Robert Ambrogi Blog
Image courtesy of TechWyse.
Earlier this year, I announced an experiment for this blog for 2016 — accepting sponsored posts. Well, I can’t say the sponsors have exactly been storming the gates. There have been a couple of sponsored posts so far — thank you very much Smokeball and LexisNexis PatentAdvisor — and there will be more to come. But an onslaught, it’s not.
Still, there has proven to be a side benefit I did not anticipate.
Any of you who are bloggers yourselves probably get the same emails I do. They start out by telling you how much they love your blog (even though it’s generally clear they’ve never read it). Then they tell you that they are writers themselves — and quite good ones at that — even though their emails are often replete with grammatical errors. And then they generously offer to provide guest posts for your blog — generally on topics that have no conceivable relevance.
All they ask in return is to include a link or two back to their sponsor’s site.
When I first started getting these several years ago, I would politely respond. After awhile, I gave up on responding and just deleted them as quickly as they came in. But some of them could be obnoxiously persistent, sending follow-up emails saying that they hadn’t heard back from me.
Now I have the perfect response. It sends them away and keeps them away. Now I say this:
Thank you for your interest in contributing to my blog. My blog accepts guest posts only as sponsored posts. Each sponsored post costs $XXX. More information about purchasing a sponsored post can be found here: www.lawnext.com/advertise.
Amazingly, after sending that reply, I never hear back from them again.