog post of our choice?" Yeah, hidden advertising for 5 USD a link that remains there for ever. No way!

And with the rise of social media, like Facebook, blogs seemed to have become less interesting for advertisers. (Ok, in my case, I am not the frequent writer and that's of course a reason for advertisers to stop renewing a co-operations. But then, why on earth I get spam comments every single day?)

Why do these people (or robots?) submit constantly different comments with different hidden text links referring to different companies on different posts, every single day?

They prefer older posts, hoping their hidden links get on your blog unrecognized ... But who hasn't 'comment moderation' on? BTW, in comment moderation you do not see the hidden links and they often even have a blogger profile, see photo. But Blogger has a very efficient spam filter in place.

No doubt, that top bloggers are always interesting for advertisers as popular websites always have and always will be. But how about the casual long-time blogger (like me) ?

I think, the explanation for many of these annoying spam comments are spam sending 'robots' that pick blogs and place comments anonymously and just randomly. Not for selling goods, but to boost the page rank of their clients who are mainly small companies. Or they are private people who get referral fees for clicks on their links. All these advertising links try to sell various products: from tiles and furniture to software products, SEO services, to English schools.

Very curious about your experience with advertising on your blog lately. Please share!

Would love to hear from you,
kind regards
Susan