Guest blogging has always been a very popular marketing technique for many website owners. The benefits of guest blogging are manifold, after all. Writing content for other people’s websites does produce results.

Aside from getting introduced to an entirely new audience, you’ll also be getting a link back to your own website, which the audience of the blog you just wrote content for are sure to follow.

However, many people—myself included—commit their share of mistakes when guest blogging. Thankfully, these mistakes can be avoided so you can get the best possible benefits of guest blogging. To get better results when writing for other people, here are some of the mistakes to avoid when guest posting on other websites.

No set goals

So you want to guest blog, but to what end? Are you doing it to get backlinks? Get a new audience? Drive more direct sales? Guest blogging is a great marketing method, but you just can’t jump into it without any set goals in mind. Otherwise, you’d just be wasting not only your time, but your host’s time as well. A marketing strategy cannot just be “winged”, so to speak. You need to be sure what you’re guest blogging for in the first place.

Impersonal guest blogging requests

Sending emails to owners of websites you want to guest post in is a natural part of the guest blogging process. Starting your email with a highly impersonal “Dear Website Owner” or “Dear [URL]”, however, is not and should never be. When you’re asking someone if you can write for his or her website, the least you could do is find out what his or her name is. It’s not like you’re not Internet-savvy enough to find the name of the owner of the website. A simple scan of your target site’s About Us and Contact Us pages could yield the name of the website owner.

In case your name search comes up empty, you can always open with “Hi there!”, which is infinitely better than the examples given above.

Pitchless pitches

So you’ve sent an email pitching to guest blog on a certain person’s website. The question is, did you actually make a proposal on what to write? This is a pretty common mistake, assuming that the owner of the target blog has the time to think about what kind of post you should be writing. At the very least, think of 2-4 topics that you think would fit the audience of your target blog, include those ideas into your original pitch and let the website owner decide.

Not proofreading guest blogging pitches

In a world filled with abbreviations and acronyms for words, it seems spelling, punctuation use or grammar in general is no longer important. WRONG. If there’s one thing you should be sure of when making a pitch to guest blog, it’s to submit one that’s free of spelling or grammatical errors. That is the only way the owner of your target blog would be able to trust you to create high-quality content for his or her audience.

Not monitoring your pitches

One of the more embarrassing things that could happen to anyone is submitting the same pitch to the same person twice, or even more. Committing this mistake can make you feel like such an amateur, and lessens the chances of your pitch being approved. That is why it’s very important to always keep track of your proposals and the people you’ve already sent them to.

Not putting your best foot forward

I find it odd that some guest bloggers submit sub-par articles as guest posts, thinking that it’s not for their site anyway. If there’s one time to be submitting your best work, it should be when you’re guest blogging! Good first impressions are important to an entirely new audience, and if you want them impressed enough to actually follow any link back to your website after reading your guest piece, never submit content of poor quality. Then again, a blogger worth his salt would never publish a poorly written piece as a guest post anyway, so there’s that to consider as well.

Not including a link to your website

Getting a link back to your website is perhaps one of the primary benefits of guest blogging. So what’s the point of writing great content for someone else’s blog when you fail to put a link to your website in your Author Bio? Without that all-important backlink that you can use to drive huge traffic to your homepage, you’ll just end up wasting your time.

Guest blogging is only one of many strategies that you can employ to give your website the boost that it needs. It really works when it’s done right, so here’s hoping the above-mentioned tips about the mistakes to avoid when guest posting on other websites can help you do just that.