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It’s said that copywriters have to do with the written word what good salespeople do verbally. Most of the time we work like car salespeople – someone will wander into our website or showroom, wondering if they should part with their hard-earned cash. We’ll then use our tricks, techniques and wiles to worm our way into their wallets. We get paid, they get a product, everyone wins.
But what about the copy equivalent of the door to door salesperson? Well, they can be just terrible.
Spam emails and forum comments are the online equivalent of knocking on somebody’s door and opening your suitcase full of wares. If you don’t have your patter just right, it’s an alsatian to the crotch before you can even get to the end of your first sentence.
That being the case, why do we never see fantastically funny, well-written spam? Surely investing a bit of time into an amusing, gramatically correct piece of copy singing the praises of your “penis engorgement assistant” makes more sense than posting one of the following comments:
“You make big c**k by with use [PRODUCT NAME]!!”
“[LINK] buy now [LINK] make purchase [LINK] equity [LINK] cheesecake”
“Вы будете иметь исполинского цыпленка мальчика если вы едите этого волшебного тонического камрада”
Spammers of the world, stop a moment. Take some classes, read some blogs, buy a dictionary. You never know – some of your attempts might even beat my filter.
If anyone can come up with a convincing, well written “spam comment” below, I’ll be impressed. Double points for anyone selling anatomy enlargement apparatus.
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#1 by Philipb on August 25, 2009 - 2:02 pm
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I like to combine spam headers as in “triple X Russian women want to meet you & refinance your home.”
#2 by Andrew Nattan on August 25, 2009 - 10:12 am
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That’s what I just don’t understand. Why be so lazy? If they can put in a tiny morsel of effort and get, say, a 1% clickthrough rate from these thousands of emails and comments, spammers would get huge amounts of traffic.
Then again, I guess they could just solely be targeting the easily impressed and simply duped sections of the market.
#3 by Paul, copySnips.com on August 25, 2009 - 3:05 am
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Bottom line, is because they’re lazy. Too lazy to actually think up something that might actually get opened or… heaven forbid, get construed as a genuine email.
That would involve too much work for them.
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#4 by Katy Evans-Bush on August 24, 2009 - 4:55 pm
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Oops, sorry. It took my joke-cod-fake-html thingy seriously. That is not a link!! (The shame. “I am not a spammer. I am not a spammer.”)
#5 by Katy Evans-Bush on August 24, 2009 - 4:54 pm
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Is your girl looking for love in all the wrong places? Cause what the eye can’t see the heart can’t ponder? Is your next date with a magnifying glass?
No, but seriously. Boys, unless you have some condition so extreme that it’s more medical than aesthetic, just relax. Don’t worry. What you need is not vi*gra so much as some valium. Though you could try the vi*gra too, for fun.
(Surgical “enhancement” goes beyond both my ken and my stomach, and certainly against my advice, I’m afraid.)
#6 by Ben Locker on August 24, 2009 - 4:46 pm
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On the other hand, there are those spammers who paste in a passage of Dickens or Dostoevsky in an attempt to beat the spam filters. If I could find a Viagra merchant willing to paste in a page of (say) Tibor Fischer’s stuff, in the correct order, I’d sign up for regular updates.
#7 by Beatrice on August 24, 2009 - 4:07 pm
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Don’t encourage them!
(I’m delighted to discover that UT doesn’t actually register as a “blog” on our work’s IT system, and therefore I can read your words of wisdom during working hours…)
#8 by B'Elana on August 24, 2009 - 4:00 pm
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So that’s what they say in the spam? I never open any in the Post account, and I never get any to my private account.
#9 by Andrew Nattan on August 24, 2009 - 3:30 pm
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See, that’s an actual sentence that explains the benefits of the product.
#10 by Timothy (TRiG) on August 24, 2009 - 3:19 pm
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I once received a spam e-mail with the delightfully straightforward and to-the-point subject line “Make your dick bigger.”
TRiG.
#11 by Toni Anicic on August 24, 2009 - 1:22 pm
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They can beat my filter but can’t beat my Chuck Norris-like trained spam hunting eye
I approve comments on my blog by hand in case it’s a new commenter.