Bloggers nowadays write guest posts for purely SEO reasons, to get backlinks. If you are looking to grow your traffic and Search Engine Rankings then here’s the ultimate guide to guest blogging. In this guide, you will learn how to write a guest post, how to approach content managers and pitch them your post idea, and where to find these content managers.
Many bloggers are doing guest posts. I read a report from Adam Enfroy he wrote well over 80 guest posts in 1 year whilst maintaining his own shit on his website, that’s crazy.
Before we begin let’s talk about the benefits of Guest Blogging.
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Why Guest Blog?
In most cases when you guest blog, you are doing it to get backlinks. And you end up getting a whole lot more benefits than just the backlinks. Backlinks help to increase your Domain Authority or Domain Rating.
This Domain Authority(DA) is sort of a website dominance score, measured out of 100. A good DA will be above 70. It is really hard to get there. You’ll see that as a new blogger. When you start your blog your DA is probably zero and it’s OK, you gonna stick there for months or even rise by a little, say up to 5.
To rapidly increase your DA you have to participate with big sites. Link to them, and write good content that people will organically link to your blog posts. If you do that you will start to see an increase in your DA rating.
Try to feature in podcasts, and get backlinks to your content. Before doing any link-building make sure you have at least 30 articles on your blog. That way you will have enough content and better chances of talking about some of the content you have on your blog.
Writing guest posts to high DA sites will have you hijack some of that traffic from the website. Imagine when you have an article on HackerNews and it has some links that refer back to your site. All that traffic coming your way, and your subscribers increase, your blog grows, and you make money.
Side – Effects
Appearing on many places online, your social media following will grow. People will start to know more about your brand. People will even start to trust your brand and that is all you need right now.
You will also have better chances with new business opportunities. You will start to notice brands approaching you for sponsored posts. At this point, you are allowed to celebrate all your hard work.
Did you know backlinks increase your Google Ranking? The more you have those the better chances you have to feature on that first results page. When you get there, you will never worry about traffic.
And Besides, you improve your writing skills.
What is Guest Blogging
“Guest blogging is a content marketing tactic that involves writing and publishing one or more articles for other websites.” – HubSpot
That’s it, it just means writing posts for other websites in exchange for a backlink or two. It is a win-win situation, the website owner gets a blog post, and you get a backlink.
Be careful not to link to blacklisted websites, it is deadly for your SEO although you might get traffic, Google doesn’t like it when you link to scam sites.
Getting Started with Guest Blogging
As we mentioned before guest blogging is an opportunity to expand your brand and get people to see to creativity.
Now let’s talk about how to get started with Guest Blogging.
First things first, you must have a content plan for guest blogging. When doing your yearly, quarterly, or monthly keyword research, reserve some topics for guest blogging. You can use a tool like LongTailPro from AppSumo to do all your keyword research.
LongTailPro will allow you to find long tail low competition keywords, that you will definitely rank for with no problem.
Once you have outlined your content strategy, it is time to draft an outreach message template. You know a friendly, “guest post seductive” message you can use to reach-out to content managers of medium-high DA websites.
Here’s a Sample of what you could use.
Howdy (Name), My name is Bheki(Be casual) and I’m the (Title) at (Blog). I’m reaching out because I love (Target Blog) and am interested in collaborating on content with you. I was curious if you allow guest posts on your blog. I’d love to contribute to your (some nice words) blog and can pitch some topic ideas that I think your audience will enjoy. Here are some recent samples from me: (example.com/top-10-shit-posts-on-twitter) (example.com/day-in-the-life-of-a-dog) Please let me know if you’re interested and I look forward to hearing back from you soon! Thanks, Bhekumuzi From the Matrix
Doesn’t have to be too professional, just be professionally casual, you know don’t throw too much slang in there some people are just strict.
You got the message, good, it’s time you know where to find the people to post this to.
How to reach out
It is the perfect professional network to find content managers, blog owners, and a whole lot more.
The best part it is really easy to search for them on LinkedIn, all you have to do is to type Content Manager on the search bar, and voila!!
Try to connect to them first, so that your messages won’t appear as requests, people usually ignore those. So all you have to do is to connect => and then reach out.
Don’t expect your request to be accepted, It’s how it works, we all get a fair amount of rejections. Don’t let that drag you down. As Blogger you must keep moving forward, full throttle, till you hit 100 articles.
website contact page
This one is pretty simple and usually less effective, people usually get scams on the contact page so they can get really picky. Visit www.thetargetsiteyouwant.com and navigate to the contact page enter all your details, especially the website don’t leave it out. If there isn’t a field to put a website then, you have to add it in the message.
email cold outreach
Get the emails hitting their inbox, with the email, usually converts, because well it’s an email. Emails look professional, I advise you to even use your @yourwebsite.com email, if it doesn’t go to spam. The work email has a high chance of acceptance than an email that looks like this.
joebiden_4567@gmail.com, a Hotmail is even worse.
Know where to write Guest Posts
avoid your competitors
Your competitors will not just steal your post idea, they will reject your sorry-ass. And you don’t want that. Some competitors will accept you but chances are very low,
target similar niches that may require your content
It’s that simple target blogs that are under your niche or similar but do not blog about what you blog directly. For example, you have a fashion blog, you blog about jewelry to be specific. Target another fashion blogger who does luxury brand clothes or something. Just make sure the blog is not directly your competition, you might pitch out an idea already on the content calendar.
If it’s a competitor, the best thing to do is to pitch out a long-tail topic, you might get a chance to be accepted. Use a tool like LongTailPro to find a topic with long-tail keywords. These Long Tail keywords have high traffic and low competition, some have low traffic, but that low traffic will all be coming to your website.
How to write Guest Posts
Congratulations, Say you got accepted, here’s how to write content.
Be personal write interesting content, and remember it’s your time to shine. Add some links that refer back to some of your blog posts as supporting information. Don’t forget to fill out the author box, with all of your social media profiles. Just to make sure people will be able to reach you, you know…
On how to write good content here’s a detailed article about it.
Conclusion
Good Luck with your guest blogging.
In summary, aim to write 1 Guest Post per month, I know it can be hard to find guest post opportunities, you have to search for them in this dense internet forest. Don’t scam every content creator you find. If you actually get the opportunity to write a guest post, please do it in time as per the deal you guys will make. And if it’s good enough, you will get more opportunities.
You can also allow some people to guest blog on your website. They are always people looking to guest post.
If you want a faster way to search for a guest post, just type “write for us” on your browser.
