Ever inquisitive, I’ve always been quite curious to find out why people do the things they do. When you spend a lot of time online however, you tend to get pretty tired of any form of spam. Email spam. Comment spam. Spammy websites. All of these can be very frustrating. For me, it’s an opportunity. Surely there is a reason why these folks are doing this? Sure there are plenty of occasion where people are just being idiots under the protection of anonymity but many others are seeking opportunity, mostly to make money. You’ve seen those websites, the infomercials of web pages like http://www.incomehybrid.com (I am not affiliated and it may well be the answer you’ve been looking for!). You can see a pattern with all of these pages…A testimonial video, visually striking text, incredibly long single page without navigation, generally some sort of pop-up and my favorite style in that case is an “Are You Sure You Want to Leave?” notification.

Comment spam is pervasive especially to blog owners and it always intrigued me as to why bother. Most blog commenting systems are nofollow, many moderate and for the most part comment spam is pretty obvious so it begs the question, why are they doing this?

Email spam has been around since email began and should probably be considered the earliest form of Email Marketing. Strong subject. Succinct copy. Generally text-only…hey they do a lot right. Of course they also do a lot wrong like, oh I don’t know, not asking folks if they would like to receive their emails? I’m not forgetting listservs either as one of the earlier places to spam online.

So rather than getting pissy at spammers and ridiculous commenters, I like to learn why they are doing what they do. Those spammy one-page websites with all the bells, whistles and talking heads that I thought were ridiculous appear to actually work as I’ve had several clients reach out and ask about them. Some had even taken the offers. While I’d like to suggest that not all of them are rubbish, I’m afraid to say that the majority of them are. Most likely they are some out-of-the-box affiliate marketing scheme aimed at selling a cheap e-book on how to make money online by selling cheap e-books.

Comment spam like I said had baffled me until I saw a whole series of them on a blog post that was good quality and dofollow. Quite obviously that website did not moderate comments and this is what the comment spammers are hoping for. Get your comments out en-masse, maybe 1% will be fruitful. Hard Yakka if you ask me and not very beneficial but for most of these services, a link is a link no matter what the quality is like.

There have been a few sites over the years that seemed to attract a high level of spam and often this is where I will also look to help with Internet Marketing for clients only instead of spamming people, we prefer to do it properly and provide some value. A while ago ut was digg.com, then squidoo.com became quite useful and now I’m seeing quite a bit on Linkedin and Quora so I’ve been checking them out to see how they fare.