Those of you who’ve been following me for a long time know that I don’t do rants. But I have to make a small exception now.

As you may have noticed, I welcome guest posts on my blog. This is mainly to help writers who’re looking for a break, as I know how hard it can be to build up a writing portfolio.

Somewhere along the line, I started getting requests from people who are mainly looking for a way to enter backlinks leading back to their website, in the hope that this will help them gain visibility with search engines. Publishing something to help others with their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes is fine by me, as long as the content they provide me with is of interest to you, my readers. That’s why I stress that any post will be simultaneously published on both my nicholasrossis.me and my nicholasrossis.wordpress.com blog, something that’s not ideal for SEO–but great for you guys, as you can find my content on both media. This dissuades most marketers, but that’s fine–all I care about is offering you quality content.

By the way, this twin-blog policy has led to some trouble in the past, and I’ve had to draw the line a couple of times when people asked me to remove a post from one of the two destinations after it was published, even offering to pay for me to do so. This would be disrespectful to you, so it’s never happened, and it never will.

Strange Requests

I always make a point of responding to any legitimate queries for guest posts but have a couple of pet peeves.

One of them is people who ask me to host their guest posts and provide me with the wrong email address. That way, I waste precious time checking them out and responding to their email, only to discover that such an address doesn’t exist. Even funnier is when they then contact me again and ask again (often asking whether I read their original email)… still using the wrong email!

Also, I find it hard to respond to emails with poor grammar, typos, or bad English. When the query is poorly written, I know from experience I’ll have to spend hours cleaning up the post in order to make it good enough for my blog. Still, I often shake my head and allow a guest post in the hope of my blog serving as a stepping stone in their journey toward better writing.

Then, came the strangest request I’ve seen todate. I just had to laugh when I received this:

Hi Nicholas,

I am a theo đây có blog và tiếp tục nó quá thường. Bạn blog không đủ quyền để cho bạn.

I operate a website for [guns and hunting]. I would like để ghi một người dùng blog đăng nhập hay một các liên kết liên kết mà đang gắn với blog. Would you be willing to accept as a guest blogger?

Nếu bạn được phép bạn thì này là ít đề hình học cho bạn blog.

I mean, come on. I get it that English isn’t the first language for some of you. But is it so hard to at least try and send me a mail that is actually written in English?! What am I supposed to do with this one??

translation | From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's books

Is he saying I’m too wordy?

Sigh…