Chillin at John Chow’s: How to Pitch a Guest Post

Yes, I’m guest posting at JohnChow.com.

Being published on John’s blog is a bit symbolic for me.

JohnChow.com is one of the first blogs I stumbled upon when, on a cold November 2007 night, I was looking for ways to make money online. True, it didn’t come up in Google, since by that time John was already known as the Evil Panda Slayer, and Google didn’t bring him up. I was referred from some other blog. But, nevertheless, it had a huge impact on me at the time, seeing the figures he was making, the posts frequency, the FeedBurner counter and all the other authority markers.

Year and a half since, I was still reluctant to guest post. I always had a feeling that the true quality content was supposed to be on my blog. How on earth was I supposed to give away a fine article to another blog, when I was struggling to keep up with the daily posting?

But, a lot has changed during this time. I’m more laid back with my posts, and I made it clear to my readers that I will be posting weekly at best because I’m busy with PPC and other projects. I thought that I would loose my readership, but RSS count was steadily rising since then.

Luckily for me, I was getting more involved with article marketing, so releasing high quality content to other websites wasn’t as painful as it was before. And, as a weird coincidence, a buddy of mine was telling me that he thought it was impossible to guest post at John’s blog unless you were his close friend or a big-time-blogger…

So, I knew that I had to prove him wrong. John is a businessman and a pro-blogger. He must value his time and grab an opportunity when he sees one.

I proceeded to write a post intended to be published on John’s blog. The true way to make it a no-brainer for a blogger to host your post (wtf, it rhymes) is to tailor-fit it to the blog’s subject-matter. So a post about mailing lists was a good idea, since John’s marketing Aweber quite a lot.

A couple of days later, with a post about “making money with mailing lists” in my hand, I sent John a short email asking if he would be interested in hosting my post, with the .DOC file attached to the message. (saving him precious time and money)

I was prepared to give it away anyway, so no terms were set, no deadlines whatsoever. Imagine a noob sending you an email with a post and demands that it would be published in three days or else he’d go elsewhere. How rude!

So, ok, I’m not exactly a noob, but it’s always best to assume that you are in the eyes of the other. Especially since John didn’t know me personally and we never talked before.

So here we are.
Let me give you some tips to get published on another blog (when you’re not invited by the blogger, of course):

Four Tips to Successfully Pitch Your Post to Be Published on Any Blog

1. Fit your post to the host. (Rhymes again, I know)
2. Send the post itself along with the request email.
3. Make the email as short as possible:
   

   Hi,

   I’m Alex from net-entrepreneur.com, could you be interested in hosting my article about Big Red Widgets? See file attached.

   Cheers,
   Alex.

4. Don’t make terms or whatever. If the blogger doesn’t get back to you in two weeks, send it to another blogger, with the needed adjustments, publish it yourself or be free to do whatever you want with it. 14 days is more than enough to consider the offer and give a green light.

Have fun!

-Alex