Why Many Guest Post Pitches Fail (and Ways To Avoid That)

As a startup founder or marketer, we know the importance of great SEO. We also know one of the foundations of SEO is achieved through writing guest posts on relevant websites. However, we also know that our guest post pitches are being judged in seconds by the recipient, who probably receives many similar emails every week.

So how do we get their attention? I’ll show you some of the things not to do when writing guest post pitches, and what we can learn from them. Let’s get into it!

Our biggest challenge

One of my many roles is to review guest post pitches and determine which ones we’ll answer or progress to the next stage. On average, I would say there are often 100+ per week. Out of those, around 10-20 may be interesting enough to reply.

The above image is my last 24 hours, as of writing this blog post. These are only pitches for one of the blogs I manage, and they didn’t go into the spam folder either. I’ve purposely redacted names to help keep these people anonymous.

That’s indeed our biggest challenge. As people who write guest posts, our biggest challenge in all of this, is just purely getting noticed, and meeting the needs of the “gatekeeper”, which in this case, is me.

40% of people say they have at least 50 unread emails in their inbox.
(HubSpot, 2020)

The recipients of your emails are likely drowning in similar emails. Everyone is battling to get attention and be the lucky one who gets to write a guest post. All for those elusive backlinks. Wow. It can seem overwhelming.

However, after having easily reviewed ten thousand guest post pitches, I can share with you nine mistakes that many of these senders make.

9 common mistakes found in guest post pitches

Let’s go through the nine most common mistakes, which are all easily avoidable with a little forethought and planning. Review your last few guest post pitches – have you been guilty of one or more of these?

Not being genuine

Some of the guest post pitches I receive are incredibly insincere. I often wonder if the senders believe I am stupid. Phrases such as “I have been reading your blog posts for years” or “I have read over 100 articles on your blog” are highly doubtful.

I mean I like to think there is someone out there who has read 100+ of my articles, but that may be only a family member or me. Certainly not someone pitching a guest blog post.

👉How to avoid this

Instead of writing some obviously false statements like those, why not read a recent article, and say something about it? It allows you to not only state that you did the research, it actually proves that you did. 

For example, if you were pitching for a guest post here on the Linkub blog, you could say “I read the article about link reclamation, and I was impressed that Hotjar managed to get a 30% conversion rate on link acquisition for unclaimed brand mentions. That’s amazing!”.

The link inclusion is a nice touch too. Many of us are publishing multiple articles a week and it can be a challenge to remember which post is which when reading many guest post pitches a day.

Focus on yourself

When I receive an email pitch, I am focused on WIIFM. Yep, that stands for What’s In It For Me? I want to know how your guest post will help my content marketing goals. To be frank, I don’t care about your goals. I want to know why you are pitching me, and how it can help me.

An example of senders only caring about their benefits is “I want to build backlinks to my cool website, so allowing me to write a post will help my SEO and increase my domain authority”. Yes, I get that is 99% of the reason why I get guest pitches, however, try flipping your pitch to show how I can benefit from publishing your guest post.

👉How to avoid this

A better phrase than the above would be “I will provide a well-researched, extremely well-written article with plenty of references, and once published, I will share it across all my social media. All I ask for is a relevant link to my website. The link of course will look natural and will further enhance what I am stating in the article.”.

Sure, you are building backlinks through guest posts, however, you need to show your recipient that it’s a two-way street, and they will benefit from it as well.

Showing zero research

I frequently receive pitches with topics I would never cover. The 6Q blog publishes purely about human resources, modern leadership and company culture. You can easily see that by looking at any handful of posts, and the categories.

I often receive pitches for totally unrelated topics like cooking, automobiles, CRM software, web development and more. It just shows how incredibly lazy these senders are. Imagine if we asked them to write a guest post? Their laziness would show through, I am sure.

👉How to avoid this

Even a one-minute perusal of the target blog would be enough many times for you to know whether your article on automobiles is going to work for them. If it’s an HR blog, it is very doubtful it would.

If you want to really go “all the way” with the research, grab a couple of the recent posts, and review how they format the subheadings, how many images they use, their typical word count and the like.

The above screen capture shows a free WebsiteWordCalculator.com report of the Zipline blog. I can see here that there are usually around 1,700-2,100 words, and looking at a few posts, they usually publish 2-3 images per article too.

Now if I were writing a guest post pitch to them, I would say something such as “I’ll write a 1,900-word post, complete with two or three images, just like other recent posts on your blog”.

Displaying a lack of grammar

I frequently receive guest post pitches that reflect an amazing lack of care. Misspelled titles, badly formed sentences, I have even received ones with the wrong blog title in there (it was for a competitor of ours).

When I receive guest post queries that have multiple spelling errors or just very poor grammar, I imagine what their actual article would look like. If this is a reflection of their writing abilities, I don’t want to waste my or their time in entertaining a guest post from them.

👉How to avoid this

First, spell and grammar check your email pitch, and then ask a friend to review it. A second set of eyes can make all the difference. Ideally, you should also try pasting it into Hemingway to see what that handy free tool says about what you have penned.

Not reading guidelines

I normally have a “write for us” page, and then when people get in touch, I send a more detailed author guidelines document. I ask them to read that and then pitch topics once they have read it.

The amount of times the writers come back with “how many words should I write?” when it is clearly stated in the document shows me their level of engagement. If you haven’t got the time to read an author’s guidelines, then please don’t send guest post pitches.

👉How to avoid this

You can easily avoid coming across as this, by simply reading and understanding any guidelines or author notes. I tend to ask for them explicitly if I can’t find them. I like to know what the editors’ expectations are, to reduce the chances of my article being rejected. I’ve put hours into these; I want them well received!

Being vague

I sometimes receive emails which are so unclear to me, that I am a little puzzled about what they actually want. The sender will use words like ‘collaborate’ and ‘partnership’ etc but not actually come out with something such as ‘Can I write a guest post for you?’. 

Please don’t be vague in your guest post pitches. Don’t beat around the bush. Be careful not to just blurt out ‘I want a backlink!’, at the same time, don’t be coy about stating what your intentions are.

👉How to avoid this

Be upfront on what you’d like. State you have a few topic suggestions, that you write well, that you do research, that you do all of this purely to get one (or two) links back to your website. Be clear and upfront about it. Don’t hide your intention behind clever statements that just confuse the recipient.

Writing a novel

I received one of the worst guest post pitches about a week ago. It took the lengthy explanation to a whole new level. They included PDF attachments of article outlines, images they would like to use, SEO software analysis of their proposed keywords and more. 

I have an hour here and there to reply to these emails. Sorry, I am not spending that whole hour reading your one email. Sure, email software lets you write for pages and pages, but try not to. Get across your request in a friendly but succinct way.

👉How to avoid this

In your guest post pitches, you could state something such as ‘I have done a fair bit of research into this, let me know if you want to see it.”. That’s normally enough. You don’t need to have even done the research at that point. To be honest, it is unlikely any blog editor is going to want to read it all.

They just want to be reassured that you know what to write about, how to optimize a blog post well, and that you will give this opportunity your best efforts.

Making huge claims

“By publishing my guest post, I will be improving your Google ranking and your traffic will go sky high”. I once read that in a pitch. What a crazy assertion to make. Sure, I encourage you to state that you will optimize the blog post for SEO, but you should avoid making insane claims.

Most blog editors have a fair amount of understanding in SEO and traffic and the like, and we know that one guest post is unlikely to make the world move for us. It would be fantastic if yours did, but please don’t suggest it unless you can guarantee the results (spoiler: you can’t).

👉How to avoid this

Succinctly mention what you plan to do about SEO or promoting the blog post. Maybe you have 22,000 Twitter followers you’ll share it with. Perhaps you’ve used an SEO auditing tool to discover the target phrase has a low keyword difficulty. You will include a link to it in your next email newsletter to 3,400 subscribers, etc. 

Just make sure to always tell the truth in your guest post pitches. We can see right through it, otherwise.

Being impatient

I love that some people are very passionate about getting their cold emails read, however when I receive a pitch email one day and then get a follow-up email literally on the next day asking if I plan to reply, that’s just too much.

You want to show that you are keen, but please don’t look like you are hounding us for an answer. See my section about the challenge above. I already get hundreds of pitches, now you are trying to jump the queue and nag? It won’t end nicely. 

👉How to avoid this

The best way to look keen and set an expectation is to say something at the end of the first email, such as “I’ll be in touch next week if I haven’t heard from you.” That way, you are setting a reasonable timeline for the recipient to reply, and you are clearly stating what the next steps will be.

Then, next week, if you do send an email, add value with it. For example, state that you’ve noticed that the top five performing blog posts of theirs are on topics around e-commerce design, and this is one of the reasons you believe your article on e-commerce branding would be a good fit. You can find this type of information using SEO tools such as Ahrefs or Moz.

Conclusion

If you make sure to avoid these nine common mistakes, then you are already so much closer to getting a positive response from your guest post pitches than many others vying for their attention. These common mistakes, again, are;

• Not being genuine
• Focus on yourself
• Showing zero research
• Displaying lack of grammar
• Not reading guidelines
• Being vague
• Writing a novel
• Making huge claims
• Being impatient

Take the time to properly research the website you are writing guest post pitches for, and determine what will work best for them, not for you. The time and effort will pay off, trust me.