How would you deal with this?

[bryce]

Recently I placed an ad up in the classifieds section promoting my article writing service. I ran a long descriptive ad outlining the services I could provide, the rates I would charge, and anything else I could think of that would make it easier for potential clients to take on my services.

So far, and without a reveiw on that thread, I have typed more than 200,000 words of unique content, all in English as a first language, in subjects from "How To Make A Potato Gun" to "How to clear up a Yeast Infection" - I have orders for 2 x 20,000 word ebooks and 554 more articles to complete in the next 14 days.

My question relates to a lady who wrote to me via PM, and asked if I would take on a long term commitment with her, to post 250 blog comments on keyword targeted blogs of PR2 and above, for 16 clients that she was managing. This was the full scope of her request, and I agreed to working with her as she seemed to be in a bit of a spot. It also seemed like ethical and simple work. She wanted the initial 250 posts to be completed in 7 days, along with a written report from me each Friday.

I am hoping that experienced blog posters, and copywriters in general, could elaborate for me, what in their opinion, this job would involve?! What in your opinion is the expected process from start to finish?

I will tell you all what happened with this client, whom I happily refunded her $195 on Friday

[Hugh Thyer]

Well it would have involved you working on your conscience!

Isn't this kinda dishonest? Making up comments to look like they're real? I thought comments were meant to be what REAL people actually thought.

Reminds me of a job on eLance where one of the requirements was to make up the testimonials.

Sounds pretty dodgy to me, but then again maybe the whole blog/article world is a bit underhand.

Glad you refunded her money and sent her on her way.

[bryce]

Originally Posted by Hugh Thyer

Well it would have involved you working on your conscience!

Isn't this kinda dishonest? Making up comments to look like they're real? I thought comments were meant to be what REAL people actually thought.

Reminds me of a job on eLance where one of the requirements was to make up the testimonials.

Sounds pretty dodgy to me, but then again maybe the whole blog/article world is a bit underhand.

Glad you refunded her money and sent her on her way.

Thanks for your response Hugh! yes this is one of the things I had to battle with, and my associate was feeling the same way. We cringed every time we placed a comment, knowing how we treat this ourselves on our own blogs. However I had made a commitment to a client, and I decided to persist, at least temporarily.

I would love to contact all of her clients to let them know what she is doing but this would mean a reduction in my own ethical standards, and so have not bothered. Although that door is always open, as I am sure you might understand, when I detail the balance of the story

I will await more responses to see what the general feeling is. Oh and it was the best feeling, sending her money back in full!

Bryce

[CDarklock]

Originally Posted by bryce

I am hoping that experienced blog posters, and copywriters in general, could elaborate for me, what in their opinion, this job would involve?! What in your opinion is the expected process from start to finish?

Locate 250 blog posts relevant to the SEO keywords in question, at or over PR2, then comment sensibly on those blogs - under obvious pseudonyms - with the desired URL specified as your web page.

[Keeslover]

I'm thinking this would have taken you hours and hours...just to find the 250 blogs to post on!

I would have answered just as CDarklock did.

[bryce]

Originally Posted by CDarklock

Locate 250 blog posts relevant to the SEO keywords in question, at or over PR2, then comment sensibly on those blogs - under obvious pseudonyms - with the desired URL specified as your web page.

Hi CDarklock That is the way I understood it as well. Would have been okay if that was all it was. Sounded simple and straight forward, became a nightmare, and all for 64 cents a post

[bryce]

Originally Posted by Keeslover

I'm thinking this would have taken you hours and hours...just to find the 250 blogs to post on!

I would have answered just as CDarklock did.

Sure did Keeslover. In fact the average time to complete the required process, once I found out the true requirements of the client, was anywhere between 7.5 minutes and 15 minutes per successful post. Luckily I had a software program searching for the blogs

Thanks for your feedback.

[bryce]

Originally Posted by SEO

Blog commenting for SEO, not really anything unethical about it if you're leaving decent comments.

Your client gets a link, the blog gets a good comment.

Win-win

Hi SEO, and thanks for your comment. I tend to disagree, but only from the point of view of how it made me feel when I was doing it. I knew iny my gut that what I was doing was wrong. My intention (on behalf of my client) was to drop a sticky URL link back to the clients nominated sites, and that took away from the validity of the comment itself.

My sole purpose was to leave a link. My maniplation of someone elses site allowed me to do that, and it didnt sit well with me.

The thing is though, that the project itself would have turned out to be far more than was presented and expected. If I had continued doing this job, I would have been averaging $5 an hour, and the client was under the impression I was a 'firm' - absolutely rediculous!

[jrptr]

You say it was unethical! WHY?

As far as I know there is nothing wrong with leaving a good comment on a blog or a forum to get a backlink!

If the comments you leave are unique and well written and on the subject I dont see anything wrong at all.

HOWEVER, you have hinted that there was more to it than that! and if what she asked you to was indeed unethical i would have refunded her money in full too.

[bryce]

Originally Posted by MarkAndrews IMCopywriting

Shouldn't this be in another section of the Warrior
Forum?

It doesn't really specifically, have anything to do
with copywriting per se, no offence.

Not sure, and no offence taken. I guess if the mods see that it is in the wrong place they will shift it. I thought "copy" was anything to do with writing content, so thought that this would be appropriate.

[bryce]

Originally Posted by jrptr

You say it was unethical! WHY?

As far as I know there is nothing wrong with leaving a good comment on a blog or a forum to get a backlink!

If the comments you leave are unique and well written and on the subject I dont see anything wrong at all.

HOWEVER, you have hinted that there was more to it than that! and if what she asked you to was indeed unethical i would have refunded her money in full too.

Hi jrptr Thanks for your feedback. I can't remember saying it was unethical, although that is how I felt doing it. I did say it would be a reduction in my ethical standards to contact her clients to inform them of her methods in creating their backlinks.

There was more to the job but from a workload perspective which is why I was asking people what they thought the original "scope' would entail. I was not exepecting the level of work required to earn $5 an hour.

It turns out that the comments were to be written on any blog that had an opportunity to be considered relevant to the keywords. I was supposed to (a) comment at a rate of 50 words, of which (b) at least one or two were to be the keywords (c) leave a sticky link back to the client's site at the bottom of each comment (creating html code in the comment body), and (d) making the whole thing relevant to the blog posts.

Here are some of the keywords:

(Location) Limousine Services
(Location) Certified Public Accountant
(Location) Double Glazing Installers
(business Name) Bankruptcy Lawyers



I will now post separately about the job requirements......

[bryce]

okay thanks everyone for your comments thus far... To elaborate a little on the eventuality of this project, this is what unfolded. This excercise has taught me a lot, and in a small way I am thankful for it now.

After I took on the job, and started to post on blogs, I noticed that in more than 80% of all cases, I was presented with a message after the post, saying that the comment was to be "moderated" which made me think, "what would happen in the event that comments were rejected upon moderation?" So, I presented this question to the client. Her response....

Well as an experienced blogger would know, I was to not only post 50 - 100 word comments to the 250 blogs, I was to record the post url (a) so that I could present a full report each Friday, which would have to include the page rank of each blog, and (b) so that after 3-4 days I would need to revisit each blog to confirm the posts had been accepted.

I was then expected to find new blogs to post to (or repost on the existing ones, in a different manner) should I find that the comments had been rejected. Now, my problem was that from the 80% that went to moderation, I found 12 that had been rejected by the second day, which meant I was then going to have to find a place to post 12 new comments, that were in turn accepted, in order to fulfill my commitment to the client. This would go on and on until I could confirm that 250 posts had been made, and accepted by the blog owner.

Furthermore, this was to be done each and every month, and every comment would have not only the Website URL in the space provided, it would have added html links in the comment body itself! This is probably why most comments were not accepted in the first place.

Being that each of the 'sticky' URL's was a business link, I could imagine this spiral was not going to improve.

It was taking an average of 7.5 minutes to source a suitable blog, read an article, post a comment, verify the comment, revisit the page to check at a later date, confirm the comment had been accepted, add the details to the report, and move on! For a comment that was not accepted, it could take at least double this time, and it would happen each time a comment was rejected. This was NO SIMPLE job, and all the time the client wanted to pay no more than 64 cents per post!

So, let this be a warning to any person who wants to do this sort of work! Do your homework, ask questions before you take the work on, and make sure you are getting paid what you are worth.

There is no way on this planet, that would convince me to do this sort of work for $5 an hour. In fact as I said earlier, it taught me something. It taught me that I will never do this work again for any amount of money. I will stick to writing good quality unique articles, and be satisfied with the work I do, and the benefits it presents to the client.

[acedalright]

Originally Posted by bryce

Recently I placed an ad up in the classifieds section promoting my article writing service. I ran a long descriptive ad outlining the services I could provide, the rates I would charge, and anything else I could think of that would make it easier for potential clients to take on my services.

So far, and without a reveiw on that thread, I have typed more than 200,000 words of unique content, all in English as a first language, in subjects from "How To Make A Potato Gun" to "How to clear up a Yeast Infection" - I have orders for 2 x 20,000 word ebooks and 554 more articles to complete in the next 14 days.

My question relates to a lady who wrote to me via PM, and asked if I would take on a long term commitment with her, to post 250 blog comments on keyword targeted blogs of PR2 and above, for 16 clients that she was managing. This was the full scope of her request, and I agreed to working with her as she seemed to be in a bit of a spot. It also seemed like ethical and simple work. She wanted the initial 250 posts to be completed in 7 days, along with a written report from me each Friday.

I am hoping that experienced blog posters, and copywriters in general, could elaborate for me, what in their opinion, this job would involve?! What in your opinion is the expected process from start to finish?

I will tell you all what happened with this client, whom I happily refunded her $195 on Friday

Welcome to the IM world of murky practices and moral ambiguity.

Is a good blog post bad if the intention is not or is a bad post good if the intention is too?

[bryce]

Originally Posted by acedalright

Welcome to the IM world of murky practices and moral ambiguity.

Is a good blog post bad if the intention is not or is a bad post good if the intention is too?

Thankyou for the comment acedalright and thanks for the welcome, lol. You pose a very good question, and for me, I think I would rather sleep at night knowing my intentions were on target. I believe there are other ways of generating the same result for the client, without stepping on other people's toes. But hey, that's just me

[Orator]

Interesting moral dilemma.

I agree that it seems sometimes that sometimes things can be confusing, I'd say your best bryce is to trust your instincts. Your own own sense of what you can and can't do is the best barometer I can think of.

[TPFLegionaire]

Originally Posted by SEO

Bryce I see where you're coming from on that one. .64 cents for PR2 approved comments is a pitiful price.. People are selling those at $3+ each.

You were giving her a good deal..She's going to have a lot of trouble finding a monkey to do that kind of work at that price.

Hi SEO, you can hire people on odesk to do this for between 1$ and 2$ an hour, so, sure they might need a bit of training and access to software to speed up blogg discovery, but once they are able to do it...they can churn 3 to 6 comment an hour.

[Sylviane]

Isn't this kinda dishonest? Making up comments to look like they're real? I thought comments were meant to be what REAL people actually thought.

Reminds me of a job on eLance where one of the requirements was to make up the testimonials.

Sounds pretty dodgy to me, but then again maybe the whole blog/article world is a bit underhand.

Glad you refunded her money and sent her on her way.

Well, I agree. Until recently I thought myself that comments on blog were something genuine.

But, guess what? I found out recently that it's part of the business for lots of internet marketers, though. It's meant to drive traffic to there blog. It happens everyday. So, I am just letting you guys know, so you might not feel so bad about it after all.

[jrptr]

Sylviane, Generally blog posts are genuine as not everyone on there is pushing a link or product so it would be a bit unfair to say what you have.

bryce, I applaud you for giving her money back. Not only did you feel badley by doing what was asked she was also having one over on you.

But remember that not everyone is like her

[Simon Stanley]

It really yanks my chain when I get useless comments on my blog, from people pretending to have read my post!

I just immedately disapprove them. If the comments are directly related to the post in question - so in answer to your question - I personally see nothing wrong with it as long as your not blatantly trying to smal your link into people's faces.

[Steve Diamond]

Originally Posted by SEO

Blog commenting for SEO, not really anything unethical about it if you're leaving decent comments.

Your client gets a link, the blog gets a good comment.

Win-win

I'm in the "win-win" camp also. As long as it's a deliberate decision on the blog owner's part to approve comments that may have an SEO goal, then both parties to this tacit agreement are satisfied.

I think it's a fair bargain, so much so that I actually encourage commenting on my business blog by using both DoFollow and KeywordLuv plugins. Of course, I moderate very selectively. But why would I not want to give some "link juice" to anyone who contributes to an interesting discussion and makes my blog look well read? It doesn't hurt me any.

I encourage other bloggers to do the same.

Steve