If there is single truth in the world after death and taxes, it is that someone is always trying to sell you something. And lately, it seems like someone is always trying to sell me more traffic to my website. A couple of times a week, I get an email message promising increased traffic and sales to my site. Here is an annotated example of one such email message, typical enough to stand for all the rest. The annotations follow the message.
Annotations:
1. Right off the bat, you can tell that they have not done their research. There is no team. There is just me. Right away I think “spam.”
2. This pleasant, if bland, intro is ruined by its lack of proper punctuation.
3. Why does the author of this message think it is important this his or her name be bolded? Will I remember it better because of that? Given what follows, I’m not sure I’d want my name associated with the message.
4. So we have a self-proclaimed expert. That is an important point, considering the pitch.
5. Why do they say “a leading software provider company” instead of just naming the company. Playing coy with me makes me immediately suspicious of your motives.
6. The pitch from this expert is that my website is not ranking well with Google and other search engines. This is their expert opinion. Have they checked this? They must have since they produced an extensive report. But when I do a search for my name in Google, here is what I see in the first page results:
7. Maybe my traffic is poor. Everything is relative. It is certainly down from its monthly peak a few years back. But it is actually up in the last couple of months over what it was for the months prior.
8. “Due to some of the reasons.” My traffic is poor because of reasons. Could you be more specific, maybe?
9. For some reason, we change fonts in this paragraph.
10. As you can see, the report is extensive. Three whole bullet points.
11. Thanks, but as I’ve said, I already have 1st page ranking on Google.
12. Now we’ve changed font color.
13. If I am not happy, I get my money back, but they have yet to ask for money. The Website Audit Report they offer in the previous paragraph is free. Even so, I wouldn’t pay money to improve my traffic or Google ranking.
14. Now a plea not to treat the message as spam.
15. Because they have put a lot of time an energy and effort into something that I never asked anyone to do in the first place.
16. I don’t even understand what the point of this final caution is. I did amuse me that they capitalized the word Details in the final sentence.
I’m sorry to break the news to you, Boldface Surname, but your message is spam, and that’s where I filed it. This may not stop similar messages in the future, but it was satisfying to mark it as spam.
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