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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