Being a website publisher, I receive my share of mass emails asking to join linking networks or trade sitewide links with other sites. Generally, as a rule of thumb, I delete such mails before ever opening them, as they are a dime a dozen and a true link builder would compose a more personalized message and subject line.
However, today I received a spam mailing which caught my eye due to there being no sender field and this title: Your Blog and Blogroll.
Seems that a site which is considering itself a social media network of blogs, videos and content is sending out mass mailing messages to bloggers in an effort to swap links and gain traffic.
What really caught my eye in this mail was a line about how if links were swapped, the site would also add the blogger’s blog to their favorites on del.icio.us, Stumbleupon and Technorati. That’s a power statement in the world of social media and I’m wondering if we’re going to see more link exchange requests directed towards bloggers with the opportunity of collecting more bookmarks and social media traffic to their blogs.
Here’s the mail (I’ve blocked out the site that sent it):
Hello,
I have just visited your blog and am interested in adding you to our blogroll.
By way of an introduction, www.xxxxxxx.com is a user driven site where the content is submitted, commented on and rated by the community.
Our content is very broad and includes entertainment, gadgets, celebrity, offbeat news, interesting ideas, videos and photos.
As part of this we are always looking for unique content from sites such as yours. As a site we receive approximately 30,000 viewers per day and would like to swap some traffic with yourself, providing you like our site.
I would like to propose the following:
1. We would like to swap links in blogroll, we will add you to our list and would be grateful if you would do the same.
2. We will also add you to our favourites on de.lici.ous,
stumbleupon.com and technorati.com. Please add xxxxxxx.com likewise.
3. We would love to feature some of your content, pleae mail me on submit@xxxxxxx.com with anything that you think may be of interest to us.
4. You can also add content to our site at xxxxxxx.com and we pay for content, $20/£10 per 1000 visitors it is viewed by.
5. Finally feel free to link to any of our content that you think may be of interest to your visitors.kind regards
Chris
From a link building perspective, I think that this company has the right intentions. By approaching bloggers in an effort to gather more inbound links from blogrolls, and offering an additional bonus of social media clicks and traffic, a site could essentially grow quite quickly and build some nice incoming traffic.
However, setting it up as a reciprocal linking opportunity is wrong. Mass mailing thousands of bloggers is spam. And Chris and his company are not off to a good start.
I will however revisit their site and try and see if their spamming campaign actually worked for them or not
