10 Things to Know Before Sending Guest Post Pitch

As a number of writers quickly grow, guest blogging is getting more competitive too. To boost your success chances, it usually starts with writing a guest post pitch.

It helps you establish a contact with a website owner and show your attitude towards writing.

Since you are expecting approval, you need to show why you are a good fit for their blog.

10 Things to Know Before Sending Guest Post Pitch

There are a few things you need to know before you get down to writing your guest post pitch.

1. Read the guidelines

The majority of websites have strict rules about what type of content they are looking for.

While some of them have ready guidelines for guest bloggers, others don’t. Read the guidelines carefully to make sure you can meet them.

Or read other pages instead to understand what their philosophy is.

Following the guidelines or other specified rules and principles is the key to getting your posts accepted.

2. Craft a stunning subject line

Can you think of how many emails successful bloggers get daily?

Sometimes it’s just impossible to look through all of them. The only way to be seen and read is to write a catchy subject line that quickly attracts attention even amidst dozens of other letters.

Be creative, provoke curiosity, and raise interest. Make the editors think for a second: “Wait, how do they know that?”. Persuading someone to open your email is a half-way done the job.

Create a few subject lines and take some time to compare them and choose the most impressive one.

3. Personalize your letter

Findings show that personalized emails bring 35% higher exposure.

Mention the name, website, and some articles you enjoyed the most.

Blog owners will appreciate the fact that you took some time to analyze their website, read a few content samples, and even choose your favorite ones.

Hopefully, your preferences will coincide with theirs. This is one of the ways to establish friendly contact with a blogger.

4. Follow them on social media

Each blog owner is sure to have social media profiles where they promote their content.

And they are bound to have links to them right on their websites. It will take you just a minute or two to follow them.

First of all, it will be rewarding for you as you will get good portions of the informative content right to your timeline. In addition, these blog owners will be more willing to work with you if they’ve seen you in their list of followers.

For some of them, it might be necessary to see what you look like and what type of content you publish.

5. Offer content ideas

When you already know what the website is about, whether it publishes evergreen content or just temporarily relevant, whether it’s information for beginners or advanced users, you can think of some stunning content topics you would like to write about – 3 would be enough.

Don’t choose too general topics that everyone else has already written about.

Narrow down your ideas to some specific methodologies in your niche, classifications or analysis of some industry stats.

A website owner will be excited to discover you’ve already done some work for them and it will give you more chances to get accepted.

6. Show what you are capable of

Despite all your efforts to say how cool you are, blog owners will always be interested in seeing your previous articles.

Choose a few samples of your work that ideally illustrate your writing capabilities and style.

Choose articles from the same niche and preferably some recent ones (not just because they are fresh, but rather because they illustrate your current writing style).

Ideally, you should send links to already published content. This way, it is possible to see how reputable your places of publication are, how many likes, comments, and shares it got.

7. Do you have any strengths?

It’s no longer effective to imitate others too much. You need to show your most striking advantages over others.

For example, it can be your close attention to content planning before the writing stage, or it can be your emphasis on some stats and other industry facts.

Don’t write that your guest posts are going to be high-quality. It says nothing today.

Or one of the striking benefits can be the fact that you employ techniques that encourage readers to comment on stories. Whatever your strengths are, you need to mention them.

8. Be concise

Blog owners or editors are really busy.

They read dozens of emails daily and they definitely don’t have time to read too long letters.

Make sure you provide your information consistently and avoid some general and meaningless phrases.

It will save both your and your editor’s time. In addition, if you write a consistent and well-structured pitch, it will only speak of your ability to write guest posts in the same way.

9. Take care of visual content too

Written content has never been so interrelated with graphics.

Users like scanning content before actually reading it. And images help them do so. If you don’t possess any designing skills, it’s probably high time for you to consider acquiring some.

I am not saying you have to become a professional website designer. The ability to create some simple illustrations of infographics will make you a higher-profile guest blogger and the editors will be more willing to accept your offer as they will definitely prefer some custom graphics over stock photos.

10. Check and edit your pitch twice

As you are going to contact other bloggers or editors, your language proficiency is a must.

Make sure your grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, and stylistics are correct.

Use some grammar checkers to double check.

Now all together

Impressing a blog owner sounds easy?

I hope it will be done as easily as said for you.

Create your stellar pitch and go on to contact your selected blog owners. Earn trust from some of the most respected blogging gurus in the industry.

Can you think of some more guest post pitch writing tricks that work undeniably well?
Guest contribution by: Richard Nolan a blogger and a private tutor,  sharing his experience in spheres of psychology, blogging & self-growth. Learn more about Richard on Facebook and Twitter