It takes all sorts to make a GFG mailbag — it’s not all lawyer’s letters from the FBCA, you know. Here’s one:
Hello Charles and Good Funeral Guide team,
I’m an avid reader of The Good Funeral Guide blog and and would be honoured to contribute by submitting an article.
I would love to read a post on ‘How to Incorporate a Limousine in a Funeral on a Budget’, and I think your other readers would too. It would definitely be a valuable inclusion because it will give your readers some tips on saving money on using a limo in a funeral.
I know you are probably too busy to get that content out immediately so how about you have my friend Mircea Stanescu write it for you? Mircea is the owner of Echo Limousine, which is a Chicago based limousine rental and service company. I assure you that the content will be of excellent quality.
Look forward to hearing from you,
Shivani
Our reply:
Dear Shivani
As an avid reader of the GFG blog you may have sometimes suspected that it is based in the UK. I can confirm that it is. This being so, I fear Mircea’s words will fall on deaf ears. I greatly regret this.
With all best wishes
Charles
We get an awful lot of these emails from guest blogggers, most of them equally bonkers. Why? Because blogging wins tons of Brownie points with meritocratic search engine web crawlerthingies. It catapults you up the rankings and increases your visibility a millionfold – perhaps more. As Shivani knows very well, a mighty vehicle like the GFG has serious rocket power. Here at the Batesville-GFG Shard we have never bothered with SEO, not only because we think it unsporting but also because we don’t need to. We blog a lot and therefore sit at the right hand of the Lord Google Almighty Himself.
From time to time we invite our readers to submit an article. Lots of you have promised to write something but have failed to come up with the goods, leaving the blog looking like the ravings of pub bore – me.
How good it would be to widen the debate, embrace all sorts of points of view and have a blog that is representative of everyone who works in Funeralworld.
Let off some steam. Send it in. Nom de plume allowed. It’ll be read all over the world and it’ll put your website on page one of Google.
Come one, come all. Just do it.
What’s your suggested word limit? 3 top hints for a first time blogger?
400-700 words. Best ingredients: 1. Something we didn’t know; 2. Something to provoke thought and disturb consensus; 3. Reflections on experience.
Up for it?
If you write using a nom de plume it won’t do anything for your website rankings. #justsaying
Of course, Andrew, silly me, utterly idiotic. Although I welcome non-self-identifiers, anything just to breathe a bit of life back into the blog. #anythinggoes
I would like to write about why a limousine is a good idea during a funeral please?
Yes! British lims for British grievers. Tell us all about the new Jag, David.
I will happily write a blog for you. Writing is my favourite bit of the job.
Let me have a think about something that would be relevant for your audience.
Helen