A tactic among spam marketers seems to be placing innocent comments on blog posts to do a recon on the comment procedures on a blog.

It typically involves a generic comment like “Hi” or “Nice blog”, and it may have an originating domain, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Which seems innocent and you might be tempted to approve the comment.

But again, the blog is a reflection of your personal branding. What’s it say about you, if the ‘best’ comments to your posts are along the lines of “nice blog” or “way to go!”

Even if it was posted by a somewhat naive/new reader with the best of intentions, it’s in your best interests to weed those out.

The nature of comments and trackbacks are to continue the conversation or build on the dialogue. If it does nothing to achieve that purpose, I’d suggest to delete without mercy.

If the person is especially flagant about it, label their comment as spam, and your filters will take care of it.

My blog moderation procedures:

• My support staff spends about 30 minutes each day, going through the comments which are pending (all comments are human moderated), and check the originating URL.
• I’ve found that blog registration is an added layer of inconvenience and creates barriers to an ongoing dialogue, so we’re done away with that.
• Comments are usually moderated within 12 hours of submission, though we shoot for 6 hours.
• If a comment contains little content, it will likely not be published.

Link dropping: In my opinion, it’s very bad to drop links in your comments, unless they’re relevant. My tech team has been active on dial-up BBSes, IRC, MMPOGs, online game networks, social networking sites and forums since the early 80s. They’re pretty good at identifying link bait. Unless you’re proficient at dropping links, they’d usually be edited out, or the comment deleted altogether.

Publicity whores beware: On the average, we receive about 3-5 comments each day, which would have been better submitted through the contact form. These are generally of the biz-op or joint venture category.

Take heed if you adopt this as a standard practise. It sends the signal that you’re:

• New at this, and haven’t figured out the difference between a comment and a contact/mailto form yet.
• Hankering for some publicty
• Using some questionable mass blog comment JV strategy (which tells us you really haven’t put much thought into targeting your partners)
• All of the above

We might still have the chance to work together, though you’d likely be flagged as somewhat ‘questionable’ in our books, and a comfortable working level will take longer to establish.

If you’re looking for a ‘permanent niche’, look no further than ‘Pills, Poker and Porn’.

By some estimates, Porn (abbreviated from pornography, and sometimes going by it’s synonyms ‘adult sites’, pr0n, or pron) is the biggest segment of the three. [Though it’s difficult to get quantitative data on gaming/gambling, pharmaceutical and adult sites]

So Laura Alter’s post “Social networking overtaking porn?” got me thinking: Could Social Networking sites really be more popular than porn sites?

Reader Paul Johns has suggested that social networking sites could be an avenue for people to meet up for sex or to exchange naked pictures.

Although this might be true for some sites like Facebook or MySpace, I doubt this ‘tactic’ would work as well on StumbleUpon or Del.icio.us or Digg, just because of the way it’s structured.

As for exchanging pictures, I think someone would better get their jollies, downloading full length movies from a P2P network instead. Pictures are so Web1.0…

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Here’s what I think is happening.

Most Web 2.0/social networking users have accounts at multiple service provider. For example, I have accounts at MyBlogLog, BumpZee, Affiliate Marketing Buzz, MySpace and a multitude of other services.

Does the fact that I have 15 Social Networking accounts, mean that I represent 15 unique visitors?

Just like a free webmail account, most social networking sites have free membership. It’s also an ‘incentive’ to create tons of accounts, and only use one or two services.

Does the report factor that some spam marketers are creating millions of MySpace and other accounts for spam purposes?

Well, if it does, I wouldn’t be surprised that social networking is ‘overtaking’ porn sites!

Here’s the bottomline, financial figures generally don’t lie.

If a niche is generating sufficient profit for people to make a full time living from it, then it’s worth pursuing.

Remember too, that for most Social Networking sites their value lies in their subscriber base (which is the rationale behind NewsCorp’s $580 million acquisition of MySpace).

It’s nice to have large subscriber figures, but for most small businesses, a hefty profit will make more sense.