I was looking for a plastic film to protect my iphone.

One of the guys at work said not to use the third-party pack of five, available at the Optus shop across the road.

So I went to see what else they had.

The only other offering, was something called Maclove. A plastic film that also had various decorations, and matching wallpapers you could download from a site.

Given that my temporary film, cut from the package the iPhone ad come with, was wearing out, I chose the Maclove. $10.

Got it home, and for the life of me, couldn’t peel it off.

I hate the risk of breaking things, particularly “hardware”, so I went to see if there was a website. Yes, to show me how to peel a sticky cover off. I just didn’t want to rip the wrong part.

Google showed me maclove.eu.

It sucked. Check out this screenshot:

The Flash dropdowns completely covered the one part of the page I wanted – how to stick it on.

So I peeled off the sticky bit, and held the cover in my hand. The bit with the decorative feature.
Strange, it wasn’t adhesive.
Did I put it on wrong?
What I have would be useless without the hard case (that I bought separately), to hold the film in place.

Am I having a blonde moment?

I’ve dabbled with Google AdWords advertising for personal sites on a small budget over the years, with a fair bit of success. My most targetted traffic I get for around 6 cents a click, and has been as low as 3 cents. It’s very targetted. So I keep it chugging along.

About two weeks ago I thought I’d experiment with a more expensive area – the “work from home” field. Clicks are pretty expensive if you want to rank well – even $1.50 for an extremely targetted ad and landing page rarely gets page one results.

Based on conversion cost, it looks like being worthwhile so far. Money I’ve spent has been completely recouped with interest.

But the spam has been oppressive.

My goal was to get people to enter their contact details, so I could follow them up. I had an autoresponder in place, but would additionally contact people personally. I have a contact form to collect details, so I don’t expose my email address.

It was an old site I hadn’t touched for years. It wasn’t ranking on search engines for my preferred words (given that I hadn’t maintained it), so it wasn’t getting any traffic.

So now I am paying for traffic.

And I appear to be paying for abuse and obscenities.

Over half the paid traffic contains profanities. People who have clicked on my paid ads at Google, purely to enter their obscene descriptions, linking back to their obscene sites.

It’s hard to tell at this point whether it is automated traffic or not. But if it is, the fact that robots are visiting sites advertised on Google AdWords, and I am being charged for it, doesn’t seem right.

I validate server-side for valid email addresses. Most seem to be a .ru email address.
But it gets my goat that Google doesn’t seem able to prevent this.

I’ve emailed Google to see what the procedure is. Surely they should allow chargebacks for obvious spam sent through paid links.

I wanted to be able to recommend AdWords as a good way of generating leads for this field. But I have to hesitate, knowing that they would be receiving filthy responses.

I do get spam from other sites I own, even those with captcha systems to validate input. But none of them receive the obcene spam I get from the work from home keywords.

Would love to know what others are experiencing.