If you’re experimenting much on the web, you’ve doubtless developed websites of various types.
Sooner or later, you may find yourself over-extended, and be ready to give up on one of them. You lack time to devote to it. Your interests have changed. You need to stop scattering your focus.
But before you make that final decision, if you have left your comments open on that neglected website, you should check two things: your comments folder, and your website email.
If you have allowed visitors to make comments, you have likely required those visitors to register before commenting, to decrease the potential for spam under cover of anonymity.
You might be surprised to find that people are registering but not commenting. That says something about your website. If those zero-comment subscribers intended to post a spam link, they would have done so already. If not intending to spam your site, by including links within comments, then what was their purpose in registering?
Look carefully at your website. Is there an article of real value that someone would have really, very intensely, taken an interest in?
Here’s a story of one such website.
Website Comments Can Really Matter–to Your Visitors
If you’re not only a website developer but also an avid web researcher, you’ve seen lots of tempting ads. Sooner or later you may have serendipitously followed a “click chain” offer. You’re told if you follow the chain, you can reach a $500 gift certificate or some similarly wonderful gift. The catch is that you have to go through many hurdles of offers to become eligible for the amazing gift. In navigating those hurdles, following the click chain, you must make increasingly expensive purchase commitments along the way.
A click chain offer is the sort of situation that makes one marvel at the cleverness of the geniuses behind it, geniuses in copywriting, marketing, and technology.
Becoming trapped in a click chain is enough to make one want to rant on the Web. You want to be angry. But instead, you are amazed–amazed at how you–-You! — have been tricked.
But the point at which you become really amazed is that point when you find out there is a valid plan, behind the tricky parts of a click chain, that might benefit someone who knows how to navigate such an offer.
The two times I have fought back against such offers on the Web, I have succumbed to this amazement. As I wrote my explanatory articles, analyzing the offers, my opinion was each time completely turned around. The monster click chains that had seemingly challenged my good judgment, as foes, seemed to transform into reasonable constructs offering something that could be useful to at least someone, if not myself, in the end.
Both times, my analyses left me with admiration for the talent, the amazing talent behind these offers, in both their technology and sales structure, but also in their possibly–at least partly–benevolent intent.
One of those times of analyzing an offer was concerning a coupon offer. Little did I know that my coupon article would take off as it did. The website had no subscription form, and was not marketed. I did not have the email set up to forward to an account I regularly checked, so the email went unnoticed.
One day, when I finally checked my coupon website’s email, there were over 2000 emails, with email addresses which didn’t look like spam.
I checked the website’s comments. About one-quarter of the comments were in another language, with spam links, but the rest appeared legitimate.
I called a tech support person for advice. He urged me to immediately stop the capability of visitors to subscribe to WordPress comments. In his experienced eyes, all subscriber responses were dangerous spam, with potential to use a website for nefarious purposes. Even zero comment subscribers were, in his eyes, spammers, just waiting to attack.
His advice didn’t ring true. He had not read my “truth” article. He had not thought about the dedication of coupon hunters, who seem to gather in groups, and seem to follow systems to track down offers that offer big rewards. I seem to recall there are a few “couponers” out there who partly survive on coupons.
Reflecting on the situation, I came to appreciate that I had discovered another talented group who inhabits the Web, one with a talent for sleuthing: coupon enthusiasts. I was tempted to conclude that only the best of sleuths would systematically subscribe to a comments list, with never an intention of posting a comment. Hope of receiving a lead to more sources of coupons seemed a likely motive. It would be an ingenious method to effortlessly receive tips about coupon offers, as a subscriber, when the website of interest offered no email or newsletter form, or any other way to invite a following.
Sometimes I am in awe of how such speculation as this, on the meaning of a lucky circumstance, can produce a new marketing strategy.
If you feel my logic is not too far off track, you might agree that this experience goes to show that people really want to know some things. If you hit the right topic on your blog, and haven’t taken the time to put a link on your website for subscribers, you might just get subscribers anyway.
Lucky for me–-I seem to have built a coupon-seekers list, and all I did was post one article.
But I am warned by a wpbeginner.com “editor’s note,” on an article, How To Export Email Addresses from WordPress Comments, that “You must have users’ permission before you add them to your email list. It is recommended that you ask the users to double opt-in.”
We are all anti-spam. But it goes to show that some things that we might think of as spam can be good old-fashioned inventiveness, and it works in all directions. What seemed a rant-worthy spam coupon offer was actually, if navigated properly, a coupon offer that could offer value. What seemed spam email registrations on my comments list were very likely excellent prospective claimers of coupon offers.
Tricks that aren’t tricks, spam that’s not spam: It makes you love the Internet, does it not?