The name of the sender. I mean come on, ha!
Posted: Tue Dec 24, 2024 5:38 am
The name of the sender. I mean come on, ha! The name “Webmaster Fastmoney” had me instantly laughing out loud upon seeing this. If I hadn’t been sourcing horrible email examples to highlight for this guide, I would’ve instantly spammed this one and never even considered opening it. Add the subject line into that quick analysis and wow, what a bad start.
The all caps subject line is spammy at best. Never send an email to a brand new recipient—especially one you’re hoping to partner with—using a subject line that’s in all capitalized text. It’s a miracle that my Gmail spam filters didn’t pull this one straight into the spam folder.
There’s not even a nod towards personalization. This blogger doesn’t bother to evenalbania phone number material use my name or the name of the site. Not to mention the fact that this email has clearly been sent to 50+ other recipients on the same exact thread.
It comes across as disingenuous. The first sentence says “I love your site,” but it’s easy to see from the email that it’s being sent to dozens of people all at the same time—so there’s no indication that this blogger has even read a single post on my blog. In fact, it suggests the opposite since they’re clearly sending identical emails to dozens (if not hundreds) of other bloggers.
There’s a grammatical error in the first sentence. We all make some mistakes, but you should be proofing your emails before hitting send. The word “its” should be “it’s” (short for “it is”) in the first sentence of this outreach email. While typos happen, when you’re asking for a guest posting opportunity, you can’t afford to give the immediate impression that your writing is going to be poorly edited.
The writing style is just plain bad. The second sentence, for instance, is long and convoluted and doesn’t really make sense—this blogger starts the sentence with “I couldn’t help wondering” but doesn’t actually pose a question, which makes the entire email a pretty confusing experience.
The emphasis on the word FREE looks very spammy. Putting “FREE” in all caps and doing it twice, comes across as desperate and pushy. It also seems like an odd selling point, as most bloggers will expect guest posts to be offered for free anyway.
There’s no actual pitch. This would-be guest poster asks me to do the work for them and “provide me the topic you wish us to write about.” As well as being rather ungrammatical, this is a red flag because good guest posters will be willing to suggest an idea that they feel they could do justice to.
There’s no indication of where “a link back to our website” would go. Bloggers with large sites have worked hard building their reputation, often over the course of years. We don’t want to risk harming that reputation by allowing a link to a spammy website, or one that runs counter to my values. Be transparent about what you’re hoping to achieve in your emails and you’ll have a much better shot at forming a genuine relationship.
Now that email example is truly one of the worst I’ve seen in quite a while.
So, to ease back into what makes an email actually stand out from the crowd—let’s walk through a bad example that’s not as egregious.
The all caps subject line is spammy at best. Never send an email to a brand new recipient—especially one you’re hoping to partner with—using a subject line that’s in all capitalized text. It’s a miracle that my Gmail spam filters didn’t pull this one straight into the spam folder.
There’s not even a nod towards personalization. This blogger doesn’t bother to evenalbania phone number material use my name or the name of the site. Not to mention the fact that this email has clearly been sent to 50+ other recipients on the same exact thread.
It comes across as disingenuous. The first sentence says “I love your site,” but it’s easy to see from the email that it’s being sent to dozens of people all at the same time—so there’s no indication that this blogger has even read a single post on my blog. In fact, it suggests the opposite since they’re clearly sending identical emails to dozens (if not hundreds) of other bloggers.
There’s a grammatical error in the first sentence. We all make some mistakes, but you should be proofing your emails before hitting send. The word “its” should be “it’s” (short for “it is”) in the first sentence of this outreach email. While typos happen, when you’re asking for a guest posting opportunity, you can’t afford to give the immediate impression that your writing is going to be poorly edited.
The writing style is just plain bad. The second sentence, for instance, is long and convoluted and doesn’t really make sense—this blogger starts the sentence with “I couldn’t help wondering” but doesn’t actually pose a question, which makes the entire email a pretty confusing experience.
The emphasis on the word FREE looks very spammy. Putting “FREE” in all caps and doing it twice, comes across as desperate and pushy. It also seems like an odd selling point, as most bloggers will expect guest posts to be offered for free anyway.
There’s no actual pitch. This would-be guest poster asks me to do the work for them and “provide me the topic you wish us to write about.” As well as being rather ungrammatical, this is a red flag because good guest posters will be willing to suggest an idea that they feel they could do justice to.
There’s no indication of where “a link back to our website” would go. Bloggers with large sites have worked hard building their reputation, often over the course of years. We don’t want to risk harming that reputation by allowing a link to a spammy website, or one that runs counter to my values. Be transparent about what you’re hoping to achieve in your emails and you’ll have a much better shot at forming a genuine relationship.
Now that email example is truly one of the worst I’ve seen in quite a while.
So, to ease back into what makes an email actually stand out from the crowd—let’s walk through a bad example that’s not as egregious.