Hate Spam? Use the Akismet plug-in and your days of spam are over

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I love getting comments on my blog. Working from home and writing away at my computer, it’s easy to start wondering if anyone is reading what I write. Sure, I can look up the stats showing traffic on my blog, but it doesn’t tell me if people are connecting with what I’m writing.

Comments however tell me that not only are people reading what I write, they are interested enough to want to start a conversation.

I still remember my first comment. I have WordPress set up to notify me by email when someone posts a comment. When I got that first notification I was so happy! For the first few months, as readership was just starting to grow, I very occasionally got comments. But each time it was a little thrill.

Then I started to get spam comments. It was a real letdown. I’d get an email and be all excited about getting a comment – but it would be spam. But again, these were few and far between at first.

Then about January, when my readership really started to take off, so did my spam. I was getting several a week. Sometimes as many as five a day. Now, instead of getting a little thrill when I got an email about a comment I started to feel annoyed. It was just going to be spam.

Not only was it annoying, but it was time-wasting. I would have to check my email then log into WordPress to delete the spam. I started wondering if there was something I could do. Of course, since I’m using WordPress for my blog there was something I could do – install a plug-in.

If you’re not familiar with blogging, a plug-in is a mini piece of software that you can “plug in” to your WordPress blog to perform certain tasks or functions. For just about anything you could want to do with you blog, someone has created a plug-in for it. And usually these plug-ins are available for free.

Fortunately for me, I didn’t even need to go searching for the plug-in. The Akismet anti-spam plug-in came preinstalled with my WordPress blog; I had just never thought to turn it on.

Well, now I have activated it and I must say I love it! No more emails from my blog that turn out to be spam. Akismet catches all the spam and holds it for me. Periodically I can go in and check it to make sure no real comments were captured but so far that’s never happened. And I must confess I really love deleting spam.

So once again, I can be happy when I receive email notification of a comment to my blog – I know it’s a real comment from someone who connected with what I wrote.

Andrea J. Stenberg

Just a quick reminder, tonight at 7 pm eastern (Toronto) I’m interviewing blogging expert Yaro Starak as part of my Build Your Business Teleseminar Series. It’s only $37 for the entire series of six teleseminars. The calls will be recorded if you can’t attend live.