Guest Bloggers: You’re Doing It Wrong

There is an abundance of blog posts, articles, guides and even conferences covering outreach and inbound marketing and guest blogging. This has got so big that it has become a new form of spam in its worst implementation. Yet, those practising guest blogging on a daily basis, as their main job, still don’t get it right more often than not. I used to get link exchange email spam, now things are changing. This is an email I got today:

Hi,

I have gone through your site and liked it very much. I would like submit
an exclusive guest post on your site. Since you generally publish guest
posts from different authors in your niche, I thought it would be nice if I
too had an opportunity to offer something really valuable and informative
to your readers.

I understand the need for unique and well-researched content. The post will
be “SEO or Web Designing” I would also like to request you to suggest any
topic, on which you would want me to write articles.

I ensure you that the articles will be unique and not published elsewhere
on the internet.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
Mary

Let’s leave aside for a moment this email being not really as personal as most blog owners would like guest post requests to be. The targeting is so off! I mean, I can totally understand why they picked me up. They fired their tools, ran a Google query for SEO + “guest post”, since both terms get menitoned on this blog sure enough it came up in the results. Have I ever accepted any guest posts? Hell no! Except for one time I suggested half-jokingly over Twitter to a friend that he publish one here, I have never seriously considered the idea of opening up my doors to strangers posting. No matter how frequently (not) I post here, this is the blog that goes with my professional consulting site, the views expressed here are exclusively my own, and I am not going to change this any time soon.

This is the reply I sent to this blogger:

Mary,

No I do NOT generally publish guest posts from different authors in my niche, or any other niche for that matter. Do your homework FFS. Just because my site comes up for a search for “guest post” does not necessarily mean I accept them, it simply means I mention the words somewhere on the site, and by not doing any further filtering or checking all your catch manually you have no idea about the context in which it is mentioned, and thus mistarget me (and a bunch of others, I am sure). Furthermore, since you are this poor at doing your job, I have no reason to believe you can come up with a worthy post and hence, even if I indeed published guest posts on my blog, I don’t think your content would qualify.

Best regards,
IrishWonder

Automating your efforts is cool, I understand the need to scale them, how many guest posts does it take to rank a site for “SEO”? But hey, there’s another way to increase the ROI of your outreach campaigns: improve your targeting, and as a result improve your response/success rate. Ever considered this?

And even then, I still do not qualify.