A thing you should know is that you get put on a lot of lists if you spend a decent chunk of time publishing blog posts on your website.

Your website and contact information will be shared around on these lists, for the purpose of soliciting you for guest posts. If you’re not familiar with the concept, guest posts are a way for other people to take advantage of your website’s search ranking as a way to divert traffic to other websites.

There are benefits to doing this. The most straightforward one is SEO. Here, outward going links serves a heuristic web search engines look to for quality when weighing results.

Guest posts can also have some additional gray hat goals, including audience segmenting and identification via things like UTM-driven campaigns. There are also straight-up cons such as linking to spyware, cryptominers and other forms of malware, and browser-based zero day exploits.

Curiouser and curiouser

I’ve always been curious about what exactly you get when you agree to a guest post offer. So, I dredged my spam folder and found one that sounded more direct and sincere.

Here’s the cold call email pitch:

Subject:
Article Pitch for Your Consideration

Body:
Hi,

Keeping up with annual home and property maintenance is essential for preserving value and preventing costly repairs down the line. Whether it's inspecting your roof, cleaning gutters, or checking heating systems, regular upkeep can save homeowners time, money, and stress.

I’m putting together an article that highlights key tasks for effective yearly maintenance, offering tips to help homeowners protect their biggest investment. I think this piece could really resonate with your audience!

Let me know if you'd be interested in featuring it on your website.

Thank you so much for your time today!

Erin Reynolds
Your trusted DIY Mama
DIYmama.net

P.S. If you’d like to propose an alternative topic, please do so. I would be happy to write on a topic that best suits your website. Don’t want to hear from me again? Please let me know.

My reply reads:

Hi Erin,

This might be a weird one, but bear with me: My blog is a personal site, and its content is focused on web development and internet culture.

I've always wanted to take someone up on this sort of offer, presented in the context of the article being something you get if you take the person reaching out on the offer to write a guest post.

Is this something you'd be interested in?

Erin took me up on my offer, and wrote about annual home and property maintenance. To her credit, she also did ask me if there was another subject I was interested in, but I figured we could stay the course of the original pitch.

She was also prompt and communicative throughout the process, and delivered exactly what was promised. Here is the article in question:

Image: Freepik

The Homeowner’s Yearly Tune-Up: Smart Habits That Keep the House Humming

By Erin Reynolds, diymama.net

There's a quiet rhythm to living in a well-loved home. If you listen closely, your house speaks to you-whispers, mostly. The soft drip of a tired faucet, the groan of an HVAC unit that's been running too long, or the gentle scold of a clogged dryer vent. These aren't just annoyances. They re the language of upkeep, and whether you're in your first place or celebrating twenty years in the same four walls, learning to listen—and act—is everything. Annual maintenance isn't just about fixing what's broken. It's about stewardship, about being the kind of homeowner who doesn't wait for the ceiling to leak before checking the roof.

Digitize Home Maintenance Records

There's something incredibly satisfying about having all your home maintenance documents in one tidy digital folder-no more rummaging through drawers for that appliance manual or the roof warranty. Digitizing receipts, inspection reports, and service invoices gives you a clear, accessible record of everything that's been done and when. Saving these as PDFs makes them universally readable and easy to share, whether you're selling your home or just need to reference them quickly. When you use a tool to create PDF files, you can convert virtually any document into a neat, portable format.

Give Your Gutters the Attention They Deserve

You might not think much about gutters unless they're sagging or spilling over during a thunderstorm, but they play a quiet hero's role in protecting your home. Clean them out once a year —twice if you're under heavy tree cover—and you'll avoid water damage, foundation cracks, and even basement flooding. Take a Saturday with a sturdy ladder, some gloves, and a hose; it's oddly meditative work, like adult sandbox play. And if climbing rooftops isn't your thing, call in the pros-your future self will thank you during the next torrential downpour.

Service Your HVAC System Like It’s a Lifeline

That whoosh of warm or cool air we all take for granted? It comes at a price if neglected. Your heating and cooling system needs a checkup at least once a year, ideally before the seasons shift. A technician can clean the coils, swap the filter, and make sure it's all running like a symphony-not the death rattle of a dying compressor. Skipping this task means flirting with energy inefficiency and sudden breakdowns during a July heatwave or a January cold snap-and no one wants that call to the emergency repair guy at 2 a.m.

Keep Your Appliances Running Like Clockwork

Your appliances work hard so giving them a little yearly attention goes a long way. Cleaning refrigerator coils, checking for clogged dryer vents, and running cleaning cycles on dishwashers and washing machines helps extend their lifespan and keep things humming. But even with routine care, breakdowns happen, which is why investing in a home warranty can provide peace of mind when repairs crop up. Be sure to research home warranty appliance coverage that includes not only repair costs, but also removal of faulty units and protection against damage caused by previous poor installations.

Tend to Your Trees

It's easy to forget the trees in your yard when they're not blooming or dropping leaves, but they're worth an annual walkaround. Look for branches that hang a little too close to power lines or seem precariously poised above your roof. Dead limbs are more than an eyesore-they're projectiles in a windstorm, liabilities when it comes to insurance, and threats to your peace of mind. Hiring an arborist to prune and assess health may not be the most glamorous expense, but it's a strategic one.

Re-Caulk and Seal Like a Procrastinator No More

This one's for all the window-ledge neglecters and bathroom corner deniers. Every year, old caulk shrinks and cracks, and when it does, water starts to creep in—under tubs, around sinks, behind tile. The same goes for gaps around doors and windows that let in drafts, bugs, and rising utility bills. Re-caulking is a humble chore that wields mighty results, and it's deeply satisfying to peel away the old and lay down a clean bead like you're frosting a cake. A tube of silicone sealant and an hour of your time buys you protection and a crisp finish.

Flush the Water Heater Before It Throws a Fit

Sediment buildup is sneaky—it collects at the bottom of your water heater like sand in a jar, slowly choking its efficiency and shortening its life. Once a year, flush it out. It's not hard: a hose, a few steps, and maybe a YouTube video or two for moral support. You'll end up with cleaner water, faster heating, and a unit that isn't harboring the mineral equivalent of a brick in its belly. This is the kind of maintenance no one talks about at dinner parties but everyone should be doing.

Inspect the Roof Before the Storms Do It for You

Roof problems rarely introduce themselves politely. They crash in during a storm or reveal themselves as creeping stains on the ceiling. But if you check your roof annually-scan for missing shingles, flashing that's come loose, or signs of moss and algae—you stand a better chance of catching issues while they're still small. If you're uneasy climbing up there, a good drone or a pair of binoculars can give you a decent read. Think of it like checking your teeth: do it regularly, and you'll avoid the root canal of roof repair.

Don’t Forget the Little Stuff: The Quieter Threats

There's an entire category of small, often-overlooked chores that quietly hold your house together. Replacing smoke detector batteries, testing GFCI outlets, tightening loose deck boards, cleaning behind the refrigerator, checking for signs of mice in the attic. These aren't major jobs, but ignoring them year after year adds up like debt. Spend a weekend with a checklist and a good podcast and knock them out-it's as much about peace of mind as it is about safety.

Being a homeowner isn't just about mortgages, paint colors, and patio furniture. It's about stewardship, a kind of quiet attentiveness to the place that holds your life. Annual maintenance doesn't come with applause or Instagram likes, but it keeps the scaffolding of your world solid and serene. When you walk into a home that's been cared for, you can feel it—the air is calmer, the floors don't squeak quite as loud, and the house seems to breathe easier, knowing someone's listening.

Explore the world of inclusive design with Eric W. Bailey, where insightful articles, engaging talks, and innovative projects await to inspire your next digital creation!

I mean, this is objectively solid advice!

The appearance of trust

What was nice to note here is none of the links contained any UTM parameters, and the sites linked out looked relatively on the up and up. It could be relevant and actionable results. Or maybe it is some sort of coordinated, quid-pro-quo networking. I honestly don’t care.

That said: Be the villain.

The deliverable was a Microsoft Word document attached to an email. On the surface this seems completely innocuous—a ton of people use it to write compared to Markdown.

However, in the wrong hands it could definitely be a vector for bad things. Appearing legitimate is a good tactic to build a sense of trust and get me to open that file. From there, all sorts of terrible things could happen.

To address this, I extracted the text via a non-Windows operating system installed on a Virtual Machine (VM). I also used a copy of LibreOffice to open the Word document.

The idea was to take advantage of the VM’s sandboxing, as well as the less-sophisticated interoperability between the two word processing apps. This allowed for sanitized plain text extraction, without enabling anything else more nefarious.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

I also searched certain select phrases from the guest post to see if this content was repeated anywhere else, and didn’t find anything. I found other guest posts written by Erin on the web, but that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

The internet is getting choked out by LLM-generated slop. Writing was already a tough job, and now it’s even gotten more thankless.

It’s always important to keep in mind that there’s people behind the technology. I choose to believe that this is an article written in earnest by someone who cares about DIY home repair and wants to get the word out.

So, to Erin: Here’s to your article! And to you, the reader: I hope you learned something new about taking care of the place you live in.