User Comments

1. 

   6/02/09

   kevingoodman

   Sounds like you got PR spam. I have a database and program that will email publishers in bulk and make it look as if it was sent to them individually. Not that there isn’t a place for that but it should follow conventions and niche publishers should be solicited personally and respectably. Clearly you don’t review sites, you review books.
   
   I think Rich has some articles dealing with PR spam on his site.

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2. 

   6/21/09

   Rich

   I just recently added staff to help me get back more often to BlogCatalog. We'll see how it goes.
   
   Q: If you have been a web publisher for more than a year or two, do you commonly engage or interact through e-mail or through twitter with other web publishers in your niche, people in the field your blog covers, publicists and other professionals?
   
   A: It's situational. For me, I use different social networks to interact differently. Twitter tends to be filled with colleagues in the field. Facebook is a bit more personal. Linkedin tends toward professional, leaning clients. BlogCatalog is my primary connection to diverse bloggers.
   
   Our clients use different networks differently too.
   
   Q: Do you often get unsolicited but not necessarily spam e-mails from people who don't even quite realize that they are asking a Competitor in a market nice that is VERY Competitive to give Their brand new web site free publicity?
   
   Sometimes, but I don't necessarily see them as competitors as much as colleagues. If they were direct competitors, e.g., casing out accounts, I'd certainly think differently about it.
   
   It takes a special kind of e-mail for me to write about it — good or bad. In between, there are all kinds of other insincere pitches, especially from those who know better.
   
   My personal favorite: "Because you wrote about so-and-so before ..." Ho hum. I guess I still prefer bring blind copied on a news release than such a feeble attempt to establish a connection. I let the last one pass, but I almost wrote back to ask if they actually read what I wrote before. It was about why "so-and-so" was so very wrong.
   
   Best,
   Rich

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3. 

   9/16/09

   MadameX

   Alan, I know this post is a couple of months old, but I just saw it for the first time today. I've received many emails like the one in your post, and I think it is part of a "throw everything against the wall and see what sticks" approach that can actually be effective to the extent that a person is looking for 50 good links and sends out 2,000 emails.
   
   The competitor issue is a different one, and one that may be worthy of its own thread. We live in a collaborative world now; I definitely promote my competitors to a degree, and see the same in return. Just a few years ago in Internet marketing we were very careful not to give a link or a plug or the slightest help to a competitor, but you will now see me tweeting competitor's articles and linking to them from blog posts and such on a regular basis.

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