Guest Post Pitch Builder

A guest article pitch is a small favour asked of a stranger. You want an editor to stop, read a few paragraphs from someone they have never met, and decide whether to give your idea a slot their own readers will see. Everything about a good pitch follows from that imbalance. The editor owes you nothing, and they are deciding fast.

So the useful question is not how to sound impressive. It is what the editor has to know to say yes or no in one read, and how to put exactly that in front of them without padding.

What an editor has to decide in one read

Strip a pitch down and three questions remain. Is this idea right for our readers? Can this person deliver it? On what terms? A headline, the reader’s problem in one sentence and three to five points the piece will make answer the first. One or two facts the editor could check, with links to past work, answer the second. Length, pictures, whether the piece is offered to them alone, and a delivery date answer the third. If any of those is missing, the editor has to write back to ask, and a pitch that creates work tends to sit unanswered.

Plain-language guidance written for government pages turns out to fit this job well, because it is guidance for readers who did not ask to be there. Digital.gov’s advice is to put one idea in each sentence and to break long, clause-heavy sentences into parts. GOV.UK goes further with a number: try to split up sentences that are over 25 words long, and keep paragraphs to five sentences at most. Neither rule was written for email, and neither is a law of nature. They are a decent yardstick for text that has to land on the first pass.

Headlines get the same treatment. GOV.UK asks its own page titles to stay at 65 characters or less, including spaces, unless more is essential to make a title clear or unique. A proposed headline for someone else’s site is not bound by that, but it is a fair test of whether the idea fits in a glance.

Length matters less than people fear, as long as every sentence carries something. Reading speed varies widely by person and by text, so any estimate is rough. Wikipedia’s article on words per minute reports a figure of about 200 words a minute for proofreading English on paper and 180 on a monitor, from a 1998 study. Treat that as a cautious rate for a careful read, not a promise about any editor.

Here is a worked example you can reproduce in the tool. The example pitch proposes a piece called “Five checks before you plant a shade garden” to a publication named Example Publication, with four points, two alternate titles, one fact about the writer and two links. Built from the standard template, it comes to 191 words, which at 200 words a minute is about 57 seconds of reading. Its subject line is 64 characters. No sentence passes 25 words, and the filler list finds nothing.

Specific beats flattering

The opening most pitches reach for is praise. “I love your blog.” “Huge fan.” “I hope this email finds you well.” None of these is false, exactly, but none of them can be checked, and none of them helps the editor decide anything. Compare “I have kept a shade bed for six years and log its light readings every month.” That sentence can be wrong, which is precisely why it is worth reading.

The tool keeps a starting list of these phrases, written for it and stated as a starting list, and flags each one it finds along with the reason: replace it with a fact the editor can check. It also counts how many sentences contain I, me, my, mine or myself. The share is not a verdict. A pitch has to say who is writing. But a draft where most sentences are about the writer usually has room to say more about the reader’s problem instead.

Links deserve the same scrutiny as claims. Every address in the draft is parsed and shown in a table: whether it uses https, which host it points to, and whether it carries tracking parameters copied in from a newsletter or a social post. Those parameters are removed from the email unless you choose to keep them, because an editor checking your past work does not need to see where you last shared it.

Then there is the habit editors complain about most: the same pitch, with the name swapped, sent to a dozen publications. The tool compares your draft with every pitch in your own log that went to a different publication. It splits each text into overlapping runs of three words, called shingles, and measures how much the two sets share as a share of everything in either set.

In the example, the log already holds a pitch on the same idea sent to Sample Weekly twelve days earlier. Apart from the greeting and the publication name, the texts are the same, and the overlap comes out at 85%. The flag is set at 60% by default, and the threshold is yours to change. That number is this tool’s rule of thumb, not a statistic about editors. The advice behind it is simpler: if a piece is right for one publication, the pitch should say why it is right for that one.

Disclosure protects the writer

Guest articles sit close to advertising, and that is where honest writers get hurt by accident. If someone pays you to place a piece, or gives you a product you write about, or you have a business relationship with a company you plan to link to, that is something readers may want to weigh.

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission’s Endorsement Guides say this directly. Under 16 CFR 255.5, when a connection between an endorser and a seller might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement, and the audience would not reasonably expect it, it must be disclosed clearly and conspicuously. The section lists business, family and personal relationships, payment, and free or discounted products as examples. It adds that a disclosure need not give every detail, only enough for readers to judge the connection.

The FTC’s own questions-and-answers page makes two points that matter for a writer. A blogger who mentions a product they paid for themselves has nothing to disclose. And a button or link labelled “disclosure” is not enough on its own, because many people never click it; the FTC notes that a disclosure can usually be brief.

Search engines care about the same links for their own reasons. Google’s published spam policies list paid links that pass ranking credit, including links with optimized anchor text in guest posts, as link spam. Its guidance on qualifying outbound links asks that paid placements be marked with the sponsored value. None of this is a rule a writer can enforce on a publication. It is a reason to tell the editor plainly, before they say yes, so they can label the piece and its links their own way.

That is why the builder treats disclosure as a required answer. You choose None or describe the relationship, and the email stays blocked until you do. Writing “none” on purpose is different from forgetting to mention something, and it protects you later if anyone asks.

Follow up once, then keep your own record

Silence is the most common answer to a pitch, and it is not a rejection you can argue with. A single, short follow-up after an interval you choose gives the editor a second chance to see it. After that, this tool’s advice is to let the pitch go: mark it withdrawn, tell the editor so if you like, and offer the idea elsewhere. The follow-up and withdrawal templates say exactly that, politely.

Follow-up dates are calendar dates, and the tool adds days to them without touching clock time. That sounds fussy until a date crosses a clock change. In the United States, daylight saving time starts at 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday of March, so a pitch sent on 1 March 2026 with a seven-day interval falls due on 8 March, the very day the clocks move. The follow-up file uses all-day dates for the same reason, as the iCalendar standard allows, with long lines folded at 75 octets.

Memory is a poor record of who you wrote to. The log keeps one row per pitch, its status, the follow-up date and any reply. It exports to CSV for a spreadsheet, with a leading quote added to any cell that starts with a formula character, which OWASP describes as a defence against CSV injection, while warning that it can fail once a spreadsheet saves and reopens the file. It exports to JSON that the page can open again, and to an .ics file for your calendar. Reply times are summarised from your own rows only, with the count shown, because five replies prove very little.

The tool sends nothing. It offers a mailto link, which RFC 6068 says should encode line breaks as %0D%0A and which it describes as meant for short messages. It also writes an .eml file in the RFC 5322 format, where a subject with accented or non-Latin characters travels as RFC 2047 encoded-words. Under RFC 5322 a header line should stay within 78 characters, so a subject of up to 69 characters fits one line after the word Subject. Words and characters are counted with the browser’s own text segmenter, so an emoji or an accented letter counts as one character.

What none of this can do is judge the idea. The checks count words, compare text and parse links by rules you can read on the page. They cannot tell whether your facts are true, whether the angle is new, or whether a particular editor will care. A clean pitch earns a fair read, nothing more, and that is the most any writer can ask for.