Do you remember our Fake Guest Posting spam cancer informative article? Here's a typical case to better understand what we were talking about there.
On Mon, 25 March 2019 we received the following e-mail:
Hi there,
My CEO asked me to reach out to you after he came across your website.
My name is Josh, by the way, and I'm the Digital PR Specialist at a company called Veridin Systems. You can check out our website over here
Anyway, my CEO was browsing your blog and saw a great opportunity for us to collaborate. He noted that you had great info and a really solid writing style.
So he wanted me to ask:
Would you be interested in having us guest post on your blog?
It would be on a topic that adds value to your readers and is totally up for discussion. We could have a list of topics prepared for you ASAP and we'd start writing as soon as a topic is approved.
I'm sure you're busy -- so no worries if you can't respond right away. But let me know if you're interested :)
Best regards,
Joshua Kurtzman
Digital PR Specialist
Notice the massive amount of lies: we can just imagine this diligent CEO of a canadian CCTV company who daily checks on random tech blogs looking for chances to collaborate. And what's the bright idea he comes up with? Fake Guest Posting, of course! Therefore he told his Digital PR Specialist to write to these blogs (including ours) asking for a chance to cripple their SEO with link schemes. Way to go, CEO!
Since we're good guys, we briefly answered that we were not interested in having our SEO ratings jeopardized by their spam-like content, but that we would gladly evaluate other more transparent forms of collaboration, such as advertising campaigns through Google Ads and the likes.
That should've been it, right? Well, no. On March 28th, we received the following:
Hi again,
My CEO is still eager for us to collaborate.
Since I haven’t received a response to my last email, I wanted to quickly follow up.
As I said, I'm sure you're very busy -- let me know if you have time to discuss this:)
Best regards,
Joshua Kurtzman
Digital PR Specialist
(same sender, same signature)
He guessed right, we are very busy... especially when we happen to politely answer to a marketing e-mail and we're getting ignored and re-spammed again as as we did nothing. This time we chose to not answer, and guess what? Here's what we found on our mailbox on March, 31th:
Hi,
At this point, it's probably obvious how eager we are to collaborate (and share our insights with your blog audience).
I'm following up with you to confirm that you've received my last two emails and are still considering collaborating with Veridin.
Are you still interested in having us write a high-value, well thought out (and researched) blog for you? :)Let me know.
Best regards,
Joshua Kurtzman
Digital PR Specialist
It's very obvious that the sender is so eager to collaborate and share insights with our blog audience (!!!) to forget to check its inbox since days and just keep spamming around like there's no tomorrow. We can only imagine how much honest, non-automated and genuine good work he did put in these e-mail messages. We were also so sincerely moved and over-excited about this collaboration experience that we replied again, saying that we were not interested and to just stop spamming us. This time we were really sure to have ended such e-mail harassment for good.
Right? Not by any chance. Here's what we got on April, 3rd:
Me again,
So I still haven’t heard back from you, and that leads me to one of 3 conclusions:
1) You’re not interested at this time, but we can work out something in the future.
2) You’re still interested but are swamped with work.
3) You saw our content but don’t think it’s a good fit for your site.
If you have other reasons, please let me know so I can stop bothering you ;)
Thanks and looking forward to hearing from you.
Best regards,
Joshua Kurtzman
Digital PR Specialist
As we can see, he's not spamming at all: he just wants to know why we don't let him know!
Well, since there seems to be no way to reach this good man via e-mail, we opted for a better route: we'll just write a dedicated post, hoping that his CEO - which is always checking out this blog, remember? - will eventually notice it and make our Joshua aware of everything. We're sure he'll be happy to know how zealous his collaborator was and will be able to reward him properly.
Just for the record, the CEO of Veridin Systems is a certain Colin Doe: we actually managed to find his account on LinkedIn and get in touch with him (sadly, we couldn't find any Joshua Kurtzman related with such company or operating in Canada): we'll definitely let you know the development of this awesome collaboration!
HILARIOUS! I’m thinking of calling out some fellow spammers as well on my platforms. Thanks for the inspiration!