If you’re like me, you get a hundred emails a day that sound something like this:

Greetings for the day! I love your blog content. I would love to write a guest blog post for your blog. Here are some ideas I could write about.

Why Some Businesses Fail
How To Reduce Churn On Your Subscription Business
Another Blog Post That Is Totally Irrelevant To Me
One More For Good Measure.

Look forward to talking soon.

Thanks,

Legitimate Guest Post Company

These might be the most annoying emails in the world.

Some high ranking blog post out there on how to pitch yourself for a guest post is promoting a template that all of these guest posting companies are using.

Due to the sheer volume of these emails I assume that some people must be opening and responding to them or they would eventually change tactics.

I stopped opening the emails a long time ago and just immediately mark them as spam.

I realize that by writing this blog post, I am opening up the floodgates of all of the bots that search for the term “guest post” and then assume we accept guest posts, which we DON’T.

The First Email

But the other day I got an email from someone I had never spoken to before.

Three days later he was writing a guest post for me. Something I had never allowed before.

How did he convince me?

He convinced me with what I consider to be the perfect guest post pitch.

What made it a perfect pitch? Because he didn’t pitch me anything.

I think it will be easier if I just show you what he emailed me and then we break it down from there.

Hey Adam,

I just signed up for JustReachOut since I too was looking for a way to improve the quality link building I do for clients. Saw that one of my websites ##########.com was in the video screenshare of your dashboard here (around the 8:49 timestamp).

Too funny…cheers, my friend!

P.S. What’s your biggest challenge right now and how might I offer some advice or connections?

Let’s breakdown what this person did right to get me to engage with him.

First, I want you to notice that he didn’t ask me for anything. In fact he did the opposite.

He told me he had signed up for my software which means he is paying me money. I tend to pay attention to my customers more than to strangers. Smart move.

Next he briefly told me something that connected him to me.

In this case it was that in one of our demo videos where we show Google search results one of his websites was listed there.

It’s really not the strongest thing he could have said to me to establish some rapport or a try to build a relationship but it was something that made the email personal.

Making the email personal so that you and the blog owner now have a connection is key to establishing a relationship of trust that you can use later to actually ask to write a guest post.

He then ended the email with a P.S. asking how he could help me solve something that was challenging me right now.

This was an effective way to get me to engage with the email and not just read it and move on with my life.

The email was such a breath of fresh air that I replied with something that was challenging me in my business.

He emailed back and with that exchange we had developed enough of a rapport that he felt comfortable asking to write a guest post for me.

I’ll show you what the second email looked like in just a moment. Before that I want to highlight what you should do with the first email.

So to recap:

The First Email Should Include These:

Quickly state why they should pay attention.
Relate to them as quickly as possible.
Offer help.
Don’t ask for anything.

The second email

The second email was in direct response to what I had responded to him was my problem.

Essentially I told him that I was trying to rebrand JustReachOut to focus more on SEO agency owners since the outreach tools we have are so effective at building backlinks the natural way instead of having to buy them.

Here is how he responded:

Thanks for the tip! I do bespoke link building for most of my SEO clients.

I know other SEO consultants that might be interested; feel free to ping me in a month or so once I get into using your software.

As you can see again he didn’t ask me for anything. He simply responded to my email and tried to be of as much help as possible.

This is a big takeaway from this post. If you want business owners to respond to you, then you need to sincerely try to help them before you ever ask for anything.

The guest post pitch

Three days after he had replied to me I received another email from him.

This time he finally did pitch me to write a guest post for my blog.

Here is what the email said:

Hey again Adam,

Would you be interested in me writing a guest post for your blog; in full transparency, I’m ramping up my outreach to get quality backlinks for my site’s pages. In return, you will get a quality 1,000+ word article for free. You can see my recent blog articles here.

Here are some potential topics:
How to Get Actionable SEO-Fueled Content Advice
Why SEO is about More than Keywords
Do Backlinks Still Work for SEO?
What Does UX Have to Do with SEO?
Something else you’d suggest?

Cheers,

I really liked that he talked about being fully transparent and was ramping up his outreach to get quality backlnks for his pages. I can totally relate to that and since he had already established a relationship with me I was sympathetic toward him.

Now as I mentioned before, I have never allowed anyone to write a guest post for me on a business blog because I take the content too seriously.

But he happened to catch me a time where I had very little free time and also had been meaning to write a very specific blog post.

Because of the email interchange we had, I decided to respond with an offer for him.

I told him if he would write a minimum of 2000 words I would let him write the article for me. I told him he would get no credit for the article but that I would make sure to link to one of his top pieces of content in a natural way in the article.

He agreed and went off to write the blog post.

I knew I would have to do a lot of rewriting on whatever he sent me because the content needed to be in my voice but in the end we helped each other out.

I didn’t have to spend the time creating the article from scratch, and he got the backlink he was looking for on a strong blog.

It goes to show you that pitching yourself for guest posts in 2022 can still work. You just need to do it the right way.

So to recap, if you want to write for a blog, you need to follow these three steps:

1. Do your research. Learn about the style, tone and content of the blog you want to write for. (our guest post outreach tool has a list of over a thousand blogs that accept guest posts)
2. Build a relationship first. Engage with them by commenting on older blog posts, engage on social media, then find some common ground and reach out and offer to help.
3. Make the pitch, but make it relevant. You only get one first pitch so make it count. Make sure you are putting your best foot forward for the maximum chance for success.

Follow these three rules and you will find yourself getting accepted to write for most of your coveted blogs and getting some amazing backlinks and referall traffic as a result.