The Rise of the Content Marketing Moron
Hey Finch. Reading about the WSO email template was downright hilarious! Hahhaha… These so called "content marketers" should learn some…
In case you didn’t hear, there’s a new craze in town. It’s called Content Marketing. There’s a serial site-killing Google Penguin on the loose, and he seems to be eating bad SEOs for breakfast.
Many of those bad SEOs have been reincarnated as bad Content Marketers.
It goes like this:
Stage 1: “Hmm, I sure would love to rank highly on Google. It’s a shame the Penguin had to munch my old bag of tricks. What can I do now?”
Stage 2: “Gee, every blogger and his dog seems to be guest posting. Maybe I should write a few dross articles and ask command the owners of better sites to publish my links.”
Stage 3:
Stage 4: One week later. “why u no reply?”
You know, these ‘content marketers’ have a lot in common with my pet Maltese. They both circle other people’s property curiously, they both piss on them, and they both run away without a care in the world.
But not if you fail to reply! Christ on a bike, that’s just an invitation for the ‘follow up’ email:
Look, seriously, this is not going to happen. You can make a meal out of my balls or sod off. I have no other purpose for you.
SEO, as we know it, may be heading towards its twilight years. But the new breed of Content Marketer leaves me in no doubt that the era of the complete and utter moron is still in full swing.
My girlfriend just received an invitation to place a link in her sidebar, for free. The incentive? “If you link to us, we’ll seriously consider buying a sponsored post on your site in the future.”
Who trains these people? Which WSO did this email template descend from?
My biggest problem with the guest posting outreach process is that it has become so popularised, so tutorialised, that every self-righteous urchin with a WordPress has begun to consider his brainfarts welcome on other bloggers’ property.
Don’t even get me started on the SEO keyword stuffing brigade.
Its just so painfully obvious what your intentions are!
Readers are not stupid and good bloggers are rightly protective of their assets.
If you think you can march in with a blatantly SEO’d article and then wait to cash the cheques, you are wrong, my friend. It doesn’t work like that. It shouldn’t work like that. How can you possibly be so arrogant to think it would ever work like that?
Okay, rant over.
Let this be a message for content marketers: the web is not your playground. Other people’s hard work is not your cheapskate shortcut to the top of Google.
Take the time to contribute something valuable or fuck off completely.
Love,
Finch
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So you got my email then?
I can totally relate…
I keep receiving “guest post” offers for car insurance, real estate, and a few other subjects that have absolutely nothing to do with my blog topic…
If that was 1 or 2 requests once in a while it would be ok, but it’s now almost daily. Are they really this stupid?
I’m considering setting an auto-responder especially for these guys, but some legit guest bloggers might get caught in the same net.
+1000 to AllyMac on that comment.
But as much as this is a great post, the fake email was that much better. Bravo, I don’t think I’ve ever laughed that hard while reading a marketing post.
Nice one Finch 🙂
“Which WSO did this email template descend from?” <== LMAO !
So uh… how’s Thailand?
The thing that amazes me about guest blogging is the fact that people actually feel inclined to send emails like the one you scribed. Why not simply use MyBlogGuest, Guestr, or one of the other forums dedicated to guest blogging?
Stop bothering those who work hard and contribute to people who want the content.
Just be happy that Google should not be to far from extinguishing the guest post all together. Most guest posts are a paid for in one way or another and we all know what “THE WEB SPAM TEAM”, sorry is that what they are called now? thinks of paid links. So I see the day in the not to distant future, when Mr Cutts brings down his gavel and declares “Guest Posts are bad… Mkay!” Followed in a very rushed statment of “justmakepostlinksnofollow… Mkay!!” Which then will be followed by “Crickets…. Cheeerp”
I really enjoyed reading about Internet Marketing. I will be back to view more of your posts!
@jeffreyskang, I don’t think Finch is due in Thailand just yet..
@Alan, The way guest posts are being discussed in Finch’s post is misuse/abuse of it. If used correctly, you don’t really need to rely on G$$gle; for example, you could you use it for targeted traffic from a blogger mate in the same niche.
I decided to let someone buy a link on a site a couple of months ago. The site had been hit by both a penguin and a panda and it isn’t obvious to me if or when I’ll do the work on it to revive things, so I figured why not? It is another test…
The site is in the investment world and has a few pages about forex, so I get occasional emails asking to arrange a guest post. What I learned very quickly was the scale of budgets out there for buying links and boosting rankings. Truthfully, it has made me feel rather inadequate with my remaining sites that I am competing with such large amounts of money.
Even though I have been involved with SEO for a number of years, I feel like this is a new level and another reason why little guys will struggle more and more to survive online in the future.
Great post!
Out of the litany of guest post requests that I have received over the years I have only had one (1), yes “1” individual whom I chose to submit a couple of articles. She wrote concise, articulate and 100% original content that is right on point to the subject matter of the site in question.
I consider this a very rare opportunity that will likely not be seen again for a while.
Nevertheless, the poorly written and often unintelligible requests keep pouring in every week…
I feel your pain 😉
@Stuart – Do you think there’s any potential to ‘game’ the big budgets by setting up simple web properties that are monetized through those sponsored links?
You need only rank for “forex write for us” and associated terms, rather than “forex”!
@Jeffrey – I’m not there! In sunny London at the moment.
@Jonathan – I’ve checked out sites like MyBlogGuest in the past and while I do think they’re useful, it’s tough to find BIG sites that are happy to broker through those services.
For the SEO robot like the one highlighted in this post, I agree. They should definitely use those services.
I have a guest post going live on ProBlogger this month that took several hours to write and edit. It’s a lot of work for one piece. But the size of the readership and the platform makes it a great opportunity to showcase my writing. It’s nothing to do with SEO. It’s everything to do with getting people to my blog and hoping they stick around. That’s guest posting done properly, in my opinion. It takes a lot of time.
@Alan – Ha, yes. That shit would not surprise me at all. Google’s hypocrisy knows no bounds.
HI, nice post – but… Stage 5 is missing. Stage 5 – Expired Domains – Own Blogs – Fake Content – … the real SEO is already one step beyond.
That’s not content marketing and doesn’t really claim to be. That’s just SEO from 1997. That sort of crap has always been around.
It’s not “content marketing” because it’s not a strategy. It’s not meeting user needs. It’s still SEO-focused for the links, not user-focused for the business that then gets you links organically.
Entertaining post though.
Well always guaranteed to make me laugh Martin as I start the day.
I just love these emails and replying to them. Its like playing with the unsolicited phone calls I get here in Blighty about home surveys from India. Great fun!
Its a past time just to think up new questions to annoy, confuse and ruin their scripts.
I love the way SEO people are bleating at what Google are doing as though they have some divine right for G to print them money. I say if you play in someones backyard and start pulling moonies you’ll get your head kicked in sooner or later
Stew
lol, dude…We own a handful of blogs in the health niche and we get these offers all the damn time. They’re horrible!
Some look good, but all it is is someone trying to take a chunk out of your gold bar…That’s it!
You’ve built an asset and just because they don’t want to go through the hard work, they ask you to help them…
When do you make an exception and take up their offer?
To me this whole thing is tragic and sad (although the article was hilarious).
It seems the whole arena of guest blogging is being totally polluted by the washouts from article marketing, blog network linking, and whatever other methods of algorithm trickery the morons can’t successfully use anymore.
The sad tragedy is that guest blogging is a legitimate and fantastic method of networking, providing value to other webmasters, building relevant links, and expanding your own audience. (Hell, I only discovered Finch because of a guest post on NickyCakes.)
Now we have these “SEO companies” and other idiots running around saying “guest blogging is the new article marketing” and other dumb shit that illustrates their overall cluelessness as to just how weak and disingenuous their whole business strategy is.
So we end up with these same folks applying the same old crap methods to a valid, legitimate practice like guest blogging: “I’ll just keep throwing out scraped, spun, keyword stuffed articles all over the world, but now instead of article directories and link programs, I’ll just have to spam the living shit out of other webmasters to get backlinks.”
I guess the question to be answered now is how do aspiring guest bloggers who really are trying to provide value, build relationships, and network with others stand out from the morons?
make a meal outta my balls….nice one. I prefer suck my balls thru my drawls
anyhow these content marketing flubs are killing my guest posting. can they please grab onto some other method and spam it to death. go back to infographs or something I say
[…] think will get published with flowers, sunshine, and smiley faces. Of course many more bloggers(like this one) are expressing their […]
Excellent material, I posted this one for Ya!
This gets to the meat and potatoes in this online blood sport.
The age of the fraudulent marketer may not be ending but there will
always be thoes who expose the bull shit.
Thanks!
I realize this post is almost a month old before I found it. I don’t care.
I platonically love the hell out of you right now. 🙂 Followed, liked, whatever else I’m supposed to do. Insert gratuitous love here. “What WSO download …” lol
I may be the supreme moron then, wasting so much time to write good articles and reach the adequate blogs for my topics.
Great Post!!
(Signed: The Commentting Moron, Content Marketing Moron’s best friend)
The letter is pretty spot on. Cheers.
[…] has been hailed as the one-size-fits-all solution to your link building problems. It ended up annoying and low quality. Google already noticed and gets more and more vocal about guest posting quality issues. Some […]
Hey Finch. Reading about the WSO email template was downright hilarious! Hahhaha…
These so called “content marketers” should learn some respect. Everytime I see outreach emails like the one that you described, I feel like replying with an epic middle finger!
Awesome post! Cheers!