Pitching to be a Guest Blogger

A great way to get your name or your brand name ‘out there’ is by asking bloggers to review your products or publish guest blog posts for you.

This helps you gain back links, widen your audience and generally boost your exposure and therefore should be a valuable part of your PR strategy.

But learning how to pitch your ideas successfully is vital if you want your posts to be accepted.

After all, well known and widely-read bloggers will be inundated by requests every week, so you have to make yours stand out from everyone else’s.

So how do you do that?

How do you get noticed?

1. Generic is bad

Like the rest of us, you’re probably short of time, but cutting corners by sending a single email out to a number of bloggers is a bad idea.

After all, who are they more likely to take notice of? Someone who has taken the time to write an email addressed to them specifically by name, or one that has obviously been sent out to the faceless millions (OK, probably not that many, but you get the idea).

If you’re serious about your pitch, mention them by name and personalise the email by showing your familiarity with their blog.

2. Blind submissions

Gathering a list of blog email addresses and blindly sending out your idea won’t be a fruitful exercise.

If you want to stand a chance, you have to research who you’re sending your pitch to. Let’s face it, as I have a marketing/copywriting/social media blog, if someone sent me a blog about the ideal beauty regime for Llamas I would be very unlikely to consider it.

Only send your ideas to blogs within your niche.

3. Don’t be repetitive

Sending your idea once is fine. But sending the same email again and again is annoying.

By all means chase up your proposal after a suitable time period, but don’t make yourself a menace.

4. Get to know them

If a company pops up out of the blue to try and sell me something and I’ve never heard of them, I’m unlikely to be receptive to them.

It’s the same with your blog pitch. If you’ve taken the time to get to know them, either through Twitter, Facebook or commenting on their blog, your name will probably be familiar to them and therefore they are more likely to respond.

5. Ignoring guidelines

If you’ve managed to get your pitch noticed and received a request to see your post, don’t scupper your chances by ignoring their guidelines.

They’ll probably be along the lines of:

•    Your post must be original and must not be published elsewhere
•    It must fit within the topic of the blog
•    It must not be a thinly veiled advert
•    There should be no HTML links in the body text

If you completely ignore these, your post will not only be rejected, any further pitches will more than likely be ignored.

Over to you

Do you regularly submit requests to bloggers?

If so do you have any tips you can offer?

Leave a comment below, it would be great to hear from you.