Why I don’t want your “guest post”
“I saw your site.” Ooh, that’s nice – something must have worked.
“… And you really liked it too.” Well, I’ll take that – even if you don’t seem to have read enough of it to be identify a single thing you liked about it.
“… And I wondered if you’d be interested in a guest post.” Ah. Here we have a problem.
“… A guest post that would be absolutely FREE!” Hmmmmmmmmm.
“… The article will be 100% unique and Copyscape protected.” I hate to be a pedant, but you can’t have percentages of unique. It’s either unique or it isn’t. As for Copyscape protected? If that’s a primary concern, chances are this isn’t going to be written for the benefit of human beings.
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“… It would be great if you can add a small “Author Biographies” at the end of the article with my related site’s links”. Oh. So that’s it. What you’re after is an advert. A free advert for your site, which I’m going to wager, is not in any way related to mine.
Guest post policy
I’ve had plenty of these e-mails recently. Enough to make me write something I didn’t think I’d need to write – a policy on guest posts.
If you take a look around this site, you’ll find a lot of words. All of those words are written by one person – me, David Whitley. That’s because it’s my site, and a major purpose of it is to showcase the work I’ve been doing elsewhere. The site has a distinctive voice because of this.
I don’t have any guest posts on Grumpy Traveller. And I don’t intend to have any on it either. If I change my mind on this, it will be because a writer I respect, whose work I really like, can add something to the site that I really want. If I want it, it’s because it will be genuinely something worthwhile to have on the site. Therefore I will pay for it – any feasible guest posts on here in the future will be properly commissioned after deliberately selecting the right writer to do them. I am not going to publish guest posts from someone I have never heard of who e-mails me out of the blue from a suspicious-sounding e-mail address. If this it you, don’t bother. You’re wasting your time.
If you’re offering me a guest post for free, I don’t have to read it to know that it’s going to be rubbish and totally ill-suited to my site.
If it was any good, you wouldn’t be offering it to me for free – you’d be writing it for your own site and watching links to it grow organically. People will be happy to link to your site for free when it contains excellent content they think will benefit their readers.
If you’re offering a FREE! guest post on the proviso that a few links to your own or another site are thrown in, then you are not giving something for free – you’re getting something for free. What you want is a free advert. I’d treat you with less contempt if you at least admitted that.
Well, the good news is that I’m happy with at least half of the “free advert” equation. Unfortunately for you, it’s not the “free” part. If you want an advert, the rates are here.
In the meantime, put your amazing free, 100% unique, copyscape protected, grammatically incorrect drivel up on your own site.
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I share your horror. And your weariness with insulting pitches. Particularly infuriating: when they say “on any topic”. Translation: “the content is irrelevent”. (Here’s a topic, guys: the intersection of my foot and your ass).
My approach was ripping off The Bloggess’s “Wil Wheaton collating” idea and writing this: http://mikesowden.org/feveredmutterings/pitching-game …which, thanks to my recent site makeover, now looks a bit of a pig’s ear. But i got into the habit of replying to craptastic guest post pitches with a score and a link to that page. *Enormously* satisfying and a real time-saver.
Forward the good fight!
The only guest post I have ever written was asked for by a particularly good travel site so I did it. Most of the sites I admire are written by people who can knock the socks off my work, so why should I insult them by offering? Like many journalists, though, I get inundated with offers of X thousands of hits if I will supply a free, unique (100% on not) article to their site, which, on close inspection, is usually the equivalent of ‘Janet and John Go To London’ but without the intellectual content. They get the bum’s rush.
However, if a site can show me that they have very high traffic (and it has to be very high) I’ll give them a piece that has been sold and paid for, working the premise that while I’ve only had a handful of jobs from my sites in the last decade, there’s value in numbers, and you never know, a couple might hang around and look at the rest of the site.
Can I guest post for you, David?
I will guest post anything than Pam offers, except better, with 150% more embedded SEO. My team is experienced in a number of ways I refuse to define, and we are experts at giving your readers what they want. All we ask is a small 1800x1600px infographic on your homepage somewhere unobtrusive.
Say yes or be stupid, your choice.
Wow. That was sobering! You stopped me right in my tracks as a newbie website with decent traffic, who was considering the benefits/drawbacks of guest posting! Guess I’ll just lurk around improving my writing on my own site until I get my nerve up again!
I totally agree that these types of guest post approaches are pointless, annoying, and no better than spamming a comment form.
However, your argument that good posts would only be published on the authors own site is very narrow-sighted.
People every day write amazing quality guest posts for other sites, not because they want a link or an advert, but because they want to be noticed by the audience of a bigger site with more reach and authority than they would have on their own site.
By the way, you should probably nofollow the links on your “sponsored” posts if you’re this vocal about guest posting and care about getting a Google penalty.
Hi Ian. I’ve genuinely no idea whether links on my site are nofollowed or not (I installed a plugin ages ago that opened most automatically in a new window, and can’t remember if that nofollowed them too).
More to the point, I don’t care. I’m not writing for Google and I vet every advertiser to make sure it’s one that I’m at least content to be associated with. If Google wants to penalise me, fine. Only a small proportion of my traffic comes from Google.