Good afternoon,

I have been receiving you blog info for a couple of weeks via Google news feeds and I wanted to congratulate you on your pregnancy and the journey you are taking as an expectant mother. I thought since you had a considerable following that I would try and network with a mom and share a product I have spent several years developing for expectant moms…the [redacted].

Wow, NETWORKING WITH A MOM. Uh. Dude. Not a mom. Yet. Also, very much against the Baby Industrial Complex and the Cult of Motherhood. (More exciting blogging on that later, perhaps.)

(Clipped, a lovely little creation story on how she came up with this AMAZING product.)

I hope you will take a look at the ultimate in comfort for expectant moms and will share my enthusiasm for this amazing product. I have included the website and I look forward to your feedback.

Kind regards,

[Redacted]

OMG – ULTIMATE comfort?! OMG OMG OMG. How could I say no?! I mean, she’s like, been reading my feed for the past who-knows-how-long and is now GRACING me with this helpful tip!

Hey, here’s some feedback from me:

Dear [Redacted],

After receiving a comment on my blog, which was so obviously not-personalized, but meant to capitalize on my blog entry regarding a product that was related to pregnancy, yet totally different from the product you offer, I can only say that I will be deliberately avoiding your product during my pregnancy.

I believe that exploiting searches, and people’s blogs to hawk your wares is not only cheap and lazy, but also offensive. The way you are doing it fakes a personalization, “I have been receiving you blog info for a couple of weeks via Google news feeds and I wanted to congratulate you on your pregnancy and the journey you are taking as an expectant mother.” I not believe you have been reading my blog all this time. Now, this is an assumption that I’m happy to be incorrect, so if you could tell me what it is about my blog that you came across that made you so interested as to add it to your reader, that would be fantastic.

Furthermore, I will be posting this response to you in a blog entry of my own, as a warning to other people who might choose to try to market their wares through comments on my blog. Sadly, I believe most of the comments are not done by human beings, but rather by robots, and that they could care less. Regardless of that, I figure it can’t hurt to let people know where I stand.

Any future comments made to my blog by your company, or any other, that are explicitly intended to redirect to another website for the sale of a product or service, will be either altered by me to obscure the site or the original poster, or be deleted entirely. None of these comments will even be seen publicly without my approval anyway. I have already altered such means to take care of other comments meant to sell other products.

I’m sure that advertising is expensive. My request is for you to stop using non-commercial blogs, unsolicited, as a way to gain more customers.

Thanks,

Laura