The phrase ‘the only way to fail is  to quit’ has shown up several times during my brief blogging career.  What does this mean?

Picture this.  You start a blog.  You go to numerous social networks and make friends.  You establish links to your blog through commenting, submitting stories/bookmarks, answering questions a yahoo answer, and everything else you have been told to do.  You even watch the google trends to find the buzz words or topics.  You experiment to find the right post that will catch every one’s attention.  All this just so people will know your blog exists.  So the person who can benefit from your blog finds it.

The post you right that flows from your fingers onto the page seems perfect.  It includes a popular topic, it has a bit of humor, yet contains valuable information.  You know it is well written - one of the best you have ever done.  But your traffic does not grow.  In fact, it seems everyone ignores the digg or the stumble.  Even the twitter or plurk you sent out doesn’t spark interest.  This is discouraging.

You remember the phrase ‘the only way to fail is  to quit’.  You remember all the work you have already put into your blog.  So you trudge on - making friends, writing posts, searching for more valid information to put on your blog.  You check out other blogs to see what they are doing.  You read posts by blog experts like problogger.com.  You continue to post and mingle.

The occasional comment you receive from others tell you that someone has found help in what you wrote.  Other bloggers that see your blog and say - this is a good blog.  So you go on.  Traffic decreases.  You get discouraged.

You go to a forum of friend you have made and voice your discouragement.  They tell you they understand, but you have a good blog and don’t give up.  Then you again remember ‘the only way to fail is  to quit’.

One day you check your traffic.  600 visits yesterday, and 300 already today?  What is going on?  You check back in a little bit - 700 today,  then 800.  You check to see what post is so interesting.  It is a post you wrote 6 months ago!  In fact, it wasn’t much of a post, but it did have a cute catch.  You look to see where it came from - stumbleupon.  But what happened?  You stumbled it yourself back when you wrote it?  And why so much traffic?  You end up with 1600 visits that day.  OK, for a pro, that is probably an average day or even a slow day, but for you, it is like a miracle.

‘The only way to fail is  to quit’ rings in your ears.  Then the next day, traffic slows to a bit higher than usual.  But does it end there?  Nope, a week later you get a higher volume of traffic (not near 1600 or even 1000), but much more than your usual.  What post is getting the attention?  The same one.  And the visitors are also checking out other posts and pages on the site.  Maybe you are making progress after all.

‘The only way to fail is  to quit’

OK - so if I want to really accomplish my goal, all I need to do is keep trying, keep posting, keep learning, keep making new friends, observe what works and what doesn’t, and DON’T QUIT.

While the exact definition of SPAM (not the canned meat) differs from person to person, the general feeling of SPAM is the same - an irritating nuisance. Online entrepreneurs are usually the ones accused of spamming. Until lately I did not realize that the online entrepreneur’s blogs are subject to being spammed by comments. In fact, while browsing through the web, I found one fellow actually advertising a free tool to spam blog comments. 

After reading the do’s and don’ts in that article, I went back through the comments I had received.  I found quite a few that were easy to spot.  They are normally short and vague.  Sometimes the spam comment will pick up the post title or the blog title, even if the comment does not make sense. I felt betrayed - fellow bloggers were spamming me.

One day last week I checked the comments on my wordpress blog (not this one, but another one I have).  I had 117 comments caught by askimet.  Akismet has been very good at recognizing spam comments.  The only problem with akismet is you have to read through the comments to ensure a valid comment did not get caught before you delete them.  I went searching for a plugin to fix my spam problem. I actually found several different plugins in several different types.

One works by making the author preview the comment before submitting.  I did not choose this one since if you hit the submit button instead of the preview button, you received a note to use the back button to preview first.  When I hit the back button, the comment was gone.  As a commenter, I would throw up my hands and move on.  A similar one claimed to fix the back-button problem. I could not get that one to work. The comments on that plugin were very favorable; I just couldn’t get it to work.

Another type uses a capcha.  We all run into those all over the place.  Some of them I cannot read which causes me frustration.  If it causes me frustration to go throught 3 or 4 before I get the capcha correct, it will frustrate some of my commenters.  Again, I moved on. 

A third type uses a simple math.  I found two of these.  I have used them on other’s blogs when commenting.  They seemed a simple solution that did not bother me. Some people are not very good at math.  So why take the chance of frustrating a good follower just because they might not add quickly? 

I found and installed WP-spamfree.  This handy plugin is ‘plug and play’ with a few options available if you want.  I copied the code for the ‘badge’ which shows how many comments were caught.  I simply opened the footer.php and place the code at the very top (before the footer theme code).  You can see mine at Be the Weight You Want.  In less than 24 hours it has caught 12 spam comments.  I put the badge on the page so my readers would know it was to catch spam.  Now my akismet can be my safety net incase wp-spamfree misses something.

In my testing of this plugin, it has been virtually invisible to the commenter.  I hope if my readers comments do not get through they will let me know. I will have to put a contact link in my sidebar so they (you) can let me know if my new tool blocks them.

Do you have this problem?  What is your answer?