From the other side – Bad approaches for a guest post
If you’re not familiar, running a blog like this one I’m inundated with requests for guest posts. A guest post, in the terms I accept here, is someone who wants to write some, maybe make a name for themselves or just test the waters. Brings something to the site. You’ve seen a few of ours, generally I hope they’re useful.
But there’s a big business in guest posting that all revolves around a site such as Pocketable’s domain authority (how real are we,) linking to sites with lower rankings in order to build them up. There’s also a business of people trying to simply get you from here to their gambling site, but yeah. Google’s managed to make a whole ecoverse of spammers work to trick content creators and legit platforms into posting word spaghetti links to garbage.
I don’t generally want guest posts. I made a mistake a while back and allowed someone who turned out worked for a firm in (it was not a person, it was a group of typewriter monkeys claiming to be a person,) and have since then been really pretty much ticked off about the whole thing.
The general letter I get out of the blue is from a gmail account and goes something along the lines of “hey, big fan of your block https://www.pocketables.com/ and have been for a while and was wondering if you accept guests posts.” This means they didn’t bother to hit the Contact Us and read the guest post guidelines. We also get a lot of “do you accept paid guests posts,” and “how much for an ad” which if you’ve been on any page on the site you know.
Usually I delete these, but I had a slightly better targeted one recently that had some suggestions that actually were not terrible (meaning they at least were about phones, apps, and security.)
My name is XXXX. I’m working for [sitename] where I write about [area that actually pertains to Paul’s interests]
You may have noticed my comments on your different posts (awesome article by the way). I’m writing you because I noticed that your blog is open to guest posts. I’d love to contribute a guest post to your blog.
There was a list of potential topics and I was like – ok, not quite Pocketables, but not quite off… I wonder if this guy knows how few comments the site gets and how there’s a tool called Search on the site, and Google as well, that allows me to search for a user’s comments. I can even search via email address from this side on many.
Huh, shocking, nobody had ever commented with that name. I asked him to link me to one comment and he said he would shortly. Three days later he’s asking for any updates and I ask him once again to show me an article he’s commented on. I was told to “leave that,” and asked how much to post an article at this point.
How many great business relationships begin with a lie? A lot I’m guessing, but man.
