A guest post for your blog

The term "guest post" is business lingo for hidden commercial, advertorial, marketing disguised as articles. No one but professional guest posters use the term, and I have never had a mail from any fly tyer of fly angler who use the words "guest post", so the mails usually stand out pretty clear.
Also, when I read the content of these mails and not least the subjects that the posters want to write about, it's pretty obvious that they only rarely spend any time looking at the site in depth and have no idea what kind of audience they are addressing or what kind of subjects this audience is used to or expects.

Money we don't see

In this modern world wide web there's a lot of money floating around. Not that we ever see any of it, but some people do. There are sites that make money and people who have an income from publishing online.
Many of these are bloggers who write about their personal experiences or publishers of special interest magazines like ours. They mainly make their money from banner ads, but can also get kickback from sales that they generate through what's generally known as affiliate links, they can earn money on hosting click bait ads and have income from a row of sources.

But quite a lot of those who publish online are professional content providers who will take almost any subject and turn it into an article if somebody pays them.

The main purposes

These articles can have several purposes:
Advertising: the articles are more or less badly disguised ads for products or services, and the seller of the product pays to have the article written and published.
Traffic drivers: the purpose is to link to certain sites - the seller or manufacturer's - or to their business partners. These articles aren't as blatant ads as the above, but often focus on one or a few brands or products rather than being unbiased and objective.
Affiliate sales: the articles contain "helpful" links to online shops where the items mentioned can be bought. Every purchase made through such a link, pays a dividend to the poster.
Linking: linking between sites give them better chances in the search engines. SEO - Search Engine Optimization - is big business, and links from well ranked and large sites (like the Global FlyFisher) can give other sites a better position in the search engines, bringing in more traffic.

Female guest posters

I often get offered such articles with "Free content".
They go under the name guest posts, which is a term borrowed from the blogosphere where one blogger will have another blogger or writer write a post now and then.
The guest posts we get offered aren't from one writer helping another, but simply “infomercials” or "advertorials", written with the purpose of being placed on high profile sites like the Global FlyFisher.

An odd thing about guest posters: 90% of them are women! I have guest post mails from Sara, Maria, Desiree, Dana and many more women. There's a single Matt and a Cory in my archive of guest post suggestions, but they're the only males I've heard from regarding this subject. This is odd because in the "real" fly-fishing world more than 90% of the writers are male.

Another thing is that they almost exclusively refer to the web site as "your blog", like in this offer:

Duh? Tips about animals, passionate about pets? What planet is this?

A mail from Sara

Here is another pretty typical example of what I get:

To be fair Sara noted in the intro that she worked with a company that builds aluminum plate boats, using cutting-edge technology in their design and construction.
Now, offering an article titled "Guide to Fishing: Essential Techniques" to our readers is like offering an article called "Beginners's guide to driving a car: The steering wheel" to a site specializing in high end motorcycles.

Che did it. Why shouldn't we?

Unknown

A mail from Cory

But Cory bettered Sara on that front, offering a guest post on cigars. Yes, cigars! And not the fly The Cigar, but cigars for smoking. He wrote:

No, I'm not specifically interested in cigars, and even though I have seen anglers smoke large Havanas, it's not the sake for GFF to promote cigar smoking. Cory did lay some wood on the fire, though:

Which very well explains what this is: linking and page ranking for search engines as well as paid endorsement or promotion (read: advertizing) of products.

Close, but no cigar! (sorry, I couldn't resist it...)

Altogether we don't accept guest posts. Contributions from fly anglers and fly tyers are welcome, but guest posts... no thanks.