This was an email I recently received:
Hi,
My name is [REDACTED] and I’m an account manager at [REDACTED].
One of our clients has shown interest in being featured on an article on your website.
Is that something you are able to accommodate?
We have a great inhouse team of writers and we can provide the content, or if you prefer, you can also write it and feature our client.
Can you please send me a price quote for an article? Please keep in mind we are an agency and require competitive pricing as we resell them to our clients.
I look forward to hearing from you,
Best regards,
[REDACTED]
Account Manager
And with that, I decided to send this as a response:
With all due respect, do you walk into a car dealership and, without any preamble, say “Quote me a price for a car…”? Not anything specific. Not providing any details of whether you’ve got a specific make or model in mind. Not listing out your needs. Just “a car”.
So care to tell me the name of your client and how they’re expecting to be featured on my site? Are they looking for me to review a product? A mention in an article relevant to their primary market? (On which knowing their name would allow me to research.) It would’ve been very helpful having that information up front, since that’s what I need to provide a price quote.
Thanks.
That was 5 days ago. Not expecting to hear from them.
And I’ll state this again: no one should be asking me about paid custom content given the very few hits per day my site gets. Which tells me the email they sent me is just another form email that gets cast out into the void to a mailing list.
