Blog Awards

In it's simplest sense, I think we could say that advertising is a way of attempting to persuade you, the consumer, that your life would be better if you use such a 'brand named' product or service.
I hope not many of us would be fooled by false advertising then.

Credit for the original image that I photo-shopped should be given to Coco Lee and her 'pure yoga' advertising.



On the theme of advertising then....

In the last couple of weeks, I have received three similar mails, allegedly from three different sites, all basically saying the same thing and I quote one here...

Hello, This is Shiela from BedroomFurnitureDiscounted.com. We stumbled on your blog page and found it interesting! We operate the largest Home Furniture & Office Furniture website featuring more than 30,000+ blogs. Our site averages 200,000+ unique visitors per month. As a kind note We have featured your blog at http://BedroomFurnitureDiscounted.com/blog_awards/index.php?id=22658 We would be grateful if you could add the following details to your blogs main page. Discounted Bedroom Furniture Looking forward for your confirmation. Thanks Shiela BedroomFurnitureDiscounted.com.

Normally I would dismiss such a one off mail as the usual Spam but I had the same mail from two printer ink companies and all three were for my old defunct site of 'Jazz-Journals.'
Site One: PrinterInkCannon.com
Site Two:PrinterInkDell.com
Site Three: BedroomFurniturediscounted.com

I have seen blog award sites where you have to pay around US$200 to enter the award scheme and then promote your site to get the votes. What we are really doing is paying the money to promote their awards and asking my readers to go their site and vote for me.
This one seems a little different.
If you click on any of those three similar sites "Contact us" button, you will see the advertising for their products. I believe that they are simply pretending to advertise my old blog and the blogs of everyone else they contact and in return we advertise them. My readers may well assume that because I advertise them that I am endorsing them.
Just the opposite in this case then!
I believe it's a scam in the form of a false advertising site where you pay for products that you'll never receive.
By asking thousands and thousands of blogger's to link them and if thousands and thousands do they'll get 'back-links' and therefore search engines, like Google, will give those sites much more credit and they will climb higher in the pages of search engines where people are genuinely looking to purchase these products.
Unfortunately what perhaps these scammer's have not considered is back-link relevance. That means that for there bedroom furniture site, a single back-link from another furniture site would be much more relevant (and therefore creditable) than ten links from girl's diary, philosophy, charity and fishing site links.