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gcrank1
Member
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# Posted: 17 Feb 2021 11:48am - Edited by: gcrank1
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Of the several fora Im on it is a constant fight to weed it out, often by a strained site owner/admin and/or volunteer moderators who would like to have a life beyond the screen.
While hunkered down in this vicious polar vortex I had a u-tube pop up on my menu that clued me to the answer to my post title. It was something like:
'How to become an affiliate marketing associate'
I did not view that, but have thought on it (not to do it but what that is about) and did a search on the topic today. There is plenty of info online on how to set it up so you can 'make money via the links'. Yep, no need to take a course, just follow the instructions.
Like, it is 'best' to join forums for stuff you have an interest in/know something about (helps to establish your forum-cred).
Have products in your affiliate basket suitable for said forum.
Use human interest lead-in stories, then turn it toward your product and toss in the link.
Some get payed per 'click' onto the link, others if a purchase is made, but it is all play the numbers; ie, the more that you can entice to click on the more chances someone will buy.
Most of us have developed a pretty good sense of what is 'spammy' and sort it out. For instance, I never click on a link at first impulse (I can wait). Some come-ons are pretty slick, I suspect the spammer actually has an interest in this site and subject. It is good stuff, after all  . They might even be building, or thinking of building a small cabin. But the ethics of using someone else's site for their own marketing/profiting has escaped them....
Some will finally 'get it', some never will, it is all about the hope for easy money.
Imho
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jhp
Member
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# Posted: 17 Feb 2021 12:43pm
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Two challenges:
First challenge is the spam company will outsource a contract to a third party saying we will pay you $X for every site you post our link to. That third party then will pay someone a fraction of $X to actually go do that work, take a screenshot and prove it was done. The company taking the contracts is making a small amount of money per contract, and the people actually making the posts are literally making beer money by doing this all day.
Second, there are bots (scripts written by programmers) that crawl the web all day looking for forums like this one that have either no authentication or no verification, meaning you can sign up instantly without a person actually looking at the account and approving it. The bots basically find a site like this and make a few posts before they move on, or a site moderator kills the account.
The challenge with the second model is like you said, to stop it you have to require human verification of a live account...which basically nobody wants to do. Additionally casual site users won't sit around and wait a day or two to get an account created to share their thoughts, they will just move on.
At the end of the day, spam is a numbers game. Just have to spam that link anywhere and everywhere to either drive revenue from clicks, drive revenue from the .01% of people who might buy something, or in some cases, drive revenue from infecting people with malware and forcing them to pay you to get rid of it.
In all of these cases, nobody on the other end probably even knows what this board is about. They just know they can potentially get people to click on things.
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Irrigation Guy
Member
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# Posted: 17 Feb 2021 01:02pm
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I belong to several other forums for various interests and this site by far has the most spam.
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gcrank1
Member
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# Posted: 17 Feb 2021 01:15pm
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I like to throw a question out on iffy ones to see what kind of answer may (usually not) come back. At least that way a legit interested party isnt just 'blown off'.
And some of them seem to generate some useful comments about the general topic, not necessarily the link.
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ICC
Member
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# Posted: 17 Feb 2021 03:13pm
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The main reason spam gets posted to a forum may not be obvious. The idea is not so much to get a real person to click on the link and follow it. The spammers know that Google, Bing, etc. all use robots to scan webpages including forums. The search engines do that so they can return results when you or I search something.
When one of those robots sees a link to xyz.com on a forum or a blog, the robot counts that and uses it to grade the popularity of the website link, which in turn is used to determine how high up the list of search results it appears when you or I search for something like it.
The theory is that if a webpage, like this forum, that has no direct relationship with the page that is linked to, has a link to an outside page, then there must be something good about the linked site. So the robot notes the linked to page and that goes into the search engine database. This process is known as SEO or Search Engine Optimization. There are SEO companies that advertise that they will improve the placing of your website in search results with their SEO expertise. Many small site owners looking to improve their position will pay for this. Most, if not all, have no idea that spam is one of the results.
If a forum viewer happens to click on the link that may be a bonus result, but that is not always the prime purpose.
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Fanman
Member
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# Posted: 17 Feb 2021 09:07pm
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Most forums run on software that is continuously updated to block spam. This forum, I don't know what software it's using but it's pretty archaic.
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CabinBuilder
Admin
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# Posted: 17 Feb 2021 09:52pm - Edited by: CabinBuilder
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All points here about links, clicks, and SEO are correct.
I delete spam as fast as I can, but it may take time before I get around and check every post (have a life, you know ) - by that time many others have seen it.
Some are helping me (Thanks!), but it's still a manual process - can't do much automation around real people actually manually posting spam.
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Atlincabin
Member
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# Posted: 18 Feb 2021 08:36am
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And a shout-out to all of you who are administering fora, websites etc. and trying to minimize the distractions. I (and others) appreciate your efforts to keep the place clean.
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CabinBuilder
Admin
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# Posted: 18 Feb 2021 09:59am - Edited by: CabinBuilder
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Also, look at the bright side: spam posts are source of ridicule and humour - without them, this thread wouldn't even exist. 
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gcrank1
Member
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# Posted: 18 Feb 2021 12:04pm
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Cabin Fever drove me to do it
Thats my story and......
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