Why waste the time?

No one visits the city dump to look at trash.

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Good point!

Let me share a quick story with you:

Last month I was researching a competitor and trying to understand what made them tick. One of the top results in the search engine I was using was a spam website that posted every piece of spam he received. You could call this man’s site as “garbage” as it was nothing but spam.

Within the post of spam that I found in his garbage site was a proposal including a private URL to access a proposal server designed for the guy who got spammed … by the CEO of a publicly held company… a publicly held competitor of mine.

My point: This guy’s garbage website that posted spam emails he received was a goldmine for me as it give me critical insight into how a competitor was growing his business. You’ll never find me doing what he did (mass unsolicitied emails), but it gave me an idea to create a similiar PHP based proposal server for a new project I had in mind.

Moral of the story: One person’s garbage is another person’s goldmine.

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Hi Chris,

By posting these articles on the web aren’t you just rewarding these authors with exposure and visibility?

I would stick to what you’re doing – which is FANTASTIC. Save the rewards for those of us who ARE using your guidelines.

For educational purposes (i.e. here’s what NOT to do), you could create a fictitious article based on these “rejects” – demonstrating each of the reasons they were rejected.

Have a great day,
Linda

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