4 Common Guest Blog Outreach Rookie Mistakes

guest post by Stephanie Staszko

For many online marketers, sourcing and contacting guest blog locations is a major part of their link building campaign. The concept for guest blogging seems fairly easy: you source a decent, relevant blog, write a guest post for them, get it published and obtain a backlink to the website of your choice.

This however, is much more easier said than done as actually getting a blog owner to agree to publish one of your posts is probably harder than the actually task of writing the post itself.

Know your Recipient

Guest bloggers have begun to try and use more personal address in their outreach emails, often directly addressing the blog owner in their quest for a guest location. This email may include, name of the recipient and the recipient's website name/URL. Although the method of using personal address seems an effective way of defining the outreach email from a spam email which was sent to thousands of people, getting the recipient's details correct is important! How many emails have you received which are addressed to a similar name to yours but the opposite gender? Getting your recipient's gender right can make the difference between sparking slight interest and downright offending someone!

Introduce Yourself

Outreach emails are pretty pointless if you don't include sufficient information about yourself for the webmaster, yet this mistake is one of the most common ones to come across. Blog owners aren't blind to the tactics used by internet marketers, so always make sure you include which website you will be including a link to, withholding this information may only result in reject after the post's been written and the time's been wasted. Always make sure you include the relevant information about yourself, company and client so that the recipient knows exactly who they're potentially linking to and why.

Can I have a Link Please?

Although the purpose of your guest post is to obtain a link back to your intended website, you need to shy away from solely basing your email around this concept and focus what's in to for the blog owner. Webmasters aren't fond of giving out links for free so you will have to justify why a link to your site from theirs can be valuable for them too. If you can't justify that then the email's rather pointless. Explain how the content of your guest post will benefit their blog.

Lies Always get Uncovered

Lies in guest post outreach emails are generally quite easy to spot and automatically, you and the company you're intending to link to lose credibility in the eyes of your recipient. A common guest blog outreach email that many webmasters will be familiar with is when they are contacted by someone who claims to have excellent writing skills, yet their email conveys a very poor command of the English language. This gives off a really bad impression of yourself and your company and you're highly unlikely to elicit a response.

Guest blogging is an incredibly popular and ethical method of building links to your domain, in exchange for providing blog owners with the content they desire. Outreaching to high value blog locations however, is a crucial step in the guest blogging process and should not be taken lightly. It could be the difference between getting your content hosted on an article directory or a high value, authoritative site viewed by thousands.

About the author
Written by Stephanie Staszko who does internet marketing on behalf of Bathshop321 you can catch her on Twitter where you'll find her posting about a number of different topics.