Because this blog is moderately popular, I've been getting a lot of requests recently to do link exchanges or promote other websites in exchange for goods and services. Here are some things I've been offered:
1) Free BLS/ACLS (which I get for free anyway)
2) Free scrubs (which I don't use)
3) A free book (that I probably don't want to read)
4) A chance to have my site linked to on their site!
5) A free boring article that I can bore my readers with
6) Very rarely, money
If it's money, I sometimes consider it, but the truth is, these interactions are way more trouble than they're worth. Is it really worth $100 to me to have some crappy ad up that I have to tweak like a dozen times before they are happy with it? I spend more than that every week on groceries.
So in general, I just ignore all these emails. And some of them get ignored for me, since they get filtered directly to the spambox.
But hey, I can't blame people for trying. You've got a product you want to promote, so you're doing what you can. I can't fault them for that.
What pisses me off is when I ignore them and they try again. I feel like that takes gall. Like:
"I'm still awaiting your response to see if you'd like to post a link to my site in exchange for a big pile of crap sent to your doorstep!"
Clearly my ignoring people does not send a strong enough message.
At some point, I got really sick of this. A woman sent me several annoying emails saying she wanted me to write an article for my blog, and then have that article link back to her website. Finally, I said okay, and I gave her a topic. She wrote the article and I said that it wasn't what I had in mind, and I asked her if she could rewrite it completely differently. She did. Then I said it still wasn't what I had in mind and I didn't publish it.
I felt a little guilty. But seriously, she started it.
Well too bad for her-it's your blog. She can put that stuff on her blog.
ReplyDeleteI find it ironic that the first comment on this post was an ad for a webpage. And don't feel bad...she was the one who pushed it.
ReplyDeleteI'm baffled how blogger sometimes misses these spam comments, even when they're so obviously spam. I mean, any anonymous comment with a link should probably be filtered as spam.
DeleteWith the exception of a specific circumstance, I disagree that Fizzy shouldn't have felt guilty. This isn't a 419 scam, or a scam in general. This is someone trying to promote themselves.
DeleteSo someone sends an email, Fizzy ignores it, and they send the email again. That shouldn't be offensive in itself. It's incredibly easy for an email to be lost, overlooked, or forgotten. It would be classier to wait a week or two before sending the message again, but the overall idea behind re-sending a message makes sense.
If Fizzy specifically denied the request and then continued to receive emails over it, well - that's annoying, but it shows persistence. I'd suggest that the correct course of action would be to either decline again or - if it seems like they're going to keep emailing until they get an affirmative response - add their email address to your blacklist, such that their emails go straight to your spam folder.
The only scenario where I would condone what Fizzy did would be if the person was being really obnoxious about it. Sending messages from different accounts so as to get around blacklisting would qualify for that; sending at least one email per day, and cycling which account it came from, would be even more egregious.
Fizzy, I know you read these comments and I'm guessing that you'll reply to this one to clarify the situation further. I just want you to know that I don't think any less of you for what you did, and I'm not judging you. (Not that the thought of some random internet person thinking ill of you would keep you up at night, but you know.)
That's the thing... the individual that emailed me wasn't particularly obnoxious, but it was just the fact that she hopped on a long train of obnoxiousness. Strings of emails from people bugging me to advertise their products/blogs. So while she only sent a couple of emails, it may as well have been twenty as far as my thinking was concerned. It's sort of like when you're on the phone with some customer service line and everyone has been a huge jerk to you, so you start antagonizing the next person you talk to, like they were the one personally responsible for all your aggravation.
DeleteI'm not saying it's the right way to behave, but it's hard not to do that.
"She started it" lol....that's the mature way around it.
ReplyDeleteBack when I was writing a blog on a regular basis, I got a lot of requests on a daily basis. Mostly, of people asking me to put a good word on this or that, reviewing this book that looked just awful to me, linking this website, etc. It got to unbearable extremes, and since I have such a bad time saying no (mostly I said noncommittant stuff), it was one of the reasons why I left the blog abandoned. It would never occur to me to just blatantly ask the things people asked of me. It was a blog written as a hobby. The moment it started looking as an obligation because of so many requests, I started hating it.
ReplyDeleteOnce, this really nice girl asked me to write an article on some topic, so that she would put it up on her blog (and so I would link it: my blog was quite popular at the time). I took the effort to write a half decent thing, send it to her, put up the link to her site... But she never even answered back, much less post my article.
Wow. Clearly not a nice girl then.
DeleteYou should read what The Bloggess does with stupid promotion requests. She is twisted and hysterical and completely apathetic about the impression she leaves these people with. Look it up sometime when you have a moment.
ReplyDelete