Girl on the Net

If you’re not a potential guest-blogger, this post will probably be very dull for you, so I apologise for taking up your time. Feel free to go and have a look through old guest blogs and read some of the incredible stories people have written here over the last five or six years. Seriously, do: there are so many incredible sexy guest blogs. Start at the beginning, or somewhere in the middle, if you’ve only begun reading this blog recently. If you’d like to submit a guest blog of your own, see below for new info on rates, topics and how to submit!

Guest blog payment

Until now, I’ve paid £10 for every guest blog I publish. It’s not loads, but then my site has never really made much money. I get tonnes of web traffic, but that only translates into cash if you’re Great At Business – which I am not. So for ages I’ve been trying to hustle a bit to sell ad space so I can raise the amount I’m paying people, as well as making some cash myself that doesn’t come directly from freelance work. And thanks to some amazing sponsors (click the ads at the side of the site!) I am now making a bit of money – wooo!

So as of now, all guest blogs will be paid £20 per post.

Again, it’s still not as much as I’d like, but it’s at least now enough that even if your guest blog takes you 2 hours to write I can comfortably say I’m paying more than the London Living Wage. That has been my dream for ages. To which you may well say ‘GOTN: get more interesting dreams’ but there you go.

Guest blog topics

As ever, I am always on the lookout for amazing guest blogs – whether it’s a dirty story you’d like to share, a detailed explanation of your kinks and turn-ons, a love story or funny encounter, or a campaign you want to shout about.

I am especially interested in:

• things I could never do/experience myself. That means any sexual, romantic, or dating experience I (a cis, mostly-straight, mostly-submissive woman) could never have.
• things you are incredibly passionate about. I think it’s really obvious when someone’s enthusiastic about a topic. Their love/lust for it shines through, and these are the posts that get other people falling in love with it too. I don’t have to share your kink to love your blog post – I just have to understand why YOU love it so much. Honestly some of the best guest blogs have simply been from people with interesting kinks and fetishes – hearing them explain what they like and why is an incredible turn on.
• ideas I might be hearing for the first time. Got an online dating strategy that’s worked really well for you? Have a date night suggestion/sex trick that you want to tell people about? Got an unusual job in the sex space? Hit me up.
• sex toys/sex tech that you’re using in interesting or innovative ways (as long as its safe).

Things to avoid:

• prescriptive tips or advice. The ‘sex trick’ bullet points above work best if you explain why YOU like it – what makes it work on an individual and personal level? Don’t explain why everyone should try it or say it’s guaranteed to make everyone come – nothing can do that. Likewise avoid ‘ten things to do to your partner’s dick’ or similar. The best posts are about you and your experience – tell people why you love something and they might want to try it. Tell them they HAVE to try it and they’ll probably be turned off.
• posts that will get me into trouble. By which I mean obviously I can’t publish anything illegal, potentially libellous, etc.
• posts that have been published elsewhere. Google frowns on duplicate content, so if your blog has been published elsewhere before, my site will take a hit as well as the site where the post has also been published. If you have your own blog and you’d like to link to your guest blog here, the best way to do that is by posting an extract with a link. Note that this doesn’t mean I’m asking for exclusive rights to use your work – I’m not going to get angry or sue you if you post it on your blog as well. I’m just pointing out that dupe content isn’t great for either of us. If you want to submit your story to a magazine/print publication as well, or rewrite the same story to use again, go for it!
• posts that you may want taken down at some point in the future. I have occasionally removed guest blogs from this site when people have asked – there are often good reasons to do this. However, bear in mind that even if I remove something from my site it may well have been copied/cached elsewhere, so please be really sure you’re happy to put something out there before you submit it.

Submitting guest blogs

Now for the awkward part: I am always slow at replying to people who submit guest blogs. I get a tonne of email, and it takes time to wade through and find all the submissions. On top of that, often guest blog submissions go to spam because Gmail is not without a sense of irony.

So. If you’re submitting a guest blog, to make it easy for me to find and reply, please include the word ‘twix’ somewhere in your email (I use a search keyword so I can dig out all the submissions) and title/pitch in the body of your email. If you’ve already written the post, feel free to attach or paste into the email, but there’s no need to and if you do include the post it’s so much easier for me if you also include a summary – it means I can work out what it’s about and reply quickly rather than starring it to read later then forgetting.

If your post is time-sensitive (i.e. you’re talking about an upcoming event/show/book release) please mention that – with dates – in your email. It means that if I can’t publish it in time I can let you know so you can try to get it published elsewhere and you don’t miss the right moment.

The ideal pitch email looks a bit like this:

Subject: Twix: guest blog on my tickling fetish

Hi GOTN,

I love being tickled, it is so hot. I recently had an amazing tickling session with someone and I’d like to write a blog post about it, with lots of delicious detail on why it was so hot for me. My name is Sam and I blog at [url] OR My name is Sam and I don’t have a blog/Twitter OR I would rather submit this anonymously.

I’ll aim to ‘do’ guest blogs on Fridays – so publishing new ones and replying to any emails that have come in throughout the week. If you haven’t heard from me within 2 weeks of emailing, please feel free to follow up. A follow-up after a day is a little soon and makes me panicky, but a follow up after a couple of weeks is very helpful and makes sure your email hasn’t got buried in the latest deluge of companies-wanting-advertorial.

If you’ve pitched me a guest blog before and not got a reply, please do feel free to re-send it (and include Twix) – it’s possible I missed it and/or it went to spam.

When I reply I’ll let you know if I love your idea, and I’ll give you a suggested date for publication (usually a Friday). You then send me the post, let me know how you’d like to be paid and credited (i.e. names or pseudonyms, links to Twitter/your site/or nothing if you’d rather be anon), I’ll edit it and put it up.

Guest blog editing

Wherever possible, I’ll avoid changing your words: I’m doing this so you can share your stories, not so I can nick your stories and rewrite them in my voice. However I will always copy edit (so don’t worry if spelling/grammar isn’t your strongest suit – I will sort that stuff, albeit not perfectly all the time because I am a human), and I will sometimes make tweaks if I think it’s worth doing. For example:

• if you’re talking about other people and your descriptions are too identifiable or you use names. I’ll always ask if they’re real or not, and change them to anonymise.
• if you’re talking about something potentially dangerous, I might link to safety advice where appropriate. Or link to a disambiguation page if you use a particularly juicy bit of slang – no need to avoid slang, though: it’s fun learning words other people have for sex acts/body parts/etc!

Guest blogs from companies

I don’t accept these – please please please stop pitching them. If you’d like to appear on my site, buy some advertising. It’s cheap for the amount of views it gets, and if you take out some ads I’ll try to write about your product/service myself – trust me, it will get far more views than your sales pitch disguised as a guest blog. I currently have two ad slots left, then it’ll be a couple of months before new ones become available, so get in quick if you want some.

Alternatively, ask me about sponsoring a series of guest blogs: for a small fee I’ll include your link/blurb at the end of a guest post, and use some of your money to pay the person who wrote it.

Guest blog inspiration

Every now and then I do a round-up of my favourite guest posts. It’s ridiculously difficult to pick faves because there are so many incredible ones, but here are a few I have loved from 2017 which show you a breadth of writing on lots of different topics – sexy, political and personal…

• A sex story I just had to tell…
• Watching VR porn as a trans man
• Condoms, lube, and one simple change
• Posing naked for an exhibition
• And OF COURSE parts one and two of this ruined orgasm story (with guest audio too!)

Fancy submitting your story? Head to the guest blog page for my email and details.