HOEI

There are a few creative lessons that can be learned from spammers. Digest the source code of your spam emails once in a while. You will notice that many mass emailing systems use custom images using the “img src” tag in the email body. Chances are that many legitimate emails in your inbox contain this type of code. Sometimes they even use a unique image per recipient. This helps the sender spammer track who has opened the email. Hence, the spammer immediately knows which emails are valid. This system does require that the recipient’s email client be configured to display HTML.

As a new blogger or web site owner looking to get a few more hits on a fresh domain, this might be a helpful technique for adding hits to your logs. By adding a custom signature to your mass emails you can register hits to your site. For instance, I might add the following code as an email signature.

[img src="http://www.hoei.com/images/HOEImini.jpg" alt="HOEI email logo" / ]

Of course you would need to replace my ][ brackets with the standard HTML tag brackets.

This little morsel is an example of what can be placed in your email signatures when sending out to your site subscribers. Each recipient who has HTML enabled on their email client will see the anchored image and will register a hit on your web site statistics simply by viewing your email. This can increase the hit count of your site’s raw visitor logs even when no one is actually visiting. This might be helpful if you are looking to build up those numbers to impress a perspective advertiser or client. Not only do these embedded images build hits, they can also help in building your brand.