You know the feeling: you’ve just hit the send button on a pitch to a super-amazing blog and it’s like you have a lottery ticket in your pocket…and the jackpot is astronomical! Your whole body is charged with electric possibility. And then (at a varying percentage rate) comes the let down: rejection. And it hurts. Hell, it downright sucks.

So you buy books full of sample queries of what works and what doesn’t and you sign up for webinars that promise to show you how to fix your shitty pitches and if you’ve done your research before crafting your proposal, great! Obviously something else is wrong.

But what if you didn’t? The number one complaint of editors listed in Writer’s Market is that submissions are not suited to their publication. That means there’s a serious lack of research not going on. But that’s not going to happen to you because you’re going to follow a checklist for researching each and every blog before you pitch them your article and here’s what you’re going to look for:

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