As Information Entrepreneurs, sometimes we feel like “second-class citizens” who aren’t credible in today’s world. It’s easy to feel like since our products don’t occupy shelf space as Barnes & Noble, our products don’t matter as much or carry as much weight. Today, Pearson, the world’s largest publishing company made some statements about digital products buried deep in their earnings report that is very interesting to us.
Here’s an excerpt from a Pearson earnings report today (emphasis provided)…
Our digital products and services are blossoming.
This past year, digital sales reached £2bn – one-third of all Pearson’s sales. Our digital learning programmes now serve almost 50 million students; Penguin’s ebook sales doubled last year and are now 12% of its total; the FT’s digital subscriptions jumped 29% to 267,000 (and in the US, as a sign of things to come, we now have more digital subscribers than newspaper subscribers).
Pearson is the world’s largest publishing company. They understand that hard-copy books days are numbered. Don’t let anyone tell you that digital products don’t pay!
As usual, the key is providing value and making that value accessible and most useful to our customers. I’m proud to be on the cusp of the digital product wave. It’s a great time to be producing digital information!
How Do I Know If Blog Comments Are Spam?
If you’ve been blogging for a while now and the “Big G” (er… Google) is indexing your posts, then you’re probably seeing some comment activity on one or more of your blog posts. For a first-time beginning blogger, that can be a real rush–an acknowledgement that your hard work is paying off and that people are finally beginning to notice you!
Now, I don’t want to burst your bubble, but… (it’s never good when there’s a “but” in that kind of sentence) …the first thing to notice your hard work is usually a spam-bot. A spam-bot is a tool that [bad] marketers use to post comments on other people’s blog posts, meant simply to gain them back-links to their sales pages. It still astonishes me that spammers can afford such technology–a testament that spamming does actually work, though I don’t know how they sleep at night. As the spam technology gets smarter and smarter, it gets harder to tell which comments are legit. and which are from the spam engines.
If your WordPress site is setup to prevent spam, it will require approval of comments so they don’t automatically get posted, and you may want to leverage plugins like WP-SpamFree and Akismet to filter out some. But some will inevitably get through. And you’ll be receiving emails from your WordPress site to moderate comments in no time. Those emails look like this (emphasis provided):
Since I have WP-SpamFree installed on my site, I also get the following in the email:
Armed with this information, it’s somewhat easier to make a judgement call. And to be sure, that’s all it is now days… a judgement call. So here are my quickie points to determining whether the comment stays or gets marked as SPAM:
With the use of anti-spam plugins like, WP-SpamFree and/or Akismet, your WordPress website will automatically filter out many of the comments you get from spam-bots. However, when some slip through, you now have the tools to make a judgement call on which comments are legitimate.
Happy blogging!