What I’m now keeping as a note to paste in reply to these solicitations:
You clearly do NOT read my blog. If you had, you’d see that there’s been an ongoing flurry of attempts at getting me to pay attention to online degrees and either similar or the sister sites, and I blogged that it’s not what I do. Whether it’s a “can I write a guest post (pointing back to my degree biz site)”, or “don’t you want to blog about my blog post (at my degree biz site)”, it’s bad social marketing.
I blog about what I find personally interesting, and that’s usually something someone I’m following on twitter has retweeted, or something that’s come up in my work, or at a conference. Not what gets sent unsolicited.
If you don’t know me, don’t send me unsolicited email unless you have some value proposition a little bit more pertinent than “I have this blog associated with a business and if you give us attention it might result in more business for us, what you get I don’t know”.
Am I missing something? Otherwise, please take me off your list. Forever. Please.
Update: the same goes for any other learning ‘product’ that there’s a new free trial for, or a raffle, or any other such social media marketing.
Clark, such charming optimism. As if those requests were coming from people sentient enough to care whether there was a match between what you do and the clickthroughs they want to generate.
I have noticed an uptick in this particular kind of stupidity, but then stupidity’s like the air inside one of those circus-clown balloons: a decrease in one part of the universe just means an increase somewhere else. So probably phony Facebook invites or messages from friendly Russian women are down at the moment.
Of course – you are making an assumption that a “spammer” will actually read your response. Good luck with that.
Related to this are the number of spam comments I have been receiving lately. I know others have had the same problem. It has gotten so that I know have to moderate comments, many of which are from sites that are questionable to me.
It is difficult to both encourage readers and comments, but then to keep out those that don’t really read your blog. If you address it in your blog, as you have here, will you turn off some potential readers (and perhaps potential clients down the road)? Then again, you have done a good job of delineating your blog with this post.
Dave & JRA, yes, I am assuming someone’s reading it, since they typically ask for a response. However, now at least I can say that they must *not* have read my blog (in response to the “we’ve read your blog”. In other words, it’s “just for the record”.
Virginia, yes, I realized (afterward) that some people might be totally rebuffed, and I am concerned. I just hope that the ‘value proposition’ explanation shows that I don’t want people soliciting unjustified web traffic, but always welcome legitimate correspondence.
Thank you for writing this up. This saves me some time typing my “go away” response; I can just send a link to this post and say “ditto for me.” :)
My favorite spammer was the one who offered me $125 to link to his site–but only if I embedded it in a post in a way that would seem “natural” and did not disclose that it was a paid link. He provided an example from another well-known blogger (one I was shocked would agree to such an offer). When I replied with my standard reply that the WordPress.com TOS forbid such paid links, he responded: “So tell me this, how does anyone need to know it was a paid post? You are just writing about what you write about and somewhere adding in a link.” He really didn’t understand why I wasn’t willing to deceive my readers.