On the Inbound Now blog, we got a lot of guest post submissions. We love them!
They help us keep the awesome marketing & WordPress content flowing.
Side note: If you don't have a page/call to action on your blog that lets people know you allow and are actively looking for guest submissions, I highly recommend you fix that.
Most of the submissions are real readers who want to tap into our audience and provide some value, while others... not so much.
The other day, I received this request:
Hello Sir, On surfing the net i landed in your site and i saw that your blog was accepting guest posts . It would be nice if you accept my guest post which will be related with information of trade show and trade show exhibits. By adding my posts you also get benefited such that your blog do not get expired and also you get good page rank. If you are interested, please do reply me soon.
With regards webmaster
Instead of replying to "Webmaster" (did their parents name them webmaster? ouch), I decided to write this post to forward on to the next jokester that decides to pitch the site blindly.
Blind pitches with horrible grammar (see the above chicken scratch from "webmaster") are a sure-fire way for the site owner to immediately delete your email and move about their day.
If you have outsourced your guest blog posting to an SEO firm, make sure they haven't outsourced their outsourced work to a non-native English speaking country.
Your best bet is having them find the sites for you to contribute to, and you doing the outreach.
Personalize the messages to the site owner and try and reference something recent that they published. If you can explain in a quick and easy way, why your blog post would benefit their audience or how it would compliment a previous post they wrote, your golden.
It may seem blatantly obvious that you wouldn't want to submit an article about dogs to a site called "All Things Kitty Cats" but people still tend to make this mistake.
Look at what the site is about before submitting your pitch.
I have my topics clearly listed out on my guest submission page:
We are focused on the following categories, so guest posts should fit into one (or more) of these:
- Inbound Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- All Things WordPress
- Email Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- How-to tutorials on internet marketing topics
- Awesome Web Tools
Trade-show exhibits are not included in this list... If you are still spending the bulk of your marketing budget on trade-shows, I've got swamp land to sell you.
Guest Posting takes time. Using off-shored SEO firms to do the heavy lifting for your guest blog posting is not a long term solution and could even detract from your brand.
You are probably familiar with the top 10 blogs in your industry or niche. After you finish reading this post, I want you to: