Comment Spam Is Pretty Much Handled

If you’ve been blogging with WordPress for any length of time, you already know how much comment spam Akismet has saved you from. It’s a really good system they have set up for bloggers where reports by one blogger help to update the database so that other bloggers don’t even need to see comments from a spammer. Not perfect but very effective. When you consider it’s standard on all new WordPress installations, it’s positively a no-brainer.

What About Contact Form Spam?

Contact form spam is kind of another animal. The same bots that can be trained to leave BS comments on your blog can be used to find the contact form and spam you there. Unlike comment spam, there’s no built-in solution that comes with every WordPress install. That’s the reason I’ve done some research and found two free WordPress plugins that will all but eliminate your contact form spam.

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Posterous Support

As part of the Challenge, I set up a posterous account to tie together seven sites for posting articles relevant to a niche I had build a site around. It was easy to set up and worked marvelously. I could get content out to my network sites that contained a link to an article I was reviewing and just one link back to my main site. I set it up exactly as Ed Dale had recommended and it helped me get ranking for some long tail keywords fairly rapidly and retain them.  I wasn’t using it for spam and I recognized that some of the sites were no-follow but I was willing to be able to post to seven sites at a time with unique, useful content.

Then, last month, it just stopped working.

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Needed A New Look

I was looking for a header that combined the various tools I use to make money online. I used Photoshop which I am not a master of by any means. Still, I think it turned out pretty close to how I conceived it.

I use the Flexibility2 (now the Flexibility3) theme by Advantus Media which I think does an excellent job at putting the tools you need together when you’re building a site. Their support is also awesome. The only complication I had was that the header was broken down into a background and a logo section instead of just being able to make a full header and upload it. If I wanted to, I could have made a logo section only but that was more work than I wanted to do. So I just used my header image background and tweaked the title and tagline inside the Flexibility2 admin panel.

Let me know what you think and let me know if you have any experience with the Flexibility2 theme.

But I Know The Mission Of My Website

Do you? I had an interesting revelation this morning.  I just finished Darren Rowse’s Problogger book and I was going back to a site of mine to update the About page.  I scanned the text I had entered almost two years ago and realized something. It did not communicate to my visitors what the site was about really. Oh sure, it gave them a general idea what to expect on the site but it didn’t address the most important question- what can I do for you and why would you come here to learn it?

Of course, I started into editing mode immediately and set to fix that major oversight.  No problem, right?  Just be specific about what the site can do for them and you’re done, right?  After numerous attempts to edit this page to better reflect the site’s goals and mission, I fell on revelation number two.

I didn’t know exactly what the site was about!
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You Hear It All The Time

I want to talk about how you always hear big name bloggers talking about writing for humans and not machines. I want to dispel this myth for the startup blog and explain that if you have a million people coming to your blog, you can write about almost anything remotely topic relevant. If you’re starting out, you better make sure the machines can find you. Besides, who do you think the machines listen to? Humans. But….if your topic is not popular enough from an SEO standpoint, what makes you think a human cares about it?

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