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§ 02About this episodeVol. XV · № 02
A real guest post pitch received at the agency gets a full tear-down. Eleven specific mistakes are highlighted — the kind that get pitches ignored or rejected immediately.
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§ 04Full transcriptVol. XV · № 04
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[00:00] Hi everyone in this episode of the SIA business podcast um I would like to share huge mistakes that I see people making quite often in their guest post pitches and actually I I got a guest post pitch just a few hours ago today I received quite a few of these not too many but I received quite a few of these from people who you know like to contribute to my blog uh which is at so let's uh go through these mistakes mistake number one when I
[00:42] Receive this there is no head shot right so I mean if you are putting all of this effort in sending a guest post page make sure that there is there is some kind of visuals in it right and I would say that headshot is like the bare that that you can do in terms of uh visuals right it just brings in some familiarity in my opinion secondly the biggest mistake is the the second biggest mistake I would say is when you are using web uh mail okay so
[01:15] In this case the person is using uh gmail.com and you know I can see that it's not even the person emailing it because it says edgar dot wilson promotion so you know even the person edgar wilson he's using um someone to do his promotion right so even then it's not like the actual email address if you know what I mean right so that's I would say is mistake number two um you can easily um you know if if your domain is uh you know sayed sayer.com okay or let me come up with a
[01:48] Simpler example if your email is sorry if your website is you know nike.com and you are doing outreach for it just buy a secondary domain from namecheap for you know like 10 bucks or something uh which let's say we would call it nike outreach or you know nike promotion or something right you can use that to send your emails you know after and and g suite makes it pretty easy so you can use g suite or if you don't want to pay for g suite which I think is like six
[02:23] Dollar per month then you know you can use your um hosting's email service right okay so the third um mistake uh of of um of this guest post pitch is that I I I it may be a matter of personal preferences but I really don't like this subject line for several reasons okay uh for one it uses the word free right this can while this email did reach my inbox I mean but um a lot of the times this this can be seen as a spammy word
[03:00] And it may be flagged as a promotional uh email and so it will not reach the target person's inbox and in fact it will reach um you know their promotions folder or it will reach their spam folder right so I would say avoid using that there is also no personalization in it you know I would say that if if if I was pitching my articles to a site and let's say if I was pitching uh an article um to to um a competitor of forbes then I would mention that
[03:39] I would I would try to use the subject line and I have done it previously where I would try to use um you know article idea from from a forbes columnist right so let's say if I'm pitching an idea to mashable.com then I can maybe mention um article idea from techcrunch columnist or forbes columnist that would be one way to do it um or you can you know you can make it something like more personalized and more in-depth uh where you can say that you know article idea um
[04:15] You know idea for a topic that your audience cares about okay so there are many ways to do it but I just don't think that this is and I'm maybe I'm not able to provide you some really good examples I will do a separate podcast video on what makes a really good podcast pitch but in this one we are trying to focus more on the mistakes right so that I would say is the third mistake uh one more thing that you can do by the way in the subject
[04:41] Line uh other than you know adding adding the first name or something is to maybe add the company company name of the target recipient right uh you can also add like an emoticon you can maybe add a question mark because that can also increase your your open rate and your response rate in in in my opinion method number four uh is kind of connected to to this one where I mean obviously in the subject line you don't see any personalization either but then uh this person did not mention it here either I
[05:15] Mean if you open my website um you know it's it's pretty easy to see what my name is and I'm sure if you are using a tool like uh hunter or something you can easily find out uh what my name is right so I mean it would I mean nicer if if he had mentioned my name uh or my company name and so on uh even better if he had mentioned how he came across a particular article of mine and why he liked it or or how
[05:44] How uh his experience is relevant to to the topic at hand so let's say I have a personal branding guide on my art on my website so if he had mentioned that you know I have let's say I've written about personal branding previously or I have done um I have run ads about purse uh I've run ads for a personal branding branding expert or something like that you know so that would have helped me see that we have some common common interests okay number five is also kind of similar to
[06:18] Personalization I would say that you know he he could have searched so uh he could have it's all about I if you see right it's all like I statements I really hope you are doing well my name is xyz I have worked with and so on right but to give you an example and to to explain how it's and the reason I you know to to and the reason I uh put it under a separate heading rather than mentioning it under personalization is that I I like to
[06:46] Label personalization as you know just the journal personalization right like like if you're mentioning their article or if you're mentioning um their name their company name and so on right but I think this goes a bit deeper than that uh the mistake number five and I would share an example about of of how to do it right um I was so we have an agency right we have an agency called dmr dot agency and um we were doing outreach for a client who have had a blog focused on beauty
[07:20] And cosmetics cosmetics and so on right what what we did was that um what we did was that what I did was that I was doing um research and and I found a pretty huge a pretty huge website um which was a um you know focus on beauty cosmetics uh and so on what I did was that I basically saw that um I was going through its
[08:04] Pages and I saw that it has had discussion forum and I went through a discussion forum and I found a particular topic I think it was called something like and it was a topic that a lot of the readers of that website were were quite interested in it that that question had a lot of followers there were so many replies on that question and so on okay um so I I contacted the editor and I mentioned that I can see that you guys have your audience is very interested in this
[08:42] And uh you guys are not really covering this topic in in in in any blog post of your pretty large website right and I you know instantly got a reply and the the editor was very happy that I did my research and that I I didn't just came up with a topic but I actually backed it up with with relevant research and I actually gave them information about what is what their audience is looking for right so that I think is something that you want to sort of uh look into it and and
[09:14] Consider right now this person is also saying that you know he has written articles um previously and drove traffic to websites but you know uh the mistake I think he's making here uh sorry mistake number six uh that he's making here is that he does not even mention what kind of publications he has written for right um so but you know even if you are someone who has never written for a publication the least you can do is to use some kind of names there right you
[09:42] Can mention how you have worked with similar marketing agencies or you know you have worked with with with international speakers if you are reaching out to an international speaker you can mention you know some kind of names that can help the recipient uh respect you more okay number seven no for focus okay so I mean if you look at here he's writing about tech home design lifestyle travel health legal business services but he does not even link to any of his articles he does not even mention his
[10:20] Own blog or something you know and he's writing about so many different topics there is no focus at all right so I mean since he has not added the links either either I would like to conclude that he has basically not written about these topics and that even if he has written about these topics then he's not really an expert on these topics right um okay mistake number eight is that he's uh asking me for a do follow uh link from he's asking me for a do follow link from
[10:52] That article that he's proposing that he will write for me and and he's doing it in the right very very first email you know so I mean this is like his very first email he could have done that um I try not to do it directly or explicitly uh in most cases uh I'm just a bit hesitant but I do know that many uh recipients are totally fine if you ask them but I think that asking for it right in the first email is not something that you should be doing um
[11:21] Ever at all you know this is like a very lazy approach like you are not really invested you have not come up with a personalized page you have not included your your portfolio link or anything like that and so on so you know why would you ask me for a link if I have you know just asked me for one thing at one time you know you are asking me for a guest post so you know let's leave it at that and then if I say yes then you know you can go
[11:45] Ahead and ask me about our links policy and so on right mistake number nine is that all this email uh and it's I would say it's a pretty large email it's a pretty long email it does not mention any questions and if you've seen our previous podcast episode uh where we did the review of uh a tool called Boomerang uh you would have noticed that um according to boomerang's research which they conducted on millions of emails if you include a couple of questions in your pitch in your emails that increases the
[12:20] Probability of you receiving a response by a big big margin right um so I mean he could have simply you know added a simple question at the end like you know what do you think or you know would you like me to share my writing samples or would you like me to suggest some topics you know you know things like that mistake number 10 is that he has not mentioned any kind of social media link so you know there is no picture the the email is you know
[12:56] Clearly set up just for outreach so it's not quote unquote real email I cannot see you know which which sites he's writing for uh I cannot see if he has a blog I cannot see his portfolio um I cannot see his LinkedIn or Twitter I cannot see if he's actively posting somewhere on social media so you know how do I know that he's this is a real person right and that he's legit and he has quality content out there right so that's mistake number 10. now the bonus
[13:28] Here is that you should also avoid some of these smaller mistakes I mean depending on your point of view they can be small or big but you know this I think I think the email is pretty uh large so that would come under the set of mistakes and I would also include you know you can see that here he is mentioning his name as edgar and here as well but then here he's saying it's floyd right then he also has typos like I mean you are not
[13:56] Supposed to capitalize my hair right so it just shows that he has not really proofread his uh pitch um you know and and uh he's just um sending his emails without any sort of um regard for the other person's time you know I know maybe I should not have disclosed his email um like this and I did not do it intentionally actually totally forgot but I think you know if if I have gone through his uh pitch and it has you know taken me some time to
[14:30] Some time to go through his pitch and all that uh then you know me doing a video about it and uh highlighting some of the mistakes this person has made if he ever watches this then I think that he can learn a lot from it in in my humble opinion right so yeah uh that's it for this episode of the podcast uh these are the biggest uh 10 or 11 mistakes that I could find in this pitch um do let me know if if you agree with
[15:01] Or if you have a different view about some of these mistakes and also let me know if there is any other mistakes or blunders that I have missed okay thank you so much take care bye