Rules For Writing A Guest Post Part 3

Welcome back Creadivs to my series the Rules For Writing a Guest Post. Today’s installment is part 3 of the series and focuses on writing your letter to the author. Not just any author though, they author you have specifically chosen as the person you would like to write a guest post for. If you are new to the series I suggest you follow along by going back and reading the first two posts of the series.

Rules For Writing A Guest Post:

• Part 1 - Why, Where, and How To Begin
• Part 2 - Researching Topics & Style, Getting Permission

Part 3 Your Permission Letter

There has already been a lot of thought and work put into a guest post that you haven’t even begun to write, but all of it has been important and leads up to our next step which is writing a letter to the author asking for permission to write a guest post on their site. Your permission letter will need to meet the following criteria to be successful.

• It must be formal and personal.
• It must address a need and benefit for the site’s author.
• It must promote you.

Your Letter Must Be Formal and Personal

When addressing an author to ask for permission to guest post on their site you must write with the idea in mind that he or she is a prospective client. With that said it should be quite obvious that you will want to refrain from using phrases like “whats up?” or other slang greetings. Your letter is a representation of you and your writing so you want to be as formal as you would be if you were writing a paper for a class you are taking, writing a memo for your work, or writing an estimate for a possible client.

At the same time however you will want to be personal with your audience. Generic letters don’t get attention. If you are able to start your letter with the author of the sites name you will have already gained more attention that any generic letter could give you. Why? Because how often do you take to time to read emails that say Hey There, Have you ever thought about … probably never. But when you open an email and is Says Hi John, This is Adam From Creadiv.com, I am a fan of your site and would like… You will most likely continue on because it sounds like the person knows you and they have immediately introduced themselves rather than trying to sell you on something.

Your Letter Must Address A Need And Benefit For The Author

Now that you have started writing your letter and have properly introduced yourself to the author and respectively engaged him in your request you need to sell him on the theory that your post will add a benefit to his site and not just to you.

This is where all of that hard work you have put in over the past few days will come in handy. Remember when I told you to read as much of the authors posts as possibly? Well if you did that step you should have found an article that you have the ability to write on a topic that you can identify to the author as one that is relative to his site, and even more importantly a topic on which his site is lacking in detail or is missing completely. You can tell him exactly what the post is you want to write how it will add benefit to a post he may have already written, his site, and how it will benefit his readers. By showing the author you have carefully considered his site and your topic you are raising your chance of an acceptance because he knows that you have taken the time to research him and that represents how you will research your article.

The best part is you can do all of this without giving away an article that you have written. As I said in part 1 most people write a post and send it around looking for an acceptance. With my method you never waste time writing a generic article and never take the risk of given away a great article. You may give an author a topic to write about if you are rejected, but you never give him the content. You wait to deliver that once he has given you permission to write on his site. He may still deny your writing once you submit the article, but at least now you are limiting the possibility of somebody stealing your work.

Your Letter Must Promote You

After you have identified the topic and need for your author to have an article about that topic on his site you need to specifically promote yourself. The best way to do this is to select a few of your best articles and link that author to them. Tell him to please look at these other articles you have written as examples of your work. I personally believe that if you have some other guests posts under your belt they provide much better examples that articles from your own site as he will get a better representation of the service you are offering.

For my guest post I wrote this letter to Yan from Thou Shall blog. Yan and I already have a relationship as he is a reader of my site and I of his so I didn’t write my letter promoting myself as much as you should do if you are writing to someone that doesn’t read your site. Please feel free to use my letter as a guide to writing yours.

Hello Yan,

Being the wonderful participant of my site that you are you probably already know about my series on guest posting. Well, in part two of my series I am going to be selecting a blog and a topic for which I want to write on and then explain to my readers how to go about getting the process started by establishing a rapport with the author of the site.

For my series I would love to use your site. Your readers are at a level that I feel my site could offer some good content too and they would enjoy. And I think they would make good participants on my site.

The topic I would like to write about is simply the history of blogging. I was searching through your site and didn’t see that you have ever just posted about the history of blogging, although maybe I missed it, and I think that knowing where the technology came from is a great place for beginners to start learning.

I would appreciate it if you would take my request to write a post for you into consideration and maybe discuss some possible topics or issues you might have with it.

Adam

P.S. Here are some ways to contact me.

Email: ajm[at]creadiv.com
msn: ajm[at]creadiv.com
yahoo: adam_mlynarcik
aim: AdamAtCreadiv

Stay tuned for more next week as I begin to write my guest post and you can see the steps I take to finish up our series.

Adam

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