G'Day Gavin!
It's called starting off on the wrong foot. Send an email to a complete stranger you're hoping to ask a favour of… and get his name wrong for starters. I don't really mind: Gavin is a fine name and I am sure there are many gardening Gavins out there. It's just that I'm a gardening Jamie, but as I said, I don't mind.
And that's what happened this morning. I received a very cheery email headed "G'Day Gavin!". It was from someone hoping to do a very modest little deal in the hope of getting some free publicity for his new Australian seed selling website.
The is familiar stuff for me. One of the little jobs I have to do as a garden blogger is deal with lots of emails from business promoters. As I've been around for a while and my blog has logged up a fair few hits (mostly due to its sheer longevity, rather than its popularity) people promoting their business send me emails offering all sorts of deals, in the hope of a bit of publicity. It's not enough to make me rich, but I would have a garden shed full of crap I don't want if I accepted every offer.
Very few of these promo emails are irksome, and I don't mind people giving it a try. In fact I can sympathise. One of the biggest problems in the business world is simply getting noticed, standing out from the pack in some way.
So I always politely reply to most emails, saying "Sorry, I'm strictly an amateur blogger and so I accept no freebies or contra in exchange for blog postings." I reply in this way every week, sometimes a couple of times a week. I always wish them the best of luck.
A few get back to me, revealingly saying "thanks for bothering to reply". It must be a hard slog for them, sending out hundreds of emails, getting hardly any replies. So when they do get a "no" from me, it prompts some of them to reply because at least someone read their email.
The only promo emails that I don't reply to are those suggesting they generously do a "guest posting", based on their relevance to my gardening blog…. on highly relevant topics like cleaning blinds, home heating, insurance for pets… etc. I don't reply to the 'guest posters'. In this gardening blog, any guest posts would just be spam with a parsley garnish.
So while I am a dismal party pooper to the business world's promotional dreams, I have decided to give the authors of my "G'Day Gavin!" email a free plug because I like their website, the company is a new Australian company, they're home-grown, they're young, they're organic, and they actually have gardening products to sell.
I wouldn't have a clue whether they're good, bad, wonderful or indifferent. You decide for yourself. But they sell seeds of all sorts of plants, both edible and ornamental – quite an interesting mix, which mostly made me decide to give them a free plug. So you can check out for yourself the good folk at Fair Dinkum Seeds here:
www.fairdinkumseeds.com
And here's a little magazine story about them, a young couple called Leigh and Manami.
http://issuu.com/lily_lifeandstyleod/docs/lilyissue6/33?e=7498468/6640236
Good luck to you both, Leigh and Manami, I hope your business flourishes as well as your garden seems to be doing.
