How many times have you gotten an e-mail from someone you’ve never seen nor heard about requesting a review exchange or link exchange? Here’s some advice for those of you who are out there hitting up webmasters, and a collective rant for those of us who are being hit up.

Build a relationship before you go trying to find out what everyone can do for you.
Lets face it: it can be difficult to build and maintain relationships with 100’s of bloggers, but it’s something that’s necessary if you plan to be successful in the least bit. Before you send me an e-mail asking me what I can do for you, at least first introduce yourself and propose either a fair business exchange or just ask me to look at your blog. This is a two way street, if I were trying to proposition someone else, I wouldn’t just write off random e-mails.

Case in point:
A few days ago someone by the name of [...] wrote me the following e-mail:

Hello I My name Is [...] and my blog is [...] It’s about
building traffic. I was wondering if you can do a review for my site if you
agree I will do one for your site too. This can help build your traffic and
good for networking. So thanks and let me know A.S.A.P

One thing this e-mail has going for it is that it’s short and to the point. However, the author does a poor job of introducing himself, his blog, and communicating his message before requesting my help. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and check out his blog, to no surprise it was another Make Money Online By Copying John Chow’s Blog On Making Money Online. I swear, I’m so tired of the Make Money Online By Telling Others How To Make Money Online circle jerk that it gives me a headache.

So, I read a few of his posts, and noticed his Feedburner RSS chiclet looked a little funny. I quickly glanced down at my Alexa toolbar and realized there was no way he had that many subscribers for that amount of traffic. I proceeded to right-click the chiclet and realized it was hosted on his own domain rather than Feedburner’s (fraudulent count).

So, I e-mailed him curious as to how many legitimate subscribers he had:

Hey [...],
How many RSS Subscribers do you have? I couldn’t tell because the chiclet in your sidebar isn’t authentic. (Hosted on your domain instead of Feedburner’s).

Keep blogging,
Scot

And his reply:

so no review and the rss is there for a reason check my post about “being evil brings more Rss subscription” so let me now if you want to do a review I will review your site too

Classy!

I didn’t remember a post about “being evil brings more Rss subscription”, (Do you really want to be like John Chow that much?) so I checked back at his blog and noticed he removed the chiclet and posted the following gem:

Well I’ve been a bad GEEK. Here at [...] I’ve been deceiving everyone.

How?

Good question, first I’d like to say I would have done it longer but because of some hater’s that exposed me to fast I couldn’t reek all the benefits.

What I’m talking about is faking you RSS subscription and if it really helps by getting more subscribers.

well in the study I had it up for about 1 1/2 weeks and it got me 15 more subscribers.

Like I said before I would have gotten more but some haters exposed me.

15 subscriber might not seem like alot but to me it’s GREAT. So maybe you guys should try being alittle evil and see your traffic sky rocket.

If only he had reeked the benefits…

The moral of this story: Don’t just spam every blogger you can think of asking what they can do for you. Think about what you can do for them, show a little personality, and see how far it will get you. It also helps if you know anything about how business works, and I’m afraid most of these folks have never done business or just don’t understand the basics of communication and persuasion. Who knows…