Hey, all you authors and other writers in the publishing world! Have you gotten an email like this one?
Hi,
My name is Taylor you can find me on facebook
www.fb.com/taylorreesdotcom
(I’ll get straight to the point since Christmas is almost here)I really love your work and wanted to ask if you
might be interested in posting a guest post on
http://publishingaddict.com/help-wanted/Anything that you think can help book authors,
Things like:
Importance of a book covers
video book trailer
how to write a book
etcThanks,
TaylorP.S. If you don’t have time to post on other websites,
I would love to write an article for your website.
If you’ve seen something like this, chances are you’ve already deleted it as spam. But for anyone who’s never seen it before, allow me to help you out!
This is from an affiliate marketer.
This was not sent from a real live person – well, I mean, they’re not from who they say they are. They’re claiming to be someone called Taylor Rees, and they’ve put together a pretty good Facebook profile and website specifically for the purpose of convincing you that they are, indeed, a real person, but they’re not. This email is from an affiliate marketer, likely based somewhere cheap like the Philippines, whose job it is to send out thousands of these emails in the hopes of getting responses that will eventually turn into links for their website.
They want to do two things here – convince you to give them some content, which they will likely tweak for SEO purposes and which you are likely to link to from your own website, and see if they can write a guest post for your site, which will inevitably contain a backlink to their site.
They’re doing this because they need to get their site to the top of Google for certain keywords, and Google’s been making it pretty hard to game the rankings lately. Part of how to do it now is effectively to ‘fake’ it completely – to build a persona and site that looks exactly like the real thing, and use it to get legitimate back links and attention from regular authors.
The end goal here, if I had to guess, is to build up the traffic and then add in affiliate ads for something like AuthorHouse.
So how do I know all this?
- I used to work in affiliate marketing, and this is pretty much par for the course.
- No name on the email (obviously), just ‘Hi’ with no reference to anything else.
- The domain is only a month old, even though the FB profile claims they’ve been around since April 2004.
- Stock image used as an avatar.
I’ve checked enough to be convinced that this isn’t legit, more or less.
Long story short – you need to delete this email and ignore it. Don’t respond at all. They aren’t who they say they are, which is a big red flag. If you get something similar to this, investigate a LOT to make sure that you know who you’re talking to.