I had an interesting exchange with a fellow blogger a few moments ago.
He asked to guest post on my blog. Never heard of him. Cold pitch. Never heard of his blog.
I politely informed him free guest posting closed on my blog years ago. I quoted my guest posting rate. He complained about being on a budget and could not afford the rate. He then bandied about the idea of a link exchange.
Hmmm….let me see: I built 55,000 backlinks to my blog by only pitching 2 human beings, meaning, 55,000 links point to BFP. 50-100 new backlinks point to BFP daily. Market Watch, Forbes, Fox News, Entrepreneur, Virgin and Positively Positive point to BFP. Pro Blogger, Smart Blogger and the Huffington Post point to BFP. All of this is bloggers CHOOSING to link to my blog. I never ask them.
So….he wants to trade a link to his unknown blog, for a link to my kinda well known blog? Of course, I never do link exchanges, and the answer is no. I charge money because my blog is valuable, in demand, something I built up over years and thousands of hours of generous service.
Do you believe it’d be wise for me to exchange links with someone who is unknown, with, an unknown blog? I would need to have the business sense of a sea slug and the money mindset of a sea cucumber to do that.
Anyway, after politely – with a 🙂 – informing this dude about not being interested in a link exchange, and wishing him the best, he emailed me back to wish me the best, but had to add: you lost the opportunity to get a link.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”A struggling, failing blogger telling a seasoned pro blogger that he’s screwing up is like a hippo telling a cheetah that the cheetah needs to lose weight, to get a little faster, and to stop being so fat @RyanBiddulph” quote=”A struggling, failing blogger telling a seasoned pro blogger that he’s screwing up is like a hippo telling a cheetah that the cheetah needs to lose weight, to get a little faster, and to stop being so fat @RyanBiddulph” theme=”style3″]
Ego blinds you. Ego ensures you bite the hand that feeds you. The split second he cold emailed me as a stranger, he proved he is a struggling blogger because successful bloggers turn down business left and right, while cold pitching bloggers desperately beg for business.
Pros have posture. Amateurs have zero posture. I could feed him wisdom, knowledge, proven blogging strategies and yes, traffic and profits, if we generously, genuinely bond. But he bit the hand that feeds him. He had to be petty and arrogant. In his deluded world, he believes I lost out on a link to his valuable blog, but I have 55,000 backlinks and gain up to 100 backlinks *every single day*. That’s the truth.
Meanwhile, he cold pitches bloggers and has not the money to invest in a guest post on a well read blog. Who’s missing out? Who’s missing the opportunity to get a backlink? HE is. Arrogance blinds you. Ego deludes you.
Stop Fighting and Start Learning from Pros
I have compassion for fear-filled, struggling bloggers but in the same breath, tell the truth to fools who fight pros, who complain to pros and who tell pros they are missing out. Your foolishness guarantees your failure because fighting success ensures success sprints away from you. Stop fighting pros. Humble yourself. You know little to nothing about how to succeed online if you cold pitch pros and warn them that *they* are missing out. Pros are succeeding quite nicely, thank you.
Stop biting the hand that feeds you wisdom, knowledge and proven, success-promoting blogging strategies. Put your poisonous pride to the side. Be humble. Lick your wounds, and begin learning from pro bloggers. Observe how pros behave. Buy their eBooks. Buy their courses. Read their blog posts. Watch their videos.
Quickly, pros teach you how to succeed so you don’t foolishly cold pitch bloggers, and even more foolishly, warn these successful pros about missing out on opportunities. If this cat humbled himself and learned more about me, he would quickly see that I do not need his link. Nor would I see any value in his link. So he would either pay money to get featured on my blog via a guest post or he would keenly learn from me how to blog the right way, so business would flow to him, and he would never need to pitch anybody.
Success leaves clues, but only if you get your hand out of the struggling blogging sand and learn from top bloggers.
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