It’s been a long time since I accepted a guest post on this blog. How long? Well, the last one I accepted was in December 2011; you do the math. lol I used to have a lot of reasons why I didn’t accept guest posts on this blog and most of my other blogs; the only one I readily accepted guest posts on no longer exists; it made money, but the extra work wasn’t worth dealing with it.
I’m actually a nice guy trying to help 🙂
I never really wanted to accept guest posting unless I knew the person asking the question well. Sometimes I was the one asking someone I respected to write a guest post for me, like I did with my friend Scott Thomas about copyright laws; very illuminating, something I should have paid more attention to. 🙂
The last time I broached the subject was in March of 2019, titled Why I Won’t Share Your Guest Post Or Your Expert Articles, where I mentioned 3 fairly personal reasons why I wasn’t accepting any more guest posts and probably wouldn’t promote anyone else’s articles if I was asked (although I will link to articles I come across that I think will benefit my readers; you can thank me later lol).
You’re probably asking “if that’s the case, what’s this article about”. It’s another attempt to educate people who are still trying to get their articles on a blog of mine. At least 5 out of 7 days a week, I get a request, and what people are doing is wasting my time and the time of others because they’re missing a few things they should and shouldn’t do.
So, this is my version of the old Schoolhouse Rock commercial cartoons that used to show on Saturday mornings on ABC back in the 70s, and they were very helpful. I’m not quite that creative when it comes to comedy, and I don’t know how to draw, but I’m going to mention some of the types of requests I get, and hopefully educate folks who are doing it horribly wrong. Let’s get started.
1. What’s my name? I’m not asking you, the readers, I’m asking those people who are requesting being allowed to write guest posts. Not leading with the person’s name in your email suggests one of two thing: either you don’t know the name or you’ve written a spam letter to send to everyone without thinking about whether your article fits their page or not. Some people might forgive the slight, but anyone with a bit of pride or lots of followers won’t.
2. How well written is your email? I’ve seen some of the worst grammar in emails that I’ve been sent, along with many that have entered my spam page. Why would anyone want to put something horribly written on their site unless they’re writing the same kind of tripe and their blogs aren’t going to be hurt by more badly written content?
3. What’s my blog about? You should know that and be able to determine if your content might reach the minds of people who stop by and read what I have to say. If I’m writing about blog tips and you’re sending me an article about the latest soccer tournament, you’re out of touch with me and my readers; I’m not bothering to waste my time formally rejecting you.
Here’s a part of a recent email I received on my business website, where I talk about leadership, health care finance, diversity and related subjects; it was the lead in the email: “Especially as remote work opportunities increase, starting a career in business is a great option for young adults with disabilities.” No greeting, no telling me who you are or who you represent, and if I want to reach out to you, you’ve given me a link that I’m too smart to ever click without knowing whether it’s taking me somewhere or trying to do damage to me and my computer.
Asking an open question to all of you; how professional do you think anyone doing any of these things is? I’ve never asked anyone in over 30 years if I could write a guest post for them, yet I’ve written at least 50 of them, though many of those blogs no longer exist. There’s a way to ask people if you can write for them, even if they reject you, that might encourage them to visit your blog, consume their content, and possibly leave a name and link back to their site, which might be valuable if their blog is highly ranked.
For once, I’m keeping a blog post relatively short for me; I hope I’ve made my point. Now, go enjoy your Sunday!
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I can’t remember the last time I was asked to guest post. I don’t think I ever accepted one on the blog listed below.
I have definitely done a bunch over the years for people who asked but most of those are dead links cuz the bloggers closed up shop.
Truthfully, I think there’s way less blogs talking about blogging or marketing or even writing these days. I don’t have a problem with that, but it seems that almost no blogs that I’ve found, unless the person is some kind of celebrity (or it’s a sports blog lol), gets many comments anymore. I don’t get requests for blog posts anymore, but I still get lots of requests to write articles for health care journals and magazines; I’ll take whatever I get that helps me promote my business, even if I haven’t generated much business since 2019; sigh…
Like you, I get requests for guest posts most days despite my websites making it very clear that we do not accept them. Usually I ignore them or add their emails to a block list at server level. Every now and then, I reply and ask them why they thought they were so special that they warranted an exception to the rule.
I also have ‘guest post’ as a filter term in Eudora and that gets rid of a lot of the requests.
A lot of the spam I get has enough content to be some kind of article… if it was written properly. I don’t understand two things; why do spammers think that kind of thing would work in their favor, and why doesn’t my anti-spam filter block and remove these things? I just deleted 52 spam messages; yesterday it was 71. It’s time for a new plugin apparently.
Did the spammer use characters outside the usual ASCII range, e.g. there is a bunch of characters in some fonts that are ‘letter-like’ but aren’t actually the letters themselves. Some spammers use this trick to circumvent filters.
I have so many blocks—some on the email server (Zoho, which must run very good blacklists), some in the email program (Eudora), and a junk mail filter which I think comes with an antivirus program. With all three going, you cut down on a lot of spam.
That’s an interesting question. I can’t answer that question because I don’t know; what’s interesting is how long some of those spam postings were, and it was all garbage. I guess they took their shot, but all of them showed up in the spam list. I just added a plugin called Maspik Spam on Tuesday; it seems to have drastically reduced the amount of spam I was receiving… thank goodness!
This made me laugh, because I used to get a ton of these, to the extent that I wrote a message on my contact page about not accepting any unsolicited requests. Now, the contact form spam is mostly about helping me “get more customers” and “make more sales”.
I submitted a couple of guest posts on request from others in the early days, but not since, and I don’t accept them on my blog. Someone has now invited me to submit one, and I am going to do it, just for a change of pace.
That should be illuminating; I hope it works out for you. In the early years of this blog, I only published guest posts from people I asked to write something for me, which was also helping them. I’m lucky they all turned out to be popular.