Do you want to attract targeted traffic, increase brand awareness, and build fruitful relationships in the industry? Guest posting can be the key to all that and more.
Guest posting involves writing guest articles for other websites, mostly within the same industry, in order to reach a wider audience and gain credibility.
That may sound easy enough, but building a guest posting strategy that works is more challenging than simply submitting a blog post. From finding guest posting opportunities to pitching and publishing articles, guest blogging is a long but rewarding process.
Let’s take a look at our 5-step guest posting strategy built for success.
Are Guest Articles Still Effective?
In the tumultuous world of blogging with ever-changing Google algorithms, guest posting has been used and abused for ages. Today, there are many questions about its effectiveness and credibility.
So is guest posting still effective? The answer is: Yes..but only if you do it right. The old spam-filled ways won’t fly anymore, but playing by new rules can make your SEO, domain authority, and brand awareness skyrocket.
There’s no denying that guest blogs are one of the best ways to earn high-quality backlinks. However, you need to shift your focus from scoring links to creating value-driven content. Attract your audience with engaging content and good search engine rankings will follow!
The 5-Step Guest Posting Process
Step 1: Defining Guest Posting Goals
The first step is to define your guest posting goals and outcomes you want from your guest blogging strategy. This is the stage that determines what kind of opportunities and blogs you need to target in the next steps to achieve desired results.
Step 2: Finding Guest Posting Opportunities
Start searching for guest posting opportunities relevant to your industry that align with your pre-defined goals and appeal to your audience.
Step 3: Ideation and Pitching Guest Articles
Once you have a list of blogs to target, create content ideas that fall in line with their guidelines and pitch them to their blog post editors.
Step 4: Content Creation
Write content or hire expert writers to create content that is consistent with the guest post requirements, while calling attention to your brand.
Step 5: Publishing and Tracking Progress
When the posts that contain your links are published, track their progress through guest post reports to tweak and constantly improve your strategy.
1. Defining Guest Blogging Goals
Great guest posting strategies are built on well-defined goals that help you point your efforts in the right direction.
Your guest blogging goals can be to:
- Attract targeted traffic to your website
- Boost brand awareness and exposure
- Build credibility and establish yourself as an authority in your niche
- Improve the SEO of your website
Use your goals to determine which blogs to target and the kind of content to create. For example, if you want more traffic and brand awareness, choose websites that have a large and engaged audience to reap the maximum benefits.
2. How To Find the Best Guest Blogging Opportunities
Once you have your goals sorted, it’s time to move on to finding guest blogging opportunities to get the right outcomes. First and foremost, you should select websites that operate in a relevant niche or industry.
Depending on your goals, you can go for guest blogs that your audience will be attracted to, have an avid audience with good engagement, and are active on social media to provide more exposure to your guest articles.
Once you have a general criterion in mind, you can go ahead and start searching for blogs that meet your requirements.
Here are some ways to find guest posting opportunities:
Search on Google
Start looking for new opportunities through Google search queries. Simply append your target keyword with phrases such as “write for us”, “guest article” or “guest article guidelines” to find websites that are looking for guest bloggers.
Here are some other search queries that you can try out:
- [Keyword] + become a contributor
- [Keyword] + submit a guest article
- [Keyword] + blogs that accept guest posts
Search on Social Media
Many bloggers promote their guest articles on social media platforms such as Twitter. Simply search “guest post” and other similar phrases on Twitter to find the latest guest post opportunities in your industry of choice.
Competitor Analysis
Another excellent way to find guest post opportunities is to utilize what’s working for your competitors in the industry. You can easily do that by following them on social media, subscribing to their newsletter, and keeping track of their posts.
Alternatively, you can conduct a competitor analysis by finding inbound links to your competitor’s site through tools like Semrush. Reports from such tools will provide a list of all the referring domains and anchor text that can then be used to build your own list of potential candidates.
Follow Successful Bloggers
Closely follow successful bloggers in your niche to keep an eye on where they’re posting. Targeting the blogs that have worked for well-renowned bloggers in your niche is a good start.
3. How To Pitch Guest Posts
Bloggers receive thousands of pitches a day, what makes yours stand out? To grab their attention, you need to put in the work.
Prepare for the Pitch
Know the Content Inside Out – There’s nothing more impressive than exhibiting a deep understanding and knowledge about your target blog.
Apart from the blog being relevant to your niche, what else do you know about it? From the target audience to the type of content and preferred writing style, learn all you need to know about the blog before pitching.
Assess Featured Guest Bloggers – Read the bios of featured guest bloggers and dig into their work to learn what kind of professionals the website prefers. This will inform you how to present yourself when you pitch your content to the blog.
Learn Which Posts Get Popular and Why – Find out which posts and topics the audience seems to love, so you can come up with relevant topics that are most likely to be a hit.
When it comes to choosing topics, you can either provide your own take on a popular topic or search for a unique topic the audience will like.
Forge a Meaningful Connection – Whether you’re buying links or getting them organically through outreach, you need relationship building to set the wheels in motion. Bloggers are busy people and it’s sometimes hard to grab their attention through killer content alone.
Take a while to follow and support the blogger on social media through comments and shares. When you finally pitch your content, the blogger might be familiar enough with you and your work to give you a chance.
Pitch Your Post!
Now that you’ve done all that work, you have all the information you need to craft a fully personalized pitch that lands beautifully. Remember, bloggers are used to getting thousands of pitches a day and yours needs to sound as personal as possible.
While it’s always great to have a wholly unique pitch for each outreach effort, you can also try out a fully customizable template that saves time and covers all the bases.
4. Tips for Writing Guest Posts
It’s finally time to get down to writing the quality content we’ve been working so hard to publish.
Here are some excellent tips to help you write guest articles that are geared up for success:
Focus on Content That Adds Value
The goal of guest posting may be to drive traffic and exposure to your business, but the guest article needs to be about much more than that.
While writing the article, it’s important to exclusively focus on delivering quality content that provides value to the audience. Reserve the details about your business for the author bio.
Match the Format of the Blog
Your guest post needs to fit into the aesthetic, writing style, and tone of the blog you’re targeting. Try to pin down the kind of content loved by the audience. Learn whether people respond well to images, videos, infographics, or other media and build your content accordingly.
Link To Internal Articles
Adding internal links that link back to other articles on the blog displays a depth of knowledge that will be appreciated by blog owners. Just search for blog posts based on the target keywords and link them wherever required.
Drive Engagement With a Call to Action
Spark a conversation with the audience in the comments with a call to action that encourages them to express their opinions. You can also start conversations on Twitter and other social media platforms to drive engagement.
Craft the Perfect Guest Bio
The guest post bio is your chance to include some self-promotion without compromising the content. This is where you can add links to your socials, websites, products, and other offerings.
The guest bio should be short, sweet, and actionable. Here are some things to include in the guest bio:
- Links to your website
- Link to a landing page with a lead magnet to generate leads
- Add your socials
- Your background, expertise, and qualifications
5. Tracking Results From Guest Blogging
Once your guest articles are published, it’s time to measure the effectiveness of your strategy. This can be done by tracking the performance of your articles. Some important metrics that indicate the success of your guest blog posts include an increase in reach, social media engagement, and traffic.
You can track these metrics through tools such as Google Analytics or Semrush. These analytics can help you derive actionable data to fine-tune your strategy and readjust your goals.
Guest Posting for Success Checklist
Check out some tips and tricks from our experts to help you build a guest posting campaign that checks all your boxes.
#1 Make Sure the Sites Are Deeply Vetted
Bloggers need more than just a high domain authority to qualify for your guest posting list. They also need high organic traffic, as independently verified by their Ahrefs traffic score and an acceptable trust to citation flow ratio.
Metrics are just one part of it. The site needs to feel real and have a good professional design. In short, you should truly want it and be proud of this type of media placement.
#2 Create a Link Building Game Plan Based on Your Competitors
The backlinks strategy is just as important as the backlink itself. Do an anchor text analysis to determine the most impactful anchor text to use for your next link.
Also, compare the domain authority of your site and top-ranking competitor sites to see how many links you need to grow your organic traffic.
#3 Carefully Follow Guest Post Guidelines
Don’t forget to follow the guest post guidelines given by the bloggers to meet their criteria. This may include formatting guidelines, tone, writing style and other considerations.
#4 Use US Native Writers and Editors
Good guest blog posts start with a quality piece of content. It’s recommended to hire US native English speakers experienced with Search Engine Optimization. Writers should be well-versed in writing for people, not just robots.
Each piece of content needs to be plagiarism-checked and manually edited to ensure Google readiness. Ideal article length starts at 500 words but these days, 500 words are not enough to work in all industries, so choose the right word count depending on your target niche.
#5 Quality Check Content Before Publishing
Once the content is ready, it must go through an SEO check and quality assurance process to avoid any mistakes that might lower your credibility. The guest post is a reflection of your business after all!
#6 Go for a Good Link Up-time
Avoid working with bloggers who take their links down or turn them to no-follow after some arbitrary time period. Choose bloggers that at least guarantee a link-up time of one year to reap the maximum benefits.
#7 Do Content Promotion
Your job isn’t finished after publishing the guest article, you have to actively engage in content promotion to boost engagement. Take a multi-channel approach by encouraging your Twitter, LinkedIn, email subscribers and other social media followers to post comments and share your article.
#8 Interact With the Audience
Reply to comments and mentions about your guest posts to form connections with your audience. You can set up Google alerts to track shares and mentions so you can respond to them accordingly.
Not only will it boost engagement on your guest post, it might also earn you the favor of the blog owners.
Should You Buy Guest Posts?
A successful guest posting strategy is built on time and patience. Of course, you can simply buy guest posts but the fact is, there’s no shortcut to success in guest posting.
Investing money in professionals, tools, and services for relationship building is very different from paying for posts that lose value over time and come back to haunt your rankings.
So, no matter which way you approach it, forging true connections, providing long-term value, and building genuine relationships is the way to go.
If you want to invest in guest posting, hiring a reliable guest posting service that engages in real outreach is a good place to start. Don’t chase low-cost guest posting opportunities that lose their value over time, focus on building real relationships instead.
What To Look For in a Guest Posting Service?
Building a dedicated in-house team or investing your own time into guest posting can be time and cost-intensive. Outsourcing to a guest posting service might be the right fit for you.
Here are some tips to choose the best guest posting service to suit your needs:
- Analyze their process, ask the right questions to determine whether they do real outreach or not.
- Study the price structure to ensure there are no hidden fees. Know what you’re paying for.
- If it’s too good to be true, it probably is. Don’t fall for guest posts provided in exchange for suspiciously low rates.
- Learn whether they provide progress updates and keep you involved throughout.
- Look at their case studies, results, and customer reviews.
The Benefits of Using a Guest Posting Service
An effective guest posting strategy goes way beyond finding guest bloggers and submitting blog posts, it includes vetting websites, outreach, pitching, tracking progress, and more.
As a business owner or blogger, you may not have the time or resources required to launch such a comprehensive guest blogging campaign.
That’s where dedicated guest posting services come in! Outsourcing your guest posting can have time and cost-saving advantages, let’s take a look at few of them:
Increased Focus
With a guest posting service taking care of everything, you can allocate the time and effort to your core business operations instead. Leave all your guest posting activities to the professionals who have the resources, expertise, and experience to do it right.
Cost Savings and Increased Revenue
Whether you do it yourself or hire an in-house team, guest posting can be an expensive endeavor. Guest posting services have the tools and connections required, making them the more cost-effective option. Some services may also provide special packages that result in more cost savings.
Benefit From Industry Connections
Link building and guest posting are all about relationship building and connections. Professional guest posting services have a well-established network in the industry that guarantees recognition.
Get Links From Quality Blogs Without Lifting a Finger
Securing guest posts is a time-consuming task. You have to identify target websites, reach out to editors, pitch guest article ideas, and follow up until you secure links on high-profile industry blogs.
Guest posting services offer a streamlined service that takes care of the guest post process from start to finish.
Get Regular Progress Updates
Guest posting services often provide dedicated dashboards that make it easy to see link-building prices, request additional information, and track progress.
Guest Posting – Going Above and Beyond
You might be considering a guest post for the SEO benefits, and that’s a valid reason. But, some guest posts, especially those on top-tier editorial sites, drive a lot of targeted traffic on their own and help to get your brand in front of a relevant audience.
A guest post helps to build brand awareness & credibility and drive targeted traffic while increasing your ranking in search engines.
With so many potential benefits, guest posting is a powerful content marketing strategy to help you take your business to the next level.
So, what are you waiting for? Try out our 5-step guest posting strategy to get started now.
At OutreachMama, our guest blog service handles content creation, outreach, and placement. We seek out blogs that are more than just links, but advertising opportunities for companies that are looking to grow.
Mama’s inventory has grown to more than 700 high-traffic partners and it keeps growing as our outreach service finds more bloggers in your industry.
FAQ
What Is Guest Posting/Guest Blogging?
Guest posting, also known as guest blogging, is the practice of contributing a post to another person’s blog in order to build relationships, exposure, authority, and links.
What Is the Purpose of Guest Posting?
Guest posting is used as link building and content marketing strategy for driving targeted traffic, increasing brand awareness & credibility, and boosting rankings in the SERPs.
How To Find Good Guest Post Topics?
Here are some tips for coming up with topics for guest articles:
1. Research which topics do best with the audience
2. Choose a trending topic related to the niche
3. Focus on topics you have expertise in
What Makes an Article Worth Reading?
Well-written, informative and high quality content that engages audiences and keeps them coming back for more. Adding useful insight as a professional and expert in a field can also give your articles an edge over others.
What Are the Best Ways To Pitch a Guest Post?
Pitching a guest post is a process that begins with relationship building and ends with a short, personalized, and impactful email. Before you pitch your post, be sure to research the website, follow the blogger on their socials, build a relationship with them and personalize the email to suit their requirements.
