Internet Marketing: Making Your WordPress Blog Spam-Proof
As long as there is Internet marketing, there will be spam. A lot of it comes from overseas, but some of it is from people who just don’t know any better. They learn to go about doing things the wrong way, and some of them can get into trouble, as with email spamming. But the people who spam blogs, are by and large, just wasting their time.
Rather than waste valuable Internet marketing effort, people should do something much more effective like writing articles or posting in their own blogs. But some spend their money on “blog blasters,” which randomly spam blog comments throughout the blogging universe. What these people don’t realize is that they’ve wasted their money. But then, for every Internet marketing success story, there will be thousands of Internet marketing failures. People just don’t get it. Spamming WordPress blogs, at least, is a total waste of time.
WordPress blogs come with a plugin, already installed, called “Akismet,” and it will automatically pick out the spam comments and hold them for you, until you delete them. It’s pretty efficient, and catches about 90% of the spam comments that come in. To activate the plugin, click on the “Plugins” tab from your WordPress dashboard. You’ll see Akismet in a grey or green bar. If the bar is grey, you’ll need to activate the plugin so click on the link on the right-hand side that says, “Activate.”
To complete the process, you’ll need to get an API key from WordPress. This is a simple line of letters and numbers, and to get it, you just need to register with Word Press at http://wordpress.org. Once you’ve signed up, WordPress will email the API key to you. When you see it in your Inbox, go back to your blog and click on the Plugins tab again. To the far right, you’ll see “Akismet Configuration.” That will take you to a page that has an empty box for that API key. Fill it in and click “Update API Key.” Bang! No more spam.
Now, you’ll have to monitor the spam, so go to “Manage,” from your Dashboard screen. You’ll then see that “Akismet Spam” link. When you see there are spam comments, if there are only a few, you can check to see that they’re all spam. If so, then, click on “Delete All!” and they’re gone. Before my blog had so many spam comments, I found some legitimate comments and could weed them out to be approved. Now, we get hundreds of spam comments every day, so they’re just all deleted. Anyone wanting to spam my Internet marketing blog is out of luck.
If you have a blog, you need that spam control. So, it’s not enough to just activate the spam filter. You have to approve your comments. From the WordPress dashboard, click on “Options,” and then “Discussion.” Set your preference to: “An administrator must approve the comment.” Then, you’ll be able to see every comment before it hits your blog. Akismet is a great blocker, but not 100%.
Akismet will handle most of the problem. When your blog is new, you may not have much spam, but once it hits the search engines, you’ll see it grow daily. Akismet is one great way to control this quickly and easily. Let someone else waste their Internet marketing time on stupid tricks. You won’t have to.
