Yesterday I posted a comment Slogs at the post Spam Splog Tag stating that they were not a sustainable business model. Vaughan over at Blog Business followed up with some good points.

As with spam, I don’t doubt that Russian based sites will start to dominate and, for each one that gets knocked down, another will rise. It’s therefore a fairly efficient and sustainable business model.

Truthfully, I really don’t know how successful spam is as a business model because I haven’t tested it.

What I do know is this as a business and marketing fundamental:

Almost any business model is unsustainble unless there is a back end to the business. Whats a back end?

Its where you sell additional products or services to people who have already bought off you.

Businesses with only one product or revenue stream rarely survive over the long term. Like Jay Abraham said if you only have one product or service you don’t have a business you have a promotion.

Its far more expensive to sell to a new customer than it is to sell to a happy customer who has already bought off you.

I know there are a lot of retired sploggers out there with blog spam sites that have thrown in the towel because the time, money, and effort it took to set up those sites, even with automated software wasn’t worth the short term payoff of a few months worth of adsense revenue.

Splogging will only continue as long as a new generation of sploggers comes along to replace the last (which granted will probably continue as long as splog software sellers continue to peddle their junk)

It also begs the question of how we define splogging. The use of multiple inter-linked sites is commonplace in the worlds of Viagra, porn and other areas, and is condemned. But when a single publisher has multiple blogs (say, Weblogs Inc just as a for instance), all of which link to each other, isn’t the same trick being used? It would certainly help the SE ratings. Where do we draw the line?

Interlinking of sites in of itself is not splogging. It has absolutely nothing to do with splogging. Blog Networks like Web Blogs Inc which interlink between sites offer legitamate content that is of use value or interest to the viewer - and that is the key difference.

Splogs have interlinking but they have no usuable content. They’re just junk sites filled with meaningless keywords to attract search engine results. Sometimes they will use RSS feeds and spidered excerpts linking to other sites in the guise of content but at the end of the day when the viewer arrives at the site they will usually see a big fat ad followed by gobbledy gook.

At sites like the blogs at Web Logs Inc there are constantly updated articles of interest. Readers come back again and again and participate in that blog community with the comments features, competitions, polls etc.

When readers and users come back to blogs like the ones at Web Logs Inc that demonstrates value - plus they get the repeat business with either products purchased or more ad clicks.