You have to know how to read before you can write.
Today, I received the following e-mail message, sent to me via my blog’s content form:
Subject: Guest Blog Post on Tech Gadgets
Message Body:
Hello,
My name is [redacted], and I found your blog on a consumer electronic blogroll.
I would love to contribute to your blog by being a guest writer and focusing specifically on technology gadgets. Getting the best deal on tech gadgets like TVs, computers, or smartphones takes some serious strategy. We all know that products like the iPhone get launched at $500 and, within a few months, sell for nearly half the price, but do all electronic goods follow this pattern? When’s the best time to buy? This article gives you the insider secrets, so you can get your gadgets at rock bottom prices.
Are you interested in my writing an article for you?
Thank you for your time and best regards,
[redacted]
Blog Content Guild – 1015 Bee Caves Woods Dr, Suite 102 – Austin, TX 78746
About the Blog Content Guild:
The Blog Content Guild is an organization that provides blog writers with the opportunity to make a living writing about products and services. The writers then work to place their writing on other blog sites that are relevant to those product and service offerings.
(Please let me know if you don’t want to receive any more emails from me or others at the Blog Content Guild.)
PS – I love your website aneclecticmind.com
Understand that I’m in a foul mood this afternoon. I went out to run a few errands, leaving our new dog, Charlie, in the condo’s small walled-in patio. When I returned 40 minutes later, he greeted me in the parking lot. He had escaped by tearing down some metal mesh and squeezing through the back gate. He then tried to get back into the apartment through the screen security door, tearing the screen to shreds from the outside.
So getting a request from someone wanting to be a guest blogger really pissed me off a lot more than it normally might have.
Why would it piss me off at all? Well, he contacted me using the form on my Contact page. And that page has a section with a heading that says:
Guest Bloggers
This is a personal blog. It does not accept guest posts.
What’s more is that the first paragraph under the Contact Form heading says:
First, read the above. All of it.
So this clown used a form on a page that says I don’t accept guest posts to ask me if I would accept his guest post.
I guess when you’re spamming every blogger who you can find a contact method for, it doesn’t really matter whether you a get clear indication in advance that your request won’t get a positive response. After all, spam is spam. Does it really matter whether you target the right audience?
Of course, I just had to see what Blog Content Guild was, so I looked it up. The first item on a numbered list on their home page explains what they do:
We work on behalf of companies who want to increase the buzz in the blogosphere
In other words, advertisers pay them and their bloggers to write blog posts about their products. They basically sell advertisements disguised as objective advice or product review blog posts — just the kind of misleading crap people with low moral standards are willing to publish to turn a buck.
I composed a typically nasty response:
Wow! You’ve already amazed me with your complete inability to read; I don’t have very high expectations about your ability to research and write intelligently about a topic. But then again, writing original, objective content is probably not something folks at Blog Content Guild do.
Maybe if you would have read the information on the Contact page where you found the form you used to contact me, you’d see why you’re not likely to ever write a post on my blog.
But then again, I’m sure your query to me was just one of dozens you fired out to the blogosphere today. Spam, pure and simple. I’m sure you spend more of your time composing and sending spam than writing actual content.
I didn’t send it. I figured that if he really loved my website so much, he’d see it here when he returned to read the latest new content.
Or not.
The resulting email messages are nicely formatted to present the entire contents of the blog post. This is an example from earlier in the week; I subscribed to test it out. I chose the HTML format, but there’s also a plain text format. This even looks good in a mobile device like an iPad.