Guys, things are getting a little ridiculous. Today I received a request to pitch a fashion line on my blog. I think I have been pretty candid in the past about my wardrobe basically consisting of free conference t-shirts, and wearing maternity pants with the legs rolled up rather than bothering to hem them. I will be the first to admit I have no fashion sense, nor any meaningful blog readership to speak of. Even a cursory glance at my blog should have revealed this ad would have had terrible ROI (Return on Investment.)

Unless…. Unless the advertiser was less interested in using my blog as an advertising medium and more interested in me as a customer. I’ve had a theory about advertisers who pitch on small to medium blogs.

Often social media product pitches include free merchandise without, or with very little, monetary compensation in exchange for a “candid” reviews from “influences”. Psychology tells us that it isn’t truly candid, though, even if the advertiser doesn’t dictate any of the terms of the review. In fact, it may be more advantageous to the advertiser to dictate as little about the review as possible.

Cognitive dissonance, the mental discomfort that occurs when one has two different points of view, works in the advertiser’s favor. When we agree to review a product we’re agreeing to spend mental effort. Subconsciously we want that mental effort to pay off. We want to like the the product. Not only are we less likely to be critical, but since this is happening on a subconscious level we’re less likely to even be aware we’re not being critical. Additionally, advertisers often include a list of positive product features in their pitch, which can prime our opinions prior to even receiving the product. Cognitive dissonance won’t make you love a product you’d otherwise loath, but it can tip the scale in the advertiser’s favor. For little more than a free sample, you may have created a customer – out of the blogger him/herself!

Had I agreed to the “partnership” and liked the free sample, I may have decided to fill out the rest of my missing wardrobe.

To be fair, I doubt the advertiser knew this when I was sent the request. I don’t think I was being targeted because of how badly I need new clothes. The request was generic, only including easily scrap-able pieces of information like my name and blog title. It was the email equivalent of a cold call.

I’ve been getting more and more cold calls lately. I used to respond, but I’m oversubscribed and something’s gotta give. I’m adopting a similar email policy to my comment policy: if I can’t tell if you’re human, I’m ignoring you.

(And for the record, no, I’m not open to any advertising partnerships on my blog.)

The past two weeks I received 1113 comments flagged by my spam filter. To put that in perspective, my blog has been live for a little over three years, and I’ve received 28 actual comments.

The bots clearly love me. So do bot-like people. And sometimes it’s surprisingly difficult to tell the difference.

Here’s a comment posted to “Getting Over Photo Envy”

So I’ve been doing paid photography work for about 3 years now and it’s been a joy… [personal antidote cut for bravery.] Anyway, I don’t envy you school photographers one bit. I’d rather shoot a full-day wedding than a full-day of school photos. Keep up the good work!

It appears that someone issued a key word searches for certain topics (e.g. school photography). When they came across my post, they left this prefab comment along with a link to the comment author’s photography business. Since the comment is partially related to the topic of the blog post, it has a better chance of getting through spam filters and thus generating traffic for the business. It got through mine.

Quasi on topic spam comments seems to be a trend these days like this one on my post “Stollen Baby Photos“. Here’s another:

With havin (sic) so much written content do you ever run into any issues of plagorism (sic) or copyright infringement? [cut for brevity]

The dead give away for identifying this comment as spam was the author/website link. The link was not to a blog, but to a specific article. The commentor used a (presumably) fake email address and (obviously) fake name. Someone was likely trying to drum up page views and potentially click revenue for their article.

Protip: setting your name to “what is the best flea treatment for dogs” is a probably not going to fool many.

The author of the plagiarism comment may have never even visited my blog! Google analytics shows no activity on that page the day the comment was posted. Either the comment appears to was posted remotely, i.e. from another website using a cross site $_POST request, or Google analytics thought it was a bot and removed it from my daily totals.

With so few comments I haven’t really given much thought to a comment policy. My intention was to allow any comments from a human, and disallow those from a bot. But these days the line is getting blurrier. There was this comment:

Hi! Stopping by from Mom Bloggers Club. Great blog!
Have a nice day!

I could see from my analytic traffic that this was a real, honest to goodness, human leaving the comment. But it was left on the “Duplicate Image Search” blog post, which was my response to the fact that someone had been passing of my photos of Nicki as their photos of their child. The comment seemed misplaced. I could also tell from Analytics that the author spent almost no time on my blog, and certainly not enough time to read any posts. The comment was left within seconds of her arrival, on the most recent post. I suspect she left the comment in hopes of gaining traffic from the comment website link. I doubt she even skimmed the content of the post she commented on. Because it didn’t seem like a “real” comment, I opted to spam it.

So for now, I guess my comment policy is “if it could be mistaken for a bot, it’s marked as spam.” If there are any humans out there reading this, whose comments have been spammed, forgive me, I’m only human.

Happy Three Years, blog!

Three years feels like a blink of an eye, but then I look back on my life (and my writing!) and I realize how much has changed. My blog is still a hodgepodge of topics that interest me, and I think it always will be. I’m happy to see it’s still of interest to a few of you out there, even without a central focus.

Monthly Visits to my Blog over from Mar 1 2014 – Jan 31st 2014

My blog has had a pretty linear growth with two exceptions.

The big bump at time A is for the Stolen Baby Photos post. That day got three times more traffic than usual. Seeing that spike makes me cringe a little. I wrote the blog post hastily. The forum post that referenced my newborn photography page had just been deleted and I was hoping one of those forum goers might still be visiting my blog, might see the new post, and might possibly be able to fill me in. At the same time, my parents read my blog and I didn’t want to be too alarmist.

The bump in traffic came when I shared the post on my personal facebook page, and was reshared by a friend and college who was concerned how often this kind of thing happens without anyone noticing. While I appreciated the reshare, I couldn’t help but feel a little guilty that the post was undeserving since there wasn’t actually any useful information for others in that post. I followed it up with the Duplicate Image Search, which I’m happy to report has seen some adoption.

I assume the dip at B is because of the slightly different direction I decided to take my blog by keeping more of Nicki’s life private. Although the dip in traffic was not unexpected, I was sad to see it bare out, especially since the decision was based more on instinct than on science. To my surprise my numbers look to be recovering rather quickly.

My favorite topic to write on these days is photography. I had so much fun playing with my makeshift spotlight a few days ago. The topic I really want to get back to, the Doing the Math posts. The Uniqueness of Babynames post continues to be my favorite of all time.

If you’re using bloglovin’ the answer is probably “no”. Only 3 of my last 7 posts have appeared on my blog’s bloglovin page. Looks like I’m not the only one with this problem.

I have a couple theories as to why my posts are missing. My server is running a little slow, possibly too slow for Bloglovin. My second theory is that bloglovin’s RSS parser may be having an issue when injesting my feed. I noticed that at least two of the posts that never arrived to bloglovin were written in word, where the last post that did arrive was written directly in my web browser. Word generates curly or “smart” quotes, whereas most quotes on the web are straight or “dumb”. Some parsers choke on quotation marks if they’re expecting one type, but encounter the second.

At least feedly (the reader most of you seem to use) can still read my blog!

The blog has been tweaked and should be running a touch faster now. I’ve also made a handful of other minor, but needed modifications. I believe I’ve fixed all potential problems. In fact the primary point of this blog post is to check just that, hence the title. Apologies for boring you if you’re still actually reading this.

In other website news, I finally updated our family website, colonfamily.us, and my resume website, sarahktyler.com. That just leaves my photography site, Incidental Light. That will be a much bigger undertaking. I’m thinking of switching from Flash to HTML 5 as an excuse to learn HTML 5.

Edited to add: This post showed up in my bloglovin’ feed!

October was a better than expected month for me. Remember how it took a full year for me to make my first dollar? And then six months to make my next? In October I earned a full dollar. Updating my blogging revenue probability model with October data also shows me it will only take me 573 years to reach $1,000,000 in revenue instead of 615! Wahoo! Kidding aside, the increase in traffic has me wondering if maybe my blog could become something. In the last four months the number of visitors to my blog has doubled. (It’s the newborn photography. Too bad I have to wait for the next baby to expand on those. Maybe you’ll find non-newborn baby photography interesting in the mean time?)

I’ve been thinking a lot about what direction to take my blog, what type of blogger I am and what type of blogger I’d like to be.

Professionally, I’m a data scientist. My blog gives me an opportunity to make an internet name for myself. On the other hand, I’m fairly new to the domestic thing, and I’m still figuring things out. Blogging helps me put my skills to the test. Sometimes people like me, and I get pinned on pintrest. Other times they offer handy suggestions and ideas that help me grow.

I love to shop (especially bargain hunting around Black Friday), and I love to give my opinions on purchases. I don’t think I’m cut out to be a blogger who does those reviews and giveaways. For one, at less than a dollar revenue per month on average, I won’t be funding any giveaways any time soon. While I would love to get products for free to review, (at least in theory, ‘free’ is my favorite price tag), I’m way too small a blog for that. Besides, I’m still a novice blogger finding my voice and I wouldn’t want to come across as promoting a product because it was free to me. For now my plan is to stick to discussing only products I bought myself.

I have gotten a few requests for guest posts, but I’m even less reluctant to go this route. I blog for me first and foremost. I’m so completely forgetful and writing things down is an easy way to remember how I feel, like how much I loved being pregnant. I also blog because I’m dyslexic, and I blogging is an easy way to practice writing.

Still, I do like the idea of small businessafying (yes, I’m pretending that’s a word) my blog some day. I’ve spent the last few months reading about what that will entail, and how to grow my blog/brand. It would be nice to defray some of the costs of blogging, small as they might be. Yet, I’m not sure I’m ready to make the kind of time commitment that will require. Aside from actually blogging, I’d have to work on building an audience. Most of my visitors are still one-time visits searching via keywords.

At the current rate of growth, my model predicts it will be another 4 and a half years before I get my first check (and owe taxes) from blogging. Here’s hoping I figure it all out by then.