When Content Partnerships smell funny
Funny job descriptions turn up these day – have you ever heard of a “blog relations consultant”? I sure did today, and I can't say it was an enjoyable encounter. Just know this: unloading your backlink-ridden postings upon a popular blog is not called a “content partnership”. I would call it backlink scraping, but that sounds a lot more unfriendly, doesn't it?
Could it be there are altruist blog angels, interested in leveraging your popularity rank for utterly unselfish reasons? Unlikely, even though the first paragraph might sound tempting to some:
We're currently reaching out to bloggers like you to form a content partnership, or a guest blogging partnership, where our Professional writes can contribute guest blog posts on your blog once or twice a month.
Hang on, it's getting a lot funnier:
Our Writers would not be writing marketing material, but would like to provide Unique content for your blog. Please fill out this form if you are interested so that we can set up an editorial calendar.
Two note-worthy facts:
a) I had no idea that the difference between marketing and “great” content lies solely in the “uniqueness” of the latter.
b) This difference between the two mentioned content categories sounds even weirder considering that the person who sent me this e-mail works for a company which is “marketing” in its name.
So, sadly, I'm not going to start a “content partnership” with you. But I have a free consulting advice for you: set up your homepage before you start pestering innocent bloggers. Somebody might actually take a look at your URL, and read the following sentence:
We will use a unique combination that will allow you to fully utilize the Internet.
And then he might click around the bit and start to wonder, if a completely empty homepage is indeed “he latest trends of marketing that will literally put our customers first”…