I receive about ten e-mails a day on one of my e-mails account (the one I expose to the blogging world), and I would say 1 out of 100 I read I even consider, and 1 in 1000 I reply to (usually because the person writing it worked hard enough to find my real name). That is a lot of spam to deal with daily. I’m not too fond of spam.
What kind of spam am I getting?
Hello,
I am Lazy Dude.
I came across your website, while I was searching for advertisement opportunities.
I’m interested in advertising on your blog. I would like to know if you would be interested.
I would love to read back from you.
—
Could be a template from r/linkbuilding on Reddit
Thanks,
Lazy Dude.
Seriously, does anyone answer these useless queries? You don’t use my name, you don’t even mention my website by name, and your translator did a crappy job as well. Yes, everyone needs to hustle to make a buck on the web, but this is just old-fashioned laziness.
If you want to advertise on my site, try a little more complicated, oh and NO, you can’t have a paid guest post either. I am getting quite picky these days.
No guest posts? So if I offered you $200, would you take it?
What if I offered you $2500 for a guest post, would you take it?
I trust you see my point.
Alternatively, what if I personally offered to right a guest post for you on how to make money from something like local search engine optimization – an interesting topic and something your readers would be interested in. You know me personally, right? So not some random person off the internet. Now would you consider a guest post, with a link to my site? Maybe?
Now what if I offered you $200 for that. Hmmmmmm.
There’s a joke in there about ‘we already know what you are, now we’re just negotiating price’ :).
Either make money, or don’t make money. If you’re trying to make money by accepting advertising, and laying all sorts of unnatural conditions on that advertising, you don’t end up with a better model to make money. What you end up with is a crappy income stream.
If you don’t like something, don’t turn it down. Just charge more.
… and I have heard that from a few folks who have web sites, that made the “They’ll never pay this” price, and they got the money. I will only let folks do Guest Posts who I know, and trust (and I have a right of veto on anything before I put it up).
Oh and if you haven’t figured out that I am not the normal Internet Blogging Whore(tm) so be it, but yes, I turn down advertising all the time, especially those from idiots who don’t want to spend enough time to figure out my name.