I received an email today from an individual representing a company saying they want to pay me to publish guest posts on my main ReviseSociology blog.
Now that blog may well get some serious traffic, but it's not so hot that I'm going to believe that this recent email is anything but some kind of scam.
Two things initially got my alarm bell ringing:
- Firstly - the concept of people paying me to publish content on my site is, honestly, just too good to be true.
- Secondly - the brevity of and the terrible grammar in the email itself... here's the anonymised email below and I've *d the obvious errors in it.
Hello*,
We are a professional Outreach* company looking for blogs for blog posting. I came across your blog on Google*, and I’m writing to express my interest in posting content on your site.
We also have a writing agency, where all our writers are native speakers and will ensure that whatever that is posted* on your site will be of high quality and relevant to your site.
All payments will be made via PayPal or Pioneer. Whichever method you prefer for the do – follow backlinks. Please notify me of the price per post.
I look forward to hearing from you,
Best Regards,
- *Unprofessional opening to approach someone for the first time
- *No need to capitalise this
- *Came across your blog on Google... but no mention of my blog by name
- *whatever that is posted on your site - not grammatically correct
- *All payments made via PayPal/ Pioneer - just too convenient, too good to be true!
- *Whichever method you prefer for the do - beyond grammatically incorrect, just a lazy typo
- *Follow backlinks - this just seems to have been chucked in, maybe they accidentally deleted a chunk of a sentence?
- *Please notify me of price per post - the missing 'the' is something I've seen on many scam emails.
Now I'm no grammar purist, I make more mistakes and typos than most, but eight errors in an email that's about 100 words long, that's pretty impressive, and certainly enough to set my alarm bells ringing and to think twice about responding.
Anyone know what's going on here? Anyone had similar experiences of this? Is this company maybe scamming people who are writing guest posts and just looking for 'any old blog' to publish their work? It might be that my traffic's stagnating recently that I've been targeted - perhaps that's what these companies do?
This is actually the second email of this nature I've received in a week. I did respond to the first one as it was referring to using a particular post and querying about how I might link to it. That seemed more legit as it actually mentioned a particular sum of money and was written in good English, now I don't know... they haven't replied back anyway.
If anyone's come across this sort of thing before I'd be interested in hearing about it. I just can't believe someone's going to pay me to post other people's (apparently vetted and quality) content on my blog and it's going to be a genuine win-win situation.