Ambassador Series: Putting Email Links into Your Blog Posts on ActiveRain.

Email links in your blog posts - want spam?

This morning I happened upon a post by Kathy Nielsen, a home stager in Georgia, about embedding email links into your blog posts.  While her instructional post was dead on and explained step by step how to embed email links into your blog post, I had to leave her a comment.

Back in my rock and roll days, I was also the webmaster for the band's web site which received about a million visitors a month (at our peak, we had several months that topped five million).  Being a webmaster, I handled all the email inquiries - from fan letters to bills to requests to play here or there.  Because of the varied email I would receive, we had to keep spam filters off (emails with foreign language words often were marked as spam).  A good day for me meant about 600 email messages to sort through.  At times, I was receiving upwards of 4,000 a day.  Quite a lot of it was spam.

Much like a search engine crawls the web looking for keyword rich content, spammers crawl the website looking for fresh blood, uh, I mean email addresses.  You've probably seen a site or two where they listed there email (not linked) written out as "example at somedomain dot com" or "example[at]somedomain[dot]com" - these are attempts to thwart the spammers activites and have them pass over the email address without adding it to their database.  (Personally, I'm not sure of the value of this, my guess is spammers are a little smarter than this and have written some good code to extract these hidden addresses.)

Mailto: Links, Contact Forms, and ActiveRain.

In Kathy's post, she recommended making use of mailto: links.  I could explain the whole process of creating these links via HTML or with ActiveRain, but that's neither here not there (read Kathy's post or search Google for "mailto link").  Spammers love these links because they are easy to spot within the HTML code.  Putting your email in a mailto: link is an open invitation to spammers.  Writing out your email address without the link is just as bad (spammers search for anything that contains the @ symbol and then recursively search for the name at the front and the domain and .com at the end).  Simply put, writing yourname@emailaddress.com is akin to begging a spammer to send you some email.

For this reason, many websites use contact forms as their way of allowing visitors to email them.  While this won't cure all spam (some spammers are actual human beings and some are just sophisticated programs that understand what a contact form looks like - that's why you have to type the wacky, nonsensical words to gain access to so many email contact forms), it does help prevent a lot of it.  ActiveRain has used a contact form since I've been here and just recently they improved the contact form and made it possible to link to it (this was not previously possible).  It takes a little more time than Kathy's suggestion, but will save you from some of the spam.

How to link to your ActiveRain Contact page.

1. Write your blog post as you would normally.  Instead of writing out your email address, use a sentence such as "Contact me for more information about foreclsoures in San Antonio."
2. Publish your post as you would normally.
3. When you are redirected to the page with your new post, look on the sidebar for the "Email Me" link.
4. Copy the link location for the "Email Me" link - you can do this several ways, but make sure you grab the link while looking at the specific post you're working on.
5. Click "edit" on your post.
6. Find the place your wish to put your "contact me" link and highlight the text and click the link button as you would to create any link on ActiveRain.
7. When the "Insert Link" pop-up appears, simply paste the URL into the "Link URL" box.  Don't forget to add a "Title" - these are a great way to build SEO for your site.  Use keywords.  In my example in Step 1, I would probably highlight "information about foreclosures in San Antonio" and fill in the "Title" with "Foreclosures in San Antonio - Request More Information."  I'd also suggest you change the "Target" drop-down box to "Open link in the same window" - this keeps a smooth flow in your blog, without a user having a ton of windows open to view your site.
8. Publish your blog once again.  That's it.  You should now have a post with a link directly embedded within the text that leads users to your contact page.

Remember how I said to be sure to copy the link while looking at the specific post you were writing?  If you look at the link you copy, you will notice some extra text at the end of it.  For example, here's a recent one I copied:

http://activerain.com/rerockstar/contact?return_url=%2Fblogsview%2F1938408%2Ftest

All that gibberish that appears after the "?" is a message that tells the contact form that when the visitor is done contacting you and sends you their message, it should return them to the blog post they came from.  Smart, eh?

photo courtesy of bandita

Here are all the posts in this series:

Ambassador Series: Putting Email Links into Your Blog Posts on ActiveRain.

Ambassador Series: Taking your ActiveRain Contact Page one step further: The Signature Part I

My "thank you" page: Thank you for contacting me.

Ambassador Series: Taking your ActiveRain Contact Page one step further: The Signature Part II

Ambassador Series: Taking your ActiveRain Contact Page one step further: The Signature Part III