This morning during my coffee drinking, news reading and checking email, I came across the following email;
Hi,
I’d like to inquire about doing a sponsored blog post – about 150-300 words that talks a little bit about family & business law and links back to our site (http://www.name withheld dot com). We are a law firm and are looking for more exposure on your blog fierycanadian.blogspot.com
Here’s a list of some blog post titles we’ve done in the past:
– Why You Need To Hire A Divorce Attorney
– Own Real Estate? Basic Things Many People Miss in Their Contracts
– Why You Should Hire an Attorney For Your Business
Our budget is around $15 for the post. Is this something you’d be open to?
Also if you have some other sites just send them over and we might be interested in doing a sponsored post on there as well!
Regards,
Vanessa
For one thing, I don’t do sponsored posts, and certainly NOT by complete strangers, and certainly not by complete strangers who didn’t do their homework and find out what niche my site would be considered.
I do participate in a few affiliate programs but they are of the sort that I’m actually using (like audio books, Kindle books, etc) and confidently vouch for as a user and not because I get paid upfront to be a part of or based on commission, and that sort of thing. You get the idea.
I’m getting more and more of these emails lately, so this post is sort of serving as a template for which I’ll start giving in response to those that ask. I imagine sponsored blogging is quite old, but I’ve never been contacted as much as I have been in recent months.
However, the type of blogging I will do is this; if you contact me and you are of like mind or you blog about the same things and want to cross post on each others blogs, or something like that, then I’m game — for FREE.
But otherwise, I’m not for sale–at least not in areas that are not related to my niche.
Here are a few more reasons this “law firm” might want to rethink their strategy:
- I have not used that blogspot since 2010, and the most recent link on the homepage is to my actual blog, which, if they were serious about a sponsored post they would know I don’t use that site anymore and would contact me about the one I do write on. The traffic the blog they contacted me about gets is probably only around 5 visits per week.
- What on earth does my blog have to do with Divorce Law or Real Estate? Is it a spam bot or an actual person who checked my site to determine it would be a good place to post a blog linking to them? My readers deserve better than to see me pimp myself out to someone paying me to blog on a topic that has nothing to do with my blog or its usual topics.
- Don’t they know that search engines like Google tend to frown upon this kind of spammy way of building back links?
- Paid posts can lower a blog’s page rank and decrease its value, and possibly ruin a blog’s reputation. $15 to do that? No thanks!
I could go on, but you get the point.
Are any of you getting emails like this? If so, what are you doing in response?
