On the heels of my popular advice why some people suck at emailing me requests to publish their guest blog posts, I received a message with the following subject line:
Professional Copywriting for Sci Fi Talk
My first instinct was a recruiter found my resume on one of the online job boards where I posted it with my desire to work in social media marketing, and that this person wanted me to write articles for a science fiction website.
Alas, no.
Howdy Ari,
I hope you’re keeping well. I’m just getting in touch to ask if you’re in need of any freelance writing at Sci Fi Talk – if so, it’d be an honor to help out and I would love to get involved if you have any need for me.
I’m 29 have been working full-time as a professional writer and researcher for five years; in that time there isn’t a lot I haven’t already covered (there are a few samples below for you to check out). Anything I send over would be written with the site’s readership in mind – as long as you’re happy with the resulting material, you’d be welcome to publish it as you see fit and the content will be owned by you entirely (in that I won’t send it to anyone else, either before or after publication.)
The good news is that I’d be able to offer my services at no charge; the only thing I would ask in return is that I’m able to include a link to a company within the article – nothing adult or in bad taste, just one of the professional businesses for which I freelance. Otherwise I’d be happy to chat about alternative arrangements if you’d rather not link to a corporate site.
Do let me know if you’re interested, and if so I can get something written for you over the course of the next few days. Needless to say, the offer is open to any other sites you might own as well as scifitalk.com. I appreciate that this kind of offer is not for everyone however, so if I don’t hear from you I won’t trouble you again.
Very best,
Imogen
Some samples for your delectation:
[and she listed 5 links]
I’m willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt.
But, red flags were raised.
First: Why isn’t Imogen including a last name?
Second: Why would I care about her age?
Third: Why would she think I’d accept a guest blog post for a fee?
Fourth: Why does she think I’d want her to write for me if she writes about everything under the sun?
Fifth: Why is she a professional writer but employs grammatical errors?
Sixth (and yes you saw this coming): Why does she think I run scifitalk.com? Has she not been a researcher for five years?
…and seventh: Why are other people receiving the same exact email?
I want you to write for me. I want you to share your best ideas on social media marketing to educate, entertain, and engage with my other readers here. But I want you to be a real person. Am I asking too much?
About Ari Herzog
Hi Herzog,
even i am getting lots of guest post request for them and interesting thing i noticed they always send some professional blog post and never mention my website name as their format was always hi i am xyz,
want to do guest post saw your website in google (PS they never mention my website name ) so dnt know to how many they forward same message
Hi Ari,
Good points. This definitely looks like a spam, a little bit of research would have been nice LOL.
- Cristina
Yes you are right Ari, I think these people are using some software to post such e-mails to several persons simultaneously. Your red flags are perfectly raised, for age , I think she must be trying to prove that she is mature enough, rest of the red flags are right by you. Regards
Hi Ari,
Its really annoying for all of us who recieve fake email message related guest post.The point is how could we deal with them and how and why we recieve such type of messages?Your concern related to this message is genuine.
Hi Ari,
In blogging world, there are many spammers and sometimes it is difficult for us to find out who is right and who is wrong. I found blog owners are very reluctant for this type of messages these days and it is a good thing. The red flags are really alarming and you raised right points to consider this message as a spam.
I paused at the SciFi Talk part, and quickly check the URL of the page, I’d honestly thought I was on another blog!
Considering the amount of spam I get, yes, it probably is too much to ask for these ‘guest-posters’ to be real people. Sad stuff really. But hey, at least she referred to you by using your real name. Most of the ‘guest-posters’ I get call me entirely something else. To some, I am Andrew, and for others, I’m Smith or more recently, Nathan!
I wonder do you get other types of junk emails too, than the guest posting emails. Being a webmaster myself, I usually get few emails every week passed from gmail’s spam detector. Most of them is about some wholesale china LED lighting advertisement, some adplace-seeking emails like “We are from XXX and we have a client who is interested in advertising on your YYY….” and so on.
Earlier days, I used to reply them politely asking them more about them, and how they knew about me. But that was no good idea of wasting time. Now when I receive those kinda emails, I just mark them as phishing in Gmail.
Obviously spammers are much clever nowadays and they make realistic emails too, but the bad thing happen when we consider a legitimate email as spam. As per my personal experience, once in oct’11 I got an email about a project development from Mr. ZZZ and I didn’t replied to it thinking it as a spam, but I replied to him (driven by some mysterious forces) in Feb’12, our conversation started and by mar’12 we came up with final project plan, and the finally I got some PayPal thanks from him.
As per your comments’ policy, Ari, my comment maybe unpublished because it’s a bit offtopic as you focused in the guest posting perspective of the spam in the blog post and my comment focuses on my experience with these kinds of spam mails. But I’m happy you read my comment while moderation.
I get a lot of those mails, I used to have my blog open so that guest poster could create a profile and submit their post before I had to read it.
But I ended up having to delete anything from 5 to 30 post on LED, Iphone gadgets and so on.
So can’t recommend that…
Sp the bottom line must be, that we have to live with spam both in comments but also guest posts.!
Hi Ari, Seems a bit strange, to be honest I too get a lot of spam and would not pay any attention to it. The one that I get most often is about some african prince who is on the run and is willing to share his millions with me as long as I agree to transfer the money into my account to keep it safe for him. These messages are written quite well so I bet some people could fall for them.
I receive several guest blogging requests per week myself and they all seem to follow a pattern – broken English, an Indian IP address and someone referring to themselves as either John or Jane Smith (I kid you not) from the UK.
Anyone else had this or know why they are misrepresenting where they are from?
Interesting. I didn’t realize that spammers had gotten that sophisticated. One would think if you have intentions of guest blogging for a well established site that the potential opportunity would be taken seriously. Amazing the lengths people will take to cut corners. Building a business is hard work and eventually people will find that if they just focus on putting in the work and quit wasting time looking for shortcuts they will be better off in the long run. Thanks for sharing.
No you are not asking for to much. Nothing beats a real person and personally I think the web has to many auto tools and you see the same old articles on blog after blog. I wish I had your knowledge of social media sinse my followers / likes are a nightmare *S* But it´s OK, I am happy to run my blog as a real person and you have a point about that woman that was a professional writer and still produced grammatical errors. What can you do? *S*
i too recently got once fake guest blog invitation. since i am new to the blogging world i accepted it and wrote about it. but in return they didnt even gave credits to my work.
Interesting. This is simply a guest blog attempt gone wrong. Vertical and horizontal guest blogging is becoming increasingly popular, and in my opinion, is dramatically better than exact match blog comment spam for link building. The problem is, since reply rates are really low for guest blogging outreach, you have to walk a fine line between well crafted, targeted emails, and sending out as many as you reasonably can. In this case, the outreach email you received has clearly gone to far down the “spray and pray” email blasting path.
Overall, I don’t necessarily look down on this kind of thing (even though they could’ve done a better job in a number of different ways), but if this is how we, as an industry have to evolve, then so be it.
I guess my point is: I’ll take crappy outreach emails and well-written guest blog posts over garbage forum / comment spam any day of the week.
That is an interesting email, to say the least. Maybe not quite to the level that I would grab the bag of popcorn, but interesting. I have not been blessed to have received one, but I would share your concern about the presumptions with the email and the discrepancies. Thank you for sharing… I am curious to go read about the 6 emails.
Online environment is very tough, especially for newbies. I also get all the time these kind of emails, asking me to guest blogging or on the contrary to publish posts from other people. At a first glance there is nothing wrong, but after taking another look at the messages I have found that most of the emails were from spammers and they had no credibility. Lately, I am amused by these emails.
It really annoys me when I get emails like this.
If you are serious, be professional, where are you from, what’s your full name, your enquiry and how do I contact you.
It’s not that hard – is it?
This is really funny.
I have this problem of getting good guest bloggers for my guitar site. You think you have a great writer just to find out they know a few chords and are really just a writer, not a guitarist. You go through the trouble of setting them up as an author on your blog only to find out that the material they write is coming from a novice guitar player. This can be pretty discouraging…
I’ve had these frauds write me, sometimes to offer a guest post and at other times, to place a paid ad on my site. One time I did a search on the company who wanted to post the ad. It was for an online poker site. The company which was placing the ad had a post office box as an address. I called and hard a hard time trying to get their physical address. Finally, they put me through to the guy who had emailed me. He had emailed hundreds of site owners that morning. This company was based in North Carolina. I forget what city.
All of these people leave a bad taste in my mouth. And no, it’s not too much to ask for those who want to guest post for you to be real people.
I think with the recent de-indexing of the big public blog networks a lot of people are turning to guest posting as a direct replacement without really considering that writing for a spam network and writing for someone’s real blog are totally different. People will always look for shortcuts and right now there are a lot of people desperately looking for them.
Definetly not Ari, the quest for guest writers is simple. Its good you have mentioned here. I liked your intuitive skills about the email, I also read the why people suck emailing good points and question you have raised there.
So far enjoying reading your posts.
Obviously, some people just do not get it!!! Your 7 questions about Imogen demonstrate that she is one of them. They are hilarious, sad, and accurate. A blogger needs to know whom he/she is talking to…and talk in their language.
Oh man I bet you are getting sick of the people that just don’t care about you. But I do have something to say about all the posts you do about bad commenters and emailers and such. The fact is the people you want to stop doing this are not reading your blog obviously so the only people that are are the people who don’t have this problem.
I think guest blogging is not guest blogging these days, almost every seo firm is involve this, the purpose of guest blogging is only to get backlink nothing else, I receive a lot of request of guest blogging and all are from seo firms not from real bloggers
No you are not asking for too much! I think that request email is actually spammed through many other bloggers’ emails. I do believe though that there are still other people out there who are just happy to post a few articles on your blog though keeping in mind your readership database.
It is very irritating getting such emails again and again. I usually get some 3-4 such emails regarding guest post or paid post. Initially I went with some of them but later found that it was a big mistake of mine.