Hi everyone!
It’s been a long time since I wrote anything; in fact it was before the pubs opened. This may or may not be a coincidence, as I have made it my mission in the last few weeks to single-handedly prop up the economy by going to the pub as much as possible, if only for a swift half.
However, it’s Tuesday, the kids are at school and I’m in the house all alone. With deadlines looming, I thought that rather than do the actual work I’m paid to do I would give you all an insight into the world of a blogger by sharing with you the contents of my inbox.
Nope, it’s not all fan mail and offers of vast sums of money, as you might expect. There are nice people and legitimate companies that I want to work with in there occasionally, but they’re vastly outnumbered by the idiots.
Enjoy!
The press releases
Briefly: Websites want visitors, and to get them, you need to be on Google. The way that you rank higher on Google is to increase you website domain authority (or ‘DA’) and this is primarily done through getting backlinks. I.E. if you own a nice website and you link to me (which you should, please and thanks) my domain authority will increase and then my website will come up higher up in the Google rankings, bringing more visitors here, making me more desirable to brands etc and, ultimately, more likely to get paid. Nice one.
The way that some companies try to achieve this is by conducting tenuous ‘research’, then compiling press releases and sending them to news outlets in the hope that they will receive a nice juicy backlink.
When you’ve been blogging a while, you get added to a lot of random distribution lists and although I am extremely unlikely to feature a dull press release in my spare time, I do receive a good number of these every day.
A selection of today’s press releases:
New product launch : Obii the bedside lamp sextoy is arriving in the UK!
I never expected to hear the words ‘bedside lamp’ and ‘sextoy’ in one sentence, but here we are. It’s £79.99 though, so I’m not likely to buy one. (Edit: I didn’t buy one, but I did get sent the similar Namii and you should get one for sure).
REVEALED – THE NUMBER OF TIMES BRITS PLUMP THEIR SOFA CUSHIONS AND WIPE DOWN KITCHEN SURFACES IN AN AVERAGE YEAR
Apparently it’s 1,825 cushion plumpings and 2,555 kitchen surface wipings per year. That is insane and these people are quite clearly wasting their lives.
Art at Home – leading curator turns home into gallery space to launch new art and interiors platform to demystify art buying
Snore
10 Common Mistakes To Avoid When Buying Tiles
Hold up guys, this one sounds important
The offers of EXPOSURE
The freebie hunters in my inbox are roughly split into two: The cheeky fucker free guest post requesters – covered in the next section – and the brands using legitimate PR companies who are taking the fucking piss.
You can read about one such brand here (it was Indesit, I no longer care. What a pisstake).
This one from Matalan was also pretty special:
TLDR: Big campaign, for use on their website, with request for specific images by a certain deadline.
“This sounds like it could be a biggun!” I thought, and tentatively asked how much they’d be offering to pay me for not only my photography and my social media following, but use of my children’s images on their website. £500 at least, right? Probably more?
Wrong.
WOW.
In fact, at the start of lockdown, every man and his dog wanted you to get involved in their amazing PR campaign which was making the world better by tenuously relating their business to homeschooling; creating colouring sheets for kids with their yachts on, or getting people to make crafts out of artificial grass (really). For free.
And sometimes they’d even pretend they weren’t a money-making entity to try and pull one over on you.
Needless to say, I tend to bin those emails.
Next up, the guest posts
Guest posts are another way that companies try to get backlinks. If you have a website and you’ve outsourced the SEO (that’s Search Engine Optimisation, fact fans) to someone, this is quite possibly what they’re doing; paying people to place content on their site containing a link to your website, trying to play the Google game.
Google doesn’t like people buying backlinks so bloggers that accept them tend to do it on the DL, but lots of them do do it and then hide them away so they never see the light of the day. Money is money after all.
I get more than I can count of these emails every day. There are several types:
The Indian ‘SEO experts’
I get dozens of these, all addressed to ‘sir’ and offering ‘free quality guest posts’ in emails written in barely decipherable English, generally with insulting budgets.
Often they have hilarious made up names (I’ve had one from a ‘Jared Leto’ and one from a ‘Ross Gellar’ this month).
The best thing is when you say no, and they start getting insulting, telling you that your website metrics are crap and being a dick about it; a technique I believe is called ‘negging’. I tend not to reply these days, as I know I’ll just end up being a dick back and no one wins there.
This one was particularly special…
The requests for you to work for free
These always start out really promising; they LOVE your site and they’ve been a long term fan FOREVER.
Of course they have! That’s why they don’t know your name.
…Or even what your website is about…
…And have copied and pasted your website name in their email in a different font.
A fiver bets that they have no budget, and they want you to link to something obscure, like… I don’t know. Vegan Surfers Of New Zealand or Motorcycling Dentist World.
Sometimes they’ll offer you a link in exchange, and sometimes they’ll just ask you to waive the fee (aka literally the only thing that is in it for you) because their post is so relevant and high quality.
The CRINGE
Special mention here to anyone that thinks using a joke or attempting to be quirky will make people more inclined to reply to your emails.
It will not.
…And the total nonsense
Sometimes you get a deliciously nonsensical email, which really is the creme de la creme of spam emails:
Bet you, my audience, can’t wait to read that? Watch this space!
My favorite part is when he tells you he FOUND YOU ON GOOGLE. (Meaning you’re winning at the most important game on the interwebs) then tries to tell you your site metrics are bad. Gotta love that logic!
You made me laugh there especially the amazing last email from Dear Sir Mumtahina Adira…. yes these are things all your followers need to know about.
I’ve been getting quite a few from brands in the past who I’ve worked with, usually in return for great product but are now asking to just regurgitate their pre written content for nothing at all.
But my favourite this week has to have been from someone with an “adult fan site” who was offering me bonus access in return for sharing her p0rn website!
I swear you have just divulged the entire contents of my inbox. I am also loving all the “because if the pandemic our budgets are low” to which I generally reply, “funny that because my mortgage and monthly shop hasn’t decreased??”