My previous post discussing spam, no joke, gets two or three spam messages per day, minimum. I intentionally tagged it with every buzzword I could think of in 60 seconds, so it isn’t really a surprise, but then again, it is. You would think that a post tagged with the label “spam” would be a red flag to spammers. A discreet signpost that says, “Psst. Buddy, I’m on to you. Go hit a post that’s at least not labeled spam.”
More insidious of late, there is a character that has been posting to my blog and at least one other blog I follow, that goes by the name “Content Writers”. I haven’t deleted his (I’m going to go ahead and demonize him as a dude, it could be a demoness though) posts as yet, though I’m thinking about it since they are spam in disguise. I’m making this post to see if this guy actually reads my blog, or if he is just making quick comments like, “Great post thanks. I really enjoyed it very much. You have excellent content on your blog. Love writing? We would love for you to join us!” to any post he can click his fingers on.
Just to check it out, I followed his link. Like any spam, you have follow it through a couple of bogus blogs before you get hit with the real scam. They do this for SEO purposes. Apparently spammers haven’t learned that this no longer works. As it turned out, it wasn’t a scam exactly. Well, okay, it was a scam but not in the “I’ll take your money and give you nothing in return” kind of way. It was a scam in the sense that for a monthly fee of about $50, you’ll be signing up for a service that will aggregate writing jobs for you. That is, this service goes out to a bunch of free sites that list requests for writing jobs. Typically offering a few bucks for a blog post, that sort of thing.
Mind you, you can do all this for yourself for free if you just search for these types of sites and bookmark them. Essentially, you’re paying this service to bring it to you all at once (that’s what an aggregater does). If you’re so hard up for cash you’re willing to work for $5 on a 600-800 word blog post, then you’re probably not going to want to waste the $50 a month for this service. Take the time to look up the websites in Google. Google is your friend. They do no evil.
So as I said, it’s not a scam per se. And this is probably why WordPress hasn’t squashed him already. Just make sure you go into anything like that with your eyes open. Here’s my advice, if you want to be a professional, or even semi-pro writer:
The first rule of write club is money flows to the writer.
The second rule of write club: Money flows to the writer!
This is actually referred to as Yog’s Law. Just keep this simple maxim in mind, you should never have to pay, to be paid to write.
