My dear Internet marketing drone or spammer, I opened my email this morning and got a tiny glimmer of excitement as out of the corner of my eye I spotted a subject line with the words “Guest Post on Your Blog.”
“Oh Goody!” I thought for a moment, “Someone else with an interesting and relevant blog in my particular niche is contacting me in order to set up a mutually beneficial exchange where they provide me with well written content and I provide them with a link back to their blog!” After all, that is what a Guest Blog is all about.
However, when I opened up your email my excitement quickly turned to sour disappointment.
It began when you called me “Dear Site Owner”. I’m sure you realise that “Site Owner” is not my name as my parents would never be that cruel. I have a name and it is clearly stated in the “About Me” page of my blog. If you had taken more than five minutes to look through the blog you would have found it, which makes me wonder if you have looked at my blog at all.
Your email further continued to disappoint me when I read your suggestions for guest blog topics. Now I’m convinced that you have never read my blog before, because your suggestions have nothing to do with anything which has been previously published on my blog. Most of my readers are young budget travellers, so why would they be interested in five star hotels in London and tickets to West End Musicals? I’m sure you could have come up with something which fit the tone and the audience of my blog much better.
However, like the cheesy guy in the bar who uses the same pick up line night on night, I’m sure you say these exact words to all of the blog owners. You probably have copy and pasted this email and changed nothing but the blog name. Boy, you sure do know how to make a girl feel special!
Oh wait, what’s this? You have sent me an attachment! It is a word file with the article that you would like published on my blog. Just out of sheer morbid curiosity I must have a look. “Click”
Oh god, my eyes! This is the ugliest formatted blog post I have ever seen. It’s all over the place and it looks like you vomited words onto the page! Are you not embarrassed to put your name on something with so many spelling errors and grammatical mistakes? Even if I could look beyond the glaring mistakes, the article is un-inspiring and doesn’t offering anything helpful to my readers.
Oh, but here’s the kicker. Now that we get down to the bottom of the email we discover what you want out of the arrangement. You want me to place a link to a hotel chain, travel booking website or other commercial venture within your guest post. Of course you do. There’s nothing wrong with that per say, but the problem is that you expect me to essentially provide you with free advertising.
The company you are promoting will get a back link which will boost their SEO. You will get paid a commission for soliciting the guest post. As for me, the blog owner, I am the only one who gets screwed over in the arrangement because I will be subjecting my readers to terrible content and spamming them with advertising. I can’t do that, because I actually like my readers!
So, thank you for your email regarding guest posting, it looks fantastic in my “Trash” folder. Try again next time.