If you send emails to or from the United States, then you may need to comply with the anti-spam requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act). This article contains the basics of what a small business owner or internet marketer needs to know to get started with their email compliance.
If you are sending “commercial” email to more than one person at a time, you must comply with these rules. What does “commercial” email mean? Short answer — if you are a business, group, association, or anyone who has the potential to make money off of this email (even indirectly like via referrals or advertising), then it’s commercial. If you are in business, just assume you meet this requirement.
If you are sending a one-to-one email to a client or customer about your transaction with them, you only need to make sure you are sending an email with accurate information, such as using the real “from” address. The more specific rules apply when you send emails to multiple people and/or not involving a transaction:
You must not be deceptive in the header (return email address, domain name, IP address) or the subject line. You must give a method for the recipient of the email to opt-out of being on your list or from receiving any future emails from you. You must process their opt-out within 10 business days. You must maintain this opt-out list. You must include your physical mailing address in your emails. The email must be identified as an advertisement. You don’t have to put it in the subject, but you must contain the name of the business and/or other identifying information showing that the email is commercial in nature. You cannot harvest email addresses from web sites, directories, membership databases, or any other service/website that prohibit taking of email addresses. You may not guess at email address (for example, send to every info@domain.com email) to send mass emails.
Ironically, the spammers who really are the problem do not comply with any of these rules and are probably not going to get caught, typically because they hide behind shells or are outside of the United States. It’s all of us small business owners who are at risk of non-compliance.
The easiest way to comply with these rules is to go with a major commercial mass email service provider. I use aweber.com and 1shoppingcart.com to send out emails — both maintain and administer my opt-in/opt-out lists for me. And, since they don’t allow spammers to use their service (or contaminate their servers), my emails get through to my list.
Best practice — only send emails to people who specifically tell you (or sign up) for your eZine (not just hand you their business card). Better yet — have them double-opt-in (sign up and then confirm their signup by clicking on a link in an email).
A forum is a web application for holding discussions and posting user-generated content. Internet forums are also commonly known as Web forums, message boards, discussion boards, discussion groups, discussion forums, bulletin boards or simply forums. Forums are often divided within few groups or sub forums depending on topics that help its users to easily access the information they want by searching within a particular topic and also to post their question in most relevant subforum to get quick response by other forum members.
Forums are also very useful for Search Engine Optimisation. Often forums have an option to its members to have a signature link as a reference. Members can add their websites or blogs and also their favorite quotes in their signature links and that signature link appears in each and every time they post any thread or reply to any thread in natural way. But some people start misusing forums and start spamming forums by making posts that have little or no meaning and useless to other members.
Forum spamming is a black Hat SEO technique where users repeat the same word or phrase over and over, but differs from multiple posting which sometimes has malicious intent. This is a common trolling technique. It can also be traditional spam, unpaid advertisements that are in breach of the forum rules.
Below are some useful tips that can help a lot to avoid forum spam:
1. Using Captcha or Human Validation:
Having an option for captcha or human validation may help you a lot to avoid spam to your forum. In this option there is an application where people have to submit some characters into a box that appears in an image along with that box and randomly change each time for new post.
2. Using Email Verification: Make sure to have an option for Email verification that ensures members to activate an email before they can post anything. That includes a profile link which emailed to members email and member has to click on that to activate his or her membership.
3. Limiting Number Of Link In Signature: Some people use to have a lot of links in their signature links to spam a forum. Make sure to have limited number of links to use as signature links and having maximum of three links will be good.
4. Avoid Posting of Links From New Users: Do not allow new members to post live links of any other site no matter that is useful or not. It will better idea to allow new members to post live links only after they become regular and active member of the forum and have posted a number of useful posts.
5. Limiting Number Of Posts for Signature Links: Do not allow new users for signature links in their posts. Make sure to allow signature links to new members only after posting a number of useful posts or threads to the forum. It will be good to allow signature links after at least 20 or 30 regular posts by a new member.
6. Limiting Post Editing Time: It is recommended to limit the time of editing any post because some spammers edit older posts and either post blatant advertising links, or else hide them in punctuation and invisible images.
7. Block Common Email domains or IPs: Block same email domains or IPs from your admin panel or by using .htaccess file if you find that these are not natural and being used to spam the forum.
8. Having An Active Moderator Team: Having a team of active moderators is very much necessary to watch out your forums on regular basis that will help members to solve their unsolved queries and also warn or ban members immediately if they do not follow guidelines or involve in spamming activity.
Above tips will sure help you to avoid forum spam and make your forums free from spam. If you have any query or suggestions feel free to contact me.
Many of us internet marketers like to create multiple blogs either to promote our money sites or add content to an existing site. This allows us to create pages of relevant search engine “spider food” as well as get a community involved around our store. Nothing is better than having tons of user generated content in the form of topic replies and comments. Unfortunately many of the comments will be spam, submitted in an effort to get a backlink from your site. Most store owners see this as a hassle, I WELCOME it… here’s why!
I must say right off the bat that the marketing method I’m about to show you requires a few prerequisites. One, your honeypot blog really needs to have page rank, usually a PR 2 or better. Two, there is a manual way to do this process but it would be very time consuming so I’m going to recommend you have some sort of backlink analyzing tool – I use Market Samurai for this. Ok, let’s get started.
The premise behind this idea is simple. I want to make it easy for blog comment spammers to find, and post a comment (to be held in moderation) to my blog. Why the hell would I want to do that? Simple, I want to take advantage of all their hard work finding high PR blogs to post to.
You see, most GOOD blog spammers comment in mass and have spent time “harvesting” high PR target sites to comment on. So by “honeypotting” your own site, we can now copy the URL that they are promoting and reverse engineer its links; this is where Market Samurai comes in.
The Process: Copy the URL that the commenter left on your site. Open Market Samurai (or your preferred backlink analyzing tool) and start a new project; any keyword will do to start the project. Now go to the SEO Competition tab. In the bottom right click the “Add Custom URLs” button. Paste the DOMAIN of the URL. The URL should now appear in your list. To the right of the URL column there is a small blue arrow that you can click and it will reveal a few options. Click on the PR Analysis button on the left. This analysis will run a check on all the links pointing back to that domain and show you what the PR of each backlink page is. Eureeka! You can now see a good many of the sites this person is using to get backlinks from along with the PR of each. Export the list and go to town on it!
You can employ this method on any high PR blogs your own, or you could use it on High PR forums as well. In a month you could quickly amass a huge list of sites to reverse engineer the links on.
And here’s a final thought. Once you extract the links from these URLs, keep a list of all the high PR sites to use whenever you need them for marketing a new project. Simply provide the list to an outsourcer and pay them to leave semi-intelligent comments. Cha-ching!