Image: SPAM-flavoured macadamia nuts (own work; CC BY 4.0). Look, these nuts horrified me as much as they horrify you – but I have to admit, they were pretty good.
We’re all accustomed to fake-journal spam and fake-conference spam by now. But I’ve started to get a new flavour of spam in my inbox: guest-post spam.
Here’s the thing: I’ve had some really nice guest posts on Scientist Sees Squirrel*, and I’d be happy to have some more. Guest posts offer some different perspective, and the world certainly needs more than just mine. But here’s the latest guest-post spam to come my way:
It’s great that my spamvolunteer will supply posts that are well written with no grammatical or spelling mistakes. Actually, it would be great if my own posts met that standard. And I will admit that I called this blog Scientist Sees Squirrel because my own attention wanders and I cover quite a range of subjects here. But: Top 5 Ways to Spend Christmas in Singapore? Latest Trends in Weddings? I could be wrong, but I don’t think that’s why my readers are here. So I’m lumping this guest-post spam with my invitations to publish in the International Journal of Geosciences and in Computational and Mathematical Models in Medicine. These are spectacularly misdirected, and it’s just as well: it makes it a really, really easy call on reaching for the Delete key**.
So you can keep coming here for posts on ecology, and writing, and peer review, and – dear to my heart (if not to yours) – the etymologies of Latin names. And more! But I promise, no guest posts on Trends in Weddings or Best Corporate Gift Ideas.
© Stephen Heard January 11, 2018
I’m poking fun at guest-post spam, but that doesn’t mean I don’t welcome serious inquiries about guest-posting. If you’ve been reading for a while, you probably have a good idea what might fit. If so, I’d be happy to hear from you.
*^For example: this nice post on the two cultures, or this one and this one on learning to write, or this one about where ideas come from.
**^After milking it for a blog post, of course.
Scientist Sees Squirrel 
I get a dozen of these a week. They want to write advertising for some product, company, or web site that looks enough like a real article to trick your readers into reading it. I’ve never found any way to discourage them from pestering me. I’ve never published their dreck, and I occasionally post an article mocking them. But they keep coming.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, I imagine I can look forward to more and more of them. Fortunately, if they’re all as mismatched as this one, they’ll be very easy to ignore!
LikeLike
I think that you can take it as a sign of success – somewhere in the internet there is a bot counting clicks, and when a blog gets the scores it wants, it fires off a guest blog enquiry. Apparently if you are a real click-baiter you can actually get paid for letting companies write advertorial drivel on your site.
LikeLiked by 3 people
At some point, I think my name, email address and site ended up on a list of leads for sale, because there was a discrete moment when I started getting these on a regular basis. Looks like you’re on the list now!
LikeLike