No, your "brilliant guest post" isn't right for me
I get a couple of emails a week with content people want me to share on a site I’m connected to. I think there has been two times when the content was actually relevant to the site and didn’t sound terrible. And yet, every time I get sent an approach email, it says differently.
There’s a good chance that if you are sending emails asking to guest post on someone’s site and you get no response, you are making the same mistakes.
Some simple advice
- If you want to people to accept your invitations, then suggest relevant content.
- look for content submission details. Some sites WANT more content and have an easily discovered page where you can submit content.
- On the other hand, some sites DON’T want your content and won’t accept it even if it’s great. (e.g. This site is my own personal site, I will never accept a guest post on it. Start your own.)
- Don’t use a stock approach email. They are easy to spot and I will ignore your message. (but you may get inspired)
- If you don’t read a site, then be honest! Don’t fake “being a long time reader”. I’m more likely to read the “hey I’m looking for guest positing opportunities on {topic} and I came across your site. I was wondering if…” If you read my site, prove it subtley not just saying you read a post.
- Even if you do everything right, I may have just deleted every email in my inbox because I got fed up. You can try emailing me again but there’s a good chance I’m ignoring you or have blocked you as you came across as spammy.
By the way, this was going to be a tweetstorm but I remembered the words of a friend and decided that a blog post would be better.