Invitation

One feature available on WordPress is that a blogger can ‘Invite you to follow’ their blog. During the past ten years of blogging, I have received an ‘Invite to follow’ email on more than sixty occasions. The latest one appeared on Sunday evening.

To this date, I have NEVER followed a single blogger who sent me an invitation asking me to follow their blog.

I might be ‘old school’, (and occasionally grumpy) but to me that is somewhere between begging, and bad manners. The bloggers I follow work hard to create good content. Most of them also follow my own blog, but not all. They write about things I want to read, publish photos I want to look at, or just ooze the kind of personality and character that makes them irresistible to follow.

Not one of them, to my knowledge, has ever emailed a complete stranger asking them to follow their blog.

Blogging is a community exercise. We look after each other, care about each other, comment on posts, make suggestions, offer useful links. We share experiences, whatever our differences of age, location, politics, or beliefs.

A good blogger DOES NOT email someone out of the blue, and ask that person to follow their blog.

So if anyone else is thinking of asking me to follow their blog by sending me an unsolicited WordPress email, I have two words for you. (In bold type.)

DON’T BOTHER.

I would like to thank everyone who sent me a guest post for publication. This was the best response ever, and I was delighted.

I hope that everyone will agree that the guest posts were of a very high standard, and I was very happy to feature the bloggers involved.
Although I apologise if you felt somewhat inundated by so many at once. 🙂

Please remember that this is not ‘time-limited’. You can always send me a guest post at any time, and it’s very easy to do.

1) Send me the text of your post to petejohnson50@yahoo.com (Or a link to where I can find and copy that text)
2) Send me any photos/images you want to add separately, to the same email address. Make sure the images can be copied or downloaded though.
3) If you would like to add your own bio, or short introduction, send that separately too.
4) Please send any links to blogs or published work as ‘full links’, not just typed out.
5) Reblog my guest post on your site, to attract more readers.
6) If you have had a guest post featured before, no problem. Send me another one!

Feel free to promote your published work, or any current project. But I DO NOT allow blatant selling. So no links to your SEO, Etsy, or Ebay sites, please.

Nothing will be edited or altered, as long as it is less than 2,500 words, and the photos are reduced into small files.

This is a full-time offer, and open to anyone who follows my blog, or is a part of this wider blogging community.
I will expect you to acknowledge and reply to all comments, as engagement is the key to good blogging.

Best wishes to everyone. Pete.