Is guest posting part of your plan for effective content marketing to increase your blog ranking? If not, you should consider starting right away. There’s been assumption overtime about the decline of guest blogging; however, the tactics still stand as a great way to promote yourself and your business.
In this piece, we will be showing you the steps to create and carry out a successful guest blogging strategy. We hope you will be able to make use of guest posting effectively to gain more prospects for your business or brand after reading through this post. The steps include:
Find Target Blogs or Sites to Contribute to
You need to ensure you have a list of sites that accept guest posts openly and are actively in search of good content. Beyond that, you will also need to ensure that posting on each website will help you achieve your goals. There are ways or methods on how to find sites that accept guest posts.
Method 1: Google Search Strings method
Several search strings can easily and quickly secure you dozens of niche-relevant guest posting opportunities. Here are a few of the most successful:
- “Your Keyword” + “guest post.”
- “Your Keyword” +, “write for us.”
- “Your Keyword” + “guest posts wanted”
- intitle: guest post guidelines
- “Your Keyword” + “this post was written by.”
Method 2: Google Reverse Image Search method
To begin with, you need to look for someone related to your niche that writes a lot of guest posts. Then retrieve the URL of the headshot used in their author bio and insert it into Google reverse image search. You’ll acquire a list of all the places they’ve guest posted on a silver platter.
Method 3: Twitter Search method
This method is also a great option. You just need to head to Twitter search and enter a broad search string, and you will get a variety of sites that accept guest posts.
Method 4: Reverse Engineering the Backlinks of Competitors
This technique is where you reverse engineer the backlinks present in a site related to your niche. Once you do, you will come across a goldmine of guest posting opportunities. A fantastic aspect of this technique is that you can uncover sites that aren’t openly publicizing that they even accept guest posts.
Method 5: Blog comments
Be aware that this is a complex guest posting strategy, and if you have not published a guest post before, you can skip this method for the meantime. This strategy implies you reply niche-related bloggers that drop a comment on your guest post, increasing the chances that you will get an insider guest posting opportunity.
Once you’ve discovered a site to guest post on by following any of the methods listed, then you can go to the next step.
Form A Connection and Contact the Site Owner
Before you approach site owners to propose a post which is also known as pitching, you will need to have a form of relationship with them. Site owners are usually editors for medium to large sites or founders of small blogs.
Many site owners are getting tired of irrelevant pitches and below-average content. They now only prefer to take a guest post from people they know and can trust. You can become one of these people by following these steps:
- To start with, get to know their site and the type of content they publish. You can do this by following them on Twitter, where many people share their content. You can also connect to their site in Feedly to help you stay updated in case there is something new.
- The next thing is to read the content they publish for some weeks consistently, so you will be able to determine what matters to them and their audience. Also, take into consideration if they list top-performing or featured content on their site
- Then do well to connect with site owners on social media so you can tag them anytime you share content on their website. You can also connect with them manually by finding their contact details, mainly names and email address on Google or other search tools like hunter.io or violennorbert.
- Post a comment on their blog, sign up for their email marketing newsletter and reply to their emails as promptly as possible.
“Don’t get in a panic if you hear NOs, be ready to hear a lot of them, not just that, but a lot of bloggers may also ask for money. It’s totally normal. Don’t get discouraged. You just need to reach out to more people and find those who match your persona”, says Owais Shah, founder of Town Hustle.
We applied this strategy and got several backlinks to a Gaming Laptop Blog and run a separate campaign for each content piece eg best gaming laptop under 800 dollars. The point of connecting with site owners is to form a genuine relationship with them. Hence, endeavor not to fake it because they’ll end up discovering in the long run, and this might jeopardize your goals.
Select a Winning Topic for Guest Posting
With a good understanding of your target site and the preferences of site owners, the next thing is to select a topic to pitch. At this stage, you should be aware of what is prevalent on their site. Then consider how you can add value by responding to what’s on their website; by giving additional information on a popular topic, and by generating content on something new on a topic likely to be popular with the audience.
Once you are ready to streamline your choice, you can make use of Buzzsumo, which is a great tool to help you get content already gaining popularity on the site you are about to pitch. There are two advantages of using Buzzsumo:
- It enables you to create a related topic likely to be popular, and
- It ensures you do not pitch an idea already published by the site owner.
To retrieve popular content with Buzzsumo, type the site’s URL or a topic keyword phrase into the search box, and you will see the most shared content. Importantly, make an effort to read the guidelines for pitching and writing. If you don’t, site owners will reject your pitch even before reading it.
Craft a Killer Pitch that Converts
This stage is crucial, and to ensure the success of your guest blogging strategy, you must avoid generic post pitches. If you’ve carefully followed the steps listed above, generating a winning pitch relative to each site owner will be done with minimal effort. The following rules will help you craft high-quality pitches:
- Firstly, ensure you keep the pitch as precise as possible, straight to the point. Site owners with authoritative sites, in particular, get several pitches, so they don’t have time to read long ones.
- Make use of their name as most site owners won’t go through pitches from people who don’t care to research this basic contact detail.
- Include the post title. Some successful pitches make use of the names of site owners in the email subject line and as a secondary heading in the body of the email.
- Choose the right headline from the popular headlines given to you by Buzzsumo and use this as leverage to come up with yours.
- Give a brief description of the post indicating what it will reveal in a couple of sentences or a few bullet points. Also, give reasons why the piece of content will be of benefit to their readers
- Lastly, prove why you are the right person for the post by hitting a couple of high points.
Produce a Quality and Actionable Guest Post an Editor Can’t Deny
Once a blogger accepts your pitch, the next thing is to write your guest post. You should make it of top quality, particularly if it’s the first time you are writing for a site. For a high-quality guest post, you can follow these steps:
Create an eye-catching headline
Begin by having a look at the headline in your pitch. It will be more interesting to come up with alternatives even if the site owner is pleased with your pitch.
Research Keyword Phrases
Site owners will be happier if your guest post content ranks high in Search Engines generating increased traffic to their site. Hence, you can research some keywords and find many core phrases you can use to optimize it.
Carry out appropriate linking
Try and include relevant links in the guest post you are writing, which helps with SEO and for building authority. You can link to great content from the site you are writing for and other valuable resources on external sites.
Add Images
Getting images might be difficult. Unless site owners want to do it themselves, you can assist them by including or suggesting relevant images for your guest post. You can enhance the points you made in the post and make it easier for people to read with images.
Follow-ups
This strategy is usually neglected but highly effective. Bloggers can forget to respond to your mail despite opening it due to several entries they receive. However, you can avoid this by sending a follow-up email to find out if they are interested in publishing your guest post. You should try and keep the follow-up email short and straight to the point. From findings, sending follow-up messages increases the response rate from readers significantly.
Conclusion:
At this point, you should be aware of the steps to create an effective guest blogging strategy. You have no restriction to the number of guest posts you can publish, and you should consider guest posting on different blogs to increase your reach.
