I didn’t realize how popular “guest post” marketing is until I created my own food and drink blog centered on my town, a blog called Eat Drink Boulder. Now I receive at least one “guest post” inquiry per week. I am sure many of you out there receive a lot more!
In theory, guest posts are great. I might ask another blogger, a chef, or a local sommelier to post on my blog. I get a quality post and the author gets some exposure.
In reality, this idea has been hijacked by marketers or, so as not to disparage marketers, what I would more likely term spammers. Here are some of the characteristics I have noticed:
The person asking presents himself or herself as acting on his own, always has a generic address such as one from gmail or yahoo, and never identifies him or herself with a company.
When I research the name of the person, I can never find any history, which makes me think many of the “people” are actually fake.
The topics suggested are usually related but ultimately not relevant to my blog. Here is a good example. This morning at 2:10 AM I received an email from “Alex Mathew” asking if he could guest blog on the Wine Tourism Conference website with “quality and unique posts on topics like “Wine”,”latest wine” and “upcoming wine news”". Wow – a post about wine!
Ultimately, of course, all these guest posters want a link back to their site, which is the entire purpose of the endeavor.
I doubt any of our WBC friends who sponsor the conference do this. My guess is these are guest post “mills” run by unsavory companies. But I don’t really know. What is your experience?
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