I used to send the same guest post pitch to 50 sites at once... now I do it one at a time.
A couple years back, I'd blast out a generic template to every site in my list, hoping for a 2% reply rate. It felt fast, but the links I got were junk, mostly from spammy directories. The change came after I spent a whole afternoon writing a single, detailed pitch for a local history blog in Savannah, talking about their specific content. They not only published it, but linked to three of my pages. Now, I pick one site a week. I read their last ten posts, mention one I liked, and suggest a single idea that fits just them. It takes maybe an hour per pitch, but my acceptance rate went from maybe 1 in 50 to about 1 in 3. Has anyone else switched from the spray-and-pray method to something slower but way better?