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Subscribe via emailPosted by Kevin Merritt on February 19th, 2009
A few weeks ago I was fortunate to guest author a post on TechCrunch – How Obama Will Use Web Technology. In December I was also fortunate to author a guest post on Get Rich Slowly – 10 Essential Steps to Take Before You’re Laid Off.
Many friends have asked me to share my secrets for landing guest posts on highly visible and heavily trafficked sites like TechCrunch and Get Rich Slowly. So without further ado, here are my top 10 steps to land a guest post on a popular blog:
- Write for the audience of the site where you envision your post running. The readers of your own blog are likely different demographically than the readers of the blog where you hope to be a guest author. Write for those readers, not your own.
- Write the post first and then ask to have it run second. I have no empirical data to support this, but it seems logical to me that making the effort of actually writing the post is a great indicator of your desire to have the story told. It also isolates the approval to your post specifically and not a blanket approval of you as a guest writer generally. Even if you write the post and can’t find a place to run it, worst case you can always run it on your own blog.
- Which brings up the next point, you must have a blog where you write regularly. You need to be able to point to your body of work as both a writer and as authoritative on the subject matter.
- Don’t be too advertorial. Erick Schonfeld politely turned down the first story I wrote for TechCrunch. Here it is on our blist blog for reference. It’s all about how President Obama is using blist. When Erick turned it down, I immediately rewrote the entire story from scratch, this time about how the Obama Administration is using web 2.0 software from a number of companies – Salesforce.com, Google (YouTube), Facebook, twitter – and blist. The second time around Erick liked it and agreed to run it. A few days later I ran the original blist focused post on our own blog.
- Do as much of the work as you can so that it’s as frictionless and painless for the editor to post your story. Hyperlink everything that should be linked. Include a great teaser photo. Deliver it as HTML ready to drop right in to their blogging system. Make it easy enough to “paste and publish.”
- Be willing to be edited. Guess what, even professional journalists have editors. Erick Schonfeld is a better writer and editor than I am. That he’s willing to make some minor edits is both flattering and improves the quality of the post.
- Ask for it. Once you’ve written a great post, send a brief email to the editor asking if they would like to run the post as one from a guest author. It should include the full HTML of the post itself, a cover letter introducing yourself, your background, links to your blog and any other relevant posts you’ve written. If possible, have a private preview of the post online and include a link to the preview. Make sure it’s just a preview and that you haven’t published it yet.
- Be exclusive. By that I mean if you are going to try to find an outlet for your story by approaching multiple blogs, offer your story sequentially. Ask the editor of the blog to make a decision. Don’t run the post on your own blog or anywhere else. All sites want fresh, exclusive content.
- Write well. Most of the really good bloggers I know are, like Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, aspiring writers who love to write. You’re chances of being granted a guest post improve dramatically if you write reasonably well. You don’t have to be Hemingway – you are a programmer or marketer or CEO after all – but you do need to be clear and coherent.
- Tell a good story. I deliberately saved the best for last. Getting your story posted starts and ends with telling a great story that has to be published and needs to be read.
From what I’ve learned, these are the 10 most important factors in landing a guest post on terrific and popular sites like TechCrunch and Get Rich Slowly.