Search Engine Traffic

Spammers have always been able to exploit new ways to generate profits. The increasingly popular Twitter is not immune to spammers either.

If you are using Twitter, you may have already noticed that people out of nowhere mysteriously started to follow you. They usually have a pretty girl’s picture as their profile photo, and their twitter username usually ends with 3 digits, a sign that they are using some sort of automated twitter tools to generate these fake accounts.

It usually works like this: the spammer get an affiliate link through Clickbank or other affiliate networks; she or he then shortens the link by using bit.ly; they then create a lot of twitter accounts and start following people automatically; these links are posted to their twitter stream – usually as the first and only tweets these fake account will post.

So why do spammers target twitter now? It turns out it is quite profitable for the spammers.

I recently noticed that I have been spammed with all sorts of links related to online forex trading. I don’t know much about the forex trading market but it must be highly lucrative for the spammer affiliates promoting forex trading ebooks through clickbank.

Let’s do a quick back of envelope calculation on this type of spams. The url shortener service bit.ly has a nifty feature that gives you the statistics of clicks on a particular link. Here is a screenshot of a spam link that promoted a forex trading how-to type of ebook.

As you can see, this guy generated 14,571 clicks to his landing page in just one week. Let’s conservatively estimate that only 1% of clicks generates a sales for him. That’s almost 145 sales in one week. For an ebook on Clickbank that sells for $47 a copy and pays out 50% to affiliates, 145 sales would amounts to $3,407 in profits for this spammer in one week. Of course this is just an estimate, but you got the idea.

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