I knew it existed, but I was only faced with it truly when I started writing my blog. There is a kind of spam that I think is a bit annoying, but acceptable. These are the people who own a company or web service, and go around on people’s blogs, writing quasi-useful comments with their link inside.
First of all, it is not really good netiquette to include your link in forums, or comments. It may also get filtered if a blog has a very aggressive spam filtering system. Second of all, you can enter your website in the form, and if someone likes your comment, they can click on your name and whoosh, they’re at the site. The goal would be to write an interesting enough comment.
However, I am prepared to accept “spam” like this, that is at leas half relevant. I wrote a post on managing your tasks with Remember the Milk a while ago, and recently approved the following comment:
“The logo is cute - no doubt 
I was using the service untill I realized I needed something more. Now I’m with Wrike.com [http://www.wrike.com/]. It’s a very cool project management service.”
I can’t say 100% that this is spam, but I’m pretty sure, since Wrike is a pay for application. It’s also not exactly a substitute for Remember the Milk, but, it is similar. I also like the fact that the commenter actually read some of the post. I really-really dislike spam, but comments like this are acceptable, since they show you alternatives.
If you have a service you want to promote it’s fine posting a comment in every blog I think, but at least make the effort to contribute to the subject at hand. If you do, I think you should be ok, even if you put in your link, I mean I understand that services need traffic. If y”our product is really bad, no amount of traffic will save you anyway.
Andrew Owen's Thoughts
at 10:30 am
Daniel, what is interesting is your reaction to such comments. Did this comment made you check out Wrike, for example?
Frankly speaking, this comments doesn’t look like spam, because Remember the Milk is rather simple task management application for individuals indeed, while Wrike is for project managers, I suppose. It’s about scale of your needs..
@Stephen | Productivity in Context's Thoughts
at 10:34 am
I agree with your sentiment about the spam-style comments. Many companies do not yet fully understand the conversation aspect, because they are not regular users/visitors/readers of the site they are “promoting” their product on. I get spammed by commenters once in a while when one of us reviews a product or service, usually it’s a competitor!
It’s too bad that Gina did not include a link to her site, if she is tech-savvy enough to be using Wrike, she should have a blog.
I like Wrike, too. They are a sponsor of my blog, and whenever I drop the name, I mention that too.
Daniel's Thoughts
at 12:38 pm
Hi Andrew.
No not really. I had a look at the site but I didn’t check out the actual application. I may check it out later, but I am primarily interested in free apps for now.
Hi Stephen.
Yes, promoting is not a problem for me. It gets the promoter visitors, and content on my blog. If you mention on your blog that these people are your sponsors I’d still definitely check it out. Blogs are great for promotions like these because readers trust te writer’s judgment enough to at least check out the link.
MK's Thoughts
at 9:48 pm
It is true and i agree with you. However i too will not delete such comments just because there is a chance even if a slight one that it is not intended to be spam.