You won’t need anything else but some elbow grease. If you’re a big spender another $5 spent over at Fiverr will make you stand out from the crowd… more on that in a bit.

The details… Tiffany Dow is running a WSO for a PLR package that consists of 8 reviews for the most popular ClickBank product in the dating niche.

The product is “The Tao of BadAss” yes, cheesy, but it’s geared for young single men and it’s a very popular and profitable niche.

Anyway. It’s the #1 product on ClickBank. Correction… I just checked and it’s number 2, but you get the point, it’s selling well.

I was invited to participate in a panel discussion at the Northern California Book Publicity and Marketing Association‘s event in July. It was a great discussion on book marketing, publicity, and self publishing. The ease of self publishing with Kindle Direct Publishing on Amazon is changing the publishing world and those folks from the traditional publishing world are taking note.

And the “error message” is confusing. Here is there full policy:

https://pinterest.zendesk.com/entries/21350812-why-am-i-blocked-from-commenting-or-performing-other-actions-on-pinterest

5. Using a link-shortener or a link-redirect, for example: bit.ly or other link-shorteners – try using the full link in a comment or pin description instead! Also try pinning from the original source without using a link-redirect.

Number five does spell it out, but if you don’t click on the “read more” link, you’re left thinking you were blocked because you pinned too much, which wasn’t my case. By removing the URL shortener, I was able to pin to my board.

Here is the code once again:

?&tag=yourid-20

Copy and paste it (don’t forget to replace “yourid” with your Amazon tracking ID).

Get the Facebook Cover Template Here

Get a Facebook Cover Designed on Fiverr

This happened to me the other day. I had an idea but I wasn’t home by my computer and my iPad wasn’t handy. I was in a public spot so I didn’t want to start talking into my smartphone (the memo record feature is pretty handy). I wished I had a notepad and pen but I didn’t it and the idea is probably gone forever.

I was out shopping at Target and sure enough, they had all types of goodies. Especially now that they’re stocking for the “back to school” crowd in the fall.

I bought an old school pocket-size composition notebook. Two for $1. Now that’s a bargain. I’ll have one in the car and one on me at all times. Between the electronic tools and an old school comp book, I should be ready for the next idea to come crashing through.

It’s also handy as heck for “to do” and “shopping lists”.

I then noticed just as many where also unsubscribing from my mailing list. Well, that’s normal. I can’t please everyone. Unsubscribes are normal part of list building and managing a list. But then it was just too much. What the heck am I doing wrong here? Can my email messages be that bad?

I don’t email every day, I don’t hammer my subscribers with every offer under the sun in pursuit of the commission. I pride myself in building a relationship with my subscribers. I’ve even received compliments over it and I’ve become online friends with many of my subscribers, so what gives?

I haven’t had time to delve into it, so I just let it go, until it really got to bothering me, so tonight, I put time aside to delve into my Aweber and site stats. Holy crap, am I glad I did!

Here’s the low down. And I guess I’m naive, I didn’t even know this was a thing spammers where doing. But that’s who was joining my list in droves.

I logged into Aweber and I was checking my unsubscribe stats. The first thing that got my attention was that all these unsubscribes came before they even received an email from me…

Okay, so if it’s not my emails that drove them off, what then? At first I thought perhaps they signed up to  one of my lists to get one of my free reports and then unsubscribe right away, once they downloaded the report. It happens but damn, that’s a lot of folks doing that. I doesn’t happen that much to me.

Next up, I check the date they subscribed and unsubscribed. The majority of these “subscribers” joined my list then unsubscribed within an hour (at the most).

Hmm, okay, they subscribed, then before I even emailed them anything, they unsubscribed within an hour. Something nefarious is afoot — I’m quick aren’t I?

Next up, I need to check out the entry point. From where are these “people” subscribing. Time to check my ad tracking stats.

I take a look and a-ha, they’re all coming in from the same source: “comment_checkbox“. It seemed like a great idea, folks are reading my blog post, they want to comment, so they’re already engaged, why not make it nice and easy for them to subscribe, right from there?

Especially since I’m use a plugin called “MaxBlogPress Subscribers Magnet” which makes it so darn easy to do…

Heck, I just check that little box with the plugin admin area and voilà, the plugin adds a little checkmark at the bottom of my comment box area so folks can check it and subscribe to my mailing list when commenting. Groovy!

The culprit…

So that feature of MaxBlogPress Subscribers Magnet, really was a magnet, but it wasn’t attracting the kind of subscribers I had hoped. And I was oblivious, it’s embarrassing. My opt-in rates went through the roof! What a frigging great plugin, worth every penny, I thought… until I finally took a close look at the kind of “subscribers” the magnet was adding onto my email list. Pure crap.

Below you’ll see my “unsubscribe” data from Aweber. As you can see, the Ad Tracking code is the same, so they all entered through the same source. The “subscribe to my newsletter” checkbox added to my blog comment field by the MaxBlogPress Subscriber Magnet plugin. Notice the the “names”… diet power, bingodaubers, Eben Pagan Guru (weird one, must be an affiliate of his or something), foot locker coupons, and on and on. Comment spam type stuff.

Upon checking into a few of these “subscribers”, it appears they all use email addresses that don’t even work since the ones I checked, where all stopped by Aweber for having an email address that was undeliverable.

I have a welcome email that goes out once someone signs up so they can easily confirm their subscription, but the process didn’t get that far since they’re using bogus email addresses so Aweber stopped the subscription.

Spammers

What’s the point of all this crap? What are they trying to game? I’m not even sure. I thought perhaps they wanted to get my email address so they could spam me. My email goes out to them, they scrape my email address and add it to their database. But it doesn’t appear it even got that far.

Perhaps they’re trying comment spam by appearing to be a subscriber. But that’s a moot point, I use Akismet and other anti-spam plugins on my blog so very few spam comments even make it to the point where I have to manually review them and mark them as spam. So those backlinks won’t even make it to my blog. So I don’t think it’s that either. But who knows how spammers operate. I’m sure it’s an all automated software trying to game my blog.

I’ve already spent more time analyzing this than I want. But the main lesson-learned from this analysis for me… remove that subscribe checkbox from my post comments.

Those subscribers were not only useless, but they royally screwed up my stats. They also led me to falsely believe that the strategies I had implemented (like using the MaxBlogPress Subscriber Magnet comment feature) were working like gangbusters. I was all impressed with my kick-butt percent increase in subscribers. And Even worse, as I wrote in this post about Aweber invoicing me for going over my allotted subscriber limit for my plan, all these fake subscribers ended up being a good chunk of those subscribers that put me over the limit. Since even unsubscribed, they’re still on the Aweber database so I had to pay extra for them (I was paying an additional $9.95 per month to Aweber for four months before wising up and having them deleted off the database permanently).

It’s embarrassing to admit that I let this go unchecked for many months before delving into my stats. All the information was right there thanks to Aweber and their awesome stats.

My opt-in rate on this blog will be going way down in the next 24-hours and beyond, thank goodness! Real, quality subscribers only, please.

Try AWeber’s Email Marketing Tool Risk-Free

The numbers didn’t jive with what I had for subscribers to my mailing lists so I asked Aweber about it. They got back to me right away (another reason I dig Aweber, great support) and they mentioned that if you include the list members that have unsubscribed to my mailing list, I was over the allotted amount of subscribers for my account.

Aweber informed that I could delete the unsubscribed email addresses but they provided reasons why I might want to keep them on my account:

This stored information can be useful to see what subscribers like/dislike
about your messages. You can also see when they unsubscribed to see if there
are any correlations between your message content and their position in your
message sequence. You can use this to determine if subscribers are stopping
on a certain message or after a certain period of time.

If you have prospect and customer lists, you may want to track those
subscribers who were once prospects and then became customers, as well as
when the transition occurred. If those subscribers weren’t being counted
toward your subscriber totals, we would simply remove that information and
there would be no way to track when someone became a customer and if/when
they were a prospect, in addition to which message persuaded them to make a
purchase.

It didn’t sound too bad and it made sense, they are storing that data so it should count, but is it worth the extra ten bucks per month? After four months, I decided, it’s not worth it.

Here is why. The simple fact is that I don’t anything with that data, so what’s the point of paying for it? I could be doing more testing to figure out why people are unsubscribing, but when they do provide feedback it’s usually something along the lines of “I get too many emails already“.

I try to email about once a week, but in reality, I average an email every 2-3 weeks which is very low for the email marketing world. So it’s not that I’m emailing them too much (I’m actually emailing too infrequently when it comes to email marketing), but when you add me to the other email lists they subscribed, it’s just too many emails.

I don’t see how crunching my unsubscribe data will help me improve those numbers, so why pay an additional ten bucks per month to store data from folks who didn’t want to stay subscribed to my list anyway? Folks who will never again see one of my emails.

So I deleted them off my Aweber account. However, before I erased them into oblivion, I did download my list (unsubscribed peeps too) so I have them all saved onto a spreadsheet on my computer. It’s good backup and I’ll still have that unsubscriber data, I just won’t be paying Aweber extra for it, every month.

By the way, backing up your mailing list onto your computer from time to time is always a good idea. You just never know what might happend  with your email marketing software so it’s best to keep that valuable asset backed up on your own computer for safe keeping.

Here is how to do that with Aweber (it’s easy peasy)…

In Portugese:

And Spanish:

I found it interesting that folks in those countries felt my blog post was worth their time to enter the URL into Google Translator so they could read it in their own language.

In fact, that post has generated some great backlinks from all over the world… Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Russia and other countries. Including websites with high page rank. One site alone has sent over 700 click to my blog from that one post.

The reason? I’m giving away a free spreadsheet and Open Office document of my blogging editorial calendar.  No strings attached. No opt-in required. Direct links which in turn has led other websites to link to my post without me even knowing about it.

That has resulted in more traffic and I’ve seen an uptick in opt-in’s from that blog post. That free download and post has even landed me on page one of Google for “editorial calendar”… well, sort of… Smash Magazine wrote about editorial calendars and they linked to my blog post in their own post, which is ranked on page one for that search term.

All that link love, just from giving something of value away for free.

Pinterest is still a small smart up (less than 10 employees) and now they have to deal with spammers who were creating hundreds/thousands of fake Pinterest accounts to spam affiliate links.

Spammers claimed to make $1,000 per day (I doubt that claim) and sure enough someone is selling spamming bots for Pinterest.

I was surprised to see one for sale as a WSO on the Warrior Forum. The Warrior Forum does try to shut down tools designed to violate other sites terms and that are for spamming, so they did lock up that thread. Although they left the buy button intact… not sure if they forgot to remove it or what.

There is karma justice in that the spam software developer charges $249 for his bot and from the reviews, it doesn’t really seem to work that well, nor are the spammer wannabees making money (probably since Pinterest is working to get rid of them).

Good luck getting a refund from someone selling software to spam. All the time wasted trying to spam, they could have been doing it the right way vs wasting their time, money, and annoying Pinterest users and Pinterest the site.

It got me thinking. The average fool that buys a spamming software doesn’t really know what they’re doing, they’re lazy, looking for shortcuts. But these guys who develop these tools, they’re not lazy (they created the software/bot) and they have skills to create software. I just don’t understand why they would waste their time and skills on creating software to spam/scam people.

I guess it’s the sociopath mind, they really don’t care about the violation of Pinterest’s policy or for the annoyance their bot unleashes on others on the site. They just see it as “marketing” and they’re not doing anything wrong.

It’s fascinating to see their rationalization, though most don’t give a damn and don’t even need to rationalize.

Piniterest has been working to boot spammers off. This happens with every site that becomes popular, from MySpace (remember them) to Facebook, to Twitter, and on and on.

It’s rough being popular online!