Writing guest blog posts can drastically boost traffic on your own blog or website. But what’s the best way to ask someone to feature your content on their site? Alex Berman goes through the perfect email example to feature your work on other blogs.
Key Takeaways:
- Customize emails with the recipients name, a reference to their article and a link to their work and your work.
- Give topic options, and making sure to include topics that are relevant to the person/blog.
- Don’t make the email all about you. Tell the person how much you loved this part of one of their blog posts.
- Change the subject line to something catchy. “Amazing article”.
Pitching your content over to other blogs and websites is pretty important for marketing. Today, I want to run through a pitch that I got for guest blogger, tear it down, build it back up and show you my take on how to actually properly pitch a guest post.
This is an example of a bad email
Hi,
I am Swati Sharma, a blogger and part time author.
I am into tech blogging domain for the past two years and apart from my own blog, I now want to contribute to other blogs.
Is there a guest section on your website, experiment27.com , where I can contribute articles under my name?
Let me know.
I want to use this as an example of things that can go wrong in your mail merges. So, for instance, this space after experiment27, comes from having unclean data, which means in their Excel doc that they were using, there was an extra space in there.
The other thing that’s weird, is there is no customization here. It doesn’t say hi Alex. But it does say the website name. And then the other big meta point I want to get to in this email. One of the reasons why you cringe when you read this, is because this entire email is all about Swati and her needs. It’s not about me at all. One of the ways you get people to respond to your cold emails, are to make it about them. And then the final thing that I want to touch on, is when Swati asks,
‘Is there a guest author section on your website experiment27 where I can contribute articles under my name?’
This is a bad question because if Swati had just gone to the blog, they would’ve see if there was a guest section or not, and that should be part of the lead gen. That shouldn’t even be part of this.
How to change the email?
Hi Alex,
Came across the podcast article you did about Ryan Lee. Loved the section about premium prices.
I am Swati Sharma, a blogger and part-time author who writes content like “Top 10 Tech Hacks”, that’s been featured on Entrepreneur.com. Reading through your posts, I thought your audience might be interested in these topics.
- Topic 1
- Topic 2
- Topic 3
Is there a guest section on your website, experiment27.com , where I can contribute articles under my name?
Let me know.
- Start off with some kind of interesting tidbit about why you’re reaching out? Customizing this first sentence that took all of 10 seconds. T
- Don’t send your emails with typos.
- Link your blog or link to articles that you have written, so the author can see what those are like.
- Send at least 3 specific topics based on content on that specific blog. Customize things that speak to the content on the blog.
- The last thing I wanted to touch on, is the subject line. If you wanted to go full generic, you could say “amazing post” in the subject line. Someone is more likely to open that, because everyone likes to see compliments. If you wanted to customize it more, you can say “amazing post about Ryan Lee.”
End
Liked that?
Ok then, now…
Read about a simple tool to find the other 20 odd sites that might like your guest post
