Why do I get spam emails?

It is a question that a lot of people ask.To have a better understanding about why spammers spam, you have to look into the benefits of spam.Just like a Home Burglar, there is a financial aspect to their career decision 99% of the time.

Spammers are people too. They have monetary needs like everyone else from a purse snatcher to a kidnapper. They act in a way that has become an annoyance to millions of people. It is estimated that 80% of the email traffic that is received around the world is spam. That is a lot. It cripples the internet, and wastes millions of business dollars, and lots of time.

Let’s dig deeper into a spammers world, and we will find out that what lies ahead is psychologically and mathematically devious. It’s the true un-filtered world of the marketers and a numbers game, that when played long enough, you can win.

Becoming a spammer takes tons of research; I mean to be a real good spammer making $50,000 to $100,000 per year. You have to find the proper software and that software is not mentioned or listed anywhere a Google spider can access. This spam program exists only on the Invisible Web; underground websites that cannot be accessed unless the url address is directly typed, and have no trace of their existence with the visible world. In fact, even if I told you the name of the software, you would not be able to find it online, no search results would appear and the company that developed it doesn’t even have a web address. A quick note, there is a difference between Google/Yahoo knowing you exist and not indexing you, and them not knowing you exist completely. That is where this invisible web lies, in the unknown, uncharted waters.

The main reason for the secrecy is that there are huge amounts of anti-spamming groups and government officials who would love to know the name of the company and their products.

Getting to this invisible web is quite a feat on its own, but then getting the software is a different challenge. I don’t want to go into the details of how to get the spam software, but understand, once you got it, you will be able to harvest the true power of the biggest spammers.

Now, the spam game is a game of numbers. Like boiler room cold calling; the more calls you make, the more likely you will make a sale. Spammers play with very very little and continuously dwindling numbers. A rate of .005% to .001% is considered a great success. That’s why they have computers setup to send millions upon millions of emails a day.

Look at these numbers:

1,000,000 emails (sent out) at .005% click through rate = 5,000 potential leads.
If you take that and put a normal 3% to 5% conversion rate, you get 150 to 250 people that will end up buying your product.

Here is the interesting part. If you get 150 to 250 people who are definitely going to buy your product, you aren’t going to be selling bubble gum at 5 cents a piece. Did you know that viagra, cialis and other pharmaceutical products affiliate programs, pay from $35 to $150 PER sale?

That means that a spammer has the potential to make $5250 to $37,500 for that batch of 1 million emails. Now the reality of it is that big dogs in spamming are making from $5,000 to $100,000 a week and sending out 20 to 40 million emails a week.

If you simply look at the financial opportunity, it is huge, but with a huge risk. Some of these treats are death threats, jail, fines and being hated by everybody. But as you can see from your inbox, lots of spammers have chosen that life.

Now I am not here to condone spammers and their ways, since it is the equivalent of condoning drug dealers. If there was no demand, the suppliers would dry up.

So how can we stop spam? How can we eliminate demand from an already unwanted product? We can stop clicking on emails which we receive that are spam. Spammers continue to spam, because people continue to click on their emails, and drive them business. If all the spam emails were simply ignored by EVERYONE, the spammers would stop spamming.

We have to educate people and use better email programs like Thunderbird with SpamAssassin which directly filters the spam into the trash and/or deletes it. The day that spammer’s financial numbers go down is the day thay they will be gone just like the train robbers of the late 19th century.I would have used pirates as an example, but apparently piracy is up by 10% in 2007, go figure.

Related posts:

1. Twitter and Spam
2. The US Economy, The Media and Your Online Business
3. Pop-up Games
4. Marketing in a Social World
5. Paralysis by Over Analysis