I just got back from India and was accosted by tons of people trying to get me to overpay for cheap souvenirs (I also met many reputable sellers offering some great deals, hence the need to buy two more suitcases to carry everything home), but never in my travels have I received as bad a deal as I just got in my inbox.
Forget that this blog doesn’t take advertising (my stance is that the value I get from blogging is far greater than the negligible income I’d make from some contextual ad network). Also note that he doesn’t bother addressing me by name.
Mainly though, this email is so insulting that I had a good laugh and thought it’d be fun to share. Has anyone seen emails like this from Jerome or anyone like him?
* * *
Subject: Interested in your blog
Hi,
I would like to place an Ad on your site with the following details:
Anchor Text: Sales Leads
Target URL: http://www.kingsbridgelists
I don’t really have a big budget so I can pay you $5 for the ad, with
the agreement that you’ll leave it on that page for at
least a year or longer if you like.
Please get back to me if you are interested and you can also include
your Paypal account ID (email) for payment.
Thanks a lot,
Jerome Clam
HarvestSEO.com
People reacted to this story.
Show comments Hide commentsThat’s hilarious.
Yea, that’s fairly common. People in the SEO industry are getting desperate, since Google has been aggressively taking corrective action against people who buy text link ads for the purpose of manipulating search engine results (which is pretty much what SEOs do). I’m sure you’ll see more of this… though he should have offered you at least thirty bucks. 😉
You do realize that by posting his email, you have just given him some degree of free advertising. Of course, knowing you, the URL has been changed to something completely different…
Oh, I had much worse last week.
I run a blog about UK property (real estate) investment, and have run an opt-in newsletter for many, many years.
I’ve been particularly scathing, not just on the blog, but on TV interviews about a particular class of deal called “off-plan” (which doesn’t mean QUITE what it does in the US.)
I got contacted last week by someone from an SEO firm, asking me to (real estate) advertise an off-plan company from my main site.
The email was full of phrases like “we’re really impressed at your site…”
And started “Dear webmaster,”
Let’s get this staight:
– They had sent the email to mark AT (particular domain)
– They claimed to have read it
– The front page of my site has a picture of me and my full name
– The contact us info (where they’d got the email) has my name
So:
– They couldn’t work out I am called Mark
– They asked me to promote a class of product I had major issues with
Oh, and the payment? They would put me on their “links” page 🙂
I’ve been seeing these for a while. Often they are requests for a “link exchange” (usually with something completely unrelated). But if they inquire about rates, I’ll quote a ridiculously high price. If someone’s willing to pay (a wildly disproportionate) $1000/month, I’d sacrifice some (or a lot) of my blog integrity. For some reason, none of these advertisers seem interested.