How do you guest post?
How do you write a guest article?
How to Find Guest Blogging Opportunities
To start, look for opportunities to guest post on other blogs. You are looking for blogs that fit the following criteria:
- the content is focused on your niche/industry
- the audience of the blog will be interested in your industry
- the blog has engaged readership (posts have been shared socially and commented upon)
- the blog owner is active on social media (so you know that they will be promoting your work on their site)
E.G. To find guest post opportunities when selling plant seeds, look for gardening blogs that have an engaged audience of gardeners.
The following tips should help you find the right kind of guest post opportunities.
Google Searches
To find guest posting opportunities, a great place to start is with a search on Google. You can use any of the following keyword searches to find blogs that accept guest posts, just replacing the keyword with keywords from your industry.
- keyword “submit a guest post”
- keyword “guest post”
- keyword “guest post by”
- keyword “accepting guest posts”
- keyword “guest post guidelines”
To find guest blogging opportunities, try searching for phrases like “guest post,” “guest article,” “guest blogger,” or “write for us.” These searches should lead you to a blog’s guest post guidelines page, guest post submission page, or actual guest posts by other writers.
Prolific Guest Bloggers
Do you know any well-known guest bloggers in your industry? If you read a lot of blogs in your industry (which you should), you’ll recognize some of the same names appearing frequently in guest blogs.
Some of the top influential marketing guest bloggers are Neil Patel, Jeff Bullas, Mark Traphagen, Tony Right, Jenny Halasz, Brian Harnish, Kevin Indig, Adam Riemer, Robyn Johnson, Benji Acciola, Kevin Rowe, Anna Crow, and Kirk Williams.
A good way to find places to guest post is to use Google to search for prolific guest bloggers in your industry, along with the phrase “guest post by.” This will reveal all of the sites where these bloggers have posted previously. These sites would be good potential places for you to guest post as well. If you actually know a guest blogger in your industry, they could introduce you to the owners of the blogs they have guest posted on, which would be an added bonus.
Competitor Backlinks
If you (or your online marketing agency) have ever pulled up a backlink analysis of a competitor while working on your SEO campaign, it’s likely that one or more of your competitors have backlinks from guest posts they have done.
If you’re looking to do some competitive analysis, Open Site Explorer is a great tool to check out your competitor’s backlinks and blog posts.
If you can’t find any information, you can try doing a Google search.
Replace domain.com with your competitor’s domain to find sites they have written for.
Example:
link:backlink.io -neilpatel.com “guest post”
Social Searches
You can find the latest guest posts in your industry by doing a Twitter search for the keyword “guest post.” Just follow the links in the tweets to see which blogs are accepting guest posts.
Preparing to Pitch a Guest Blogging Post
Before you contact a blog about writing a guest post, research the blog to make sure it is a good fit for your topic.
Get to Know the Blog’s Content
It is essential to familiarize yourself with the content of your target blog. Of course, you are aware that they have material relating to the keywords you searched for when seeking opportunities to guest post. However, you need to know even more about that content, including…
- What level of audience are they writing for (beginners, intermediate, advanced)?
- What type of audience are they writing for? If your business is B2B, then you will want the blog audience for your guest post to be businesses, not general consumers.
- What type of content do they write? Is it mostly general concepts or specific, detailed tutorials? Do they like lists?
See How Other Guest Posts Do
If a blog has guest posts, will the guest bloggers be successful? Do guest posts on the site receive as many comments and social shares as posts by the site owner? Some sites might accept guest posts, but if the audience is only interested in the blog owner, then guest bloggers won’t be successful in achieving their goals of building authority or directing traffic back to their website.
See Who the Guest Bloggers Are
Some blog owners prefer certain types of guest bloggers over others. Check out the bios of guest bloggers on the blog to see if they are fellow bloggers, freelancers, consultants, business owners, etc. This is important when you introduce yourself to the blog owner for your pitch. According to a study on SEOmoz, guest posting outreach is successful more often than not.
Find Out What Posts Do the Best
You will want to make sure that your guest post is pitched to the blog owner with topics that their audience will enjoy. A great way to get ideas for topics that will work well with the blog’s audience is to look at what posts have been popular on social media.
- Oktopus: Oktopus tracks and reports on your social media performance.
- Digg: This will show you the blog posts that have received the most amount of Digg votes.
- Buzzer: Buzzer schedules your social media posts and provides data and analytics.
Become a Familiar Face in the Blog Community
To improve your odds of being accepted as a guest blogger, try to get some acknowledgement from the blog’s owner before pitching your idea. A good way to do this is to leave comments on their latest posts for a week or two. You can also get bonus points by sharing those posts on Twitter and tagging the blog’s owner with their @username. This approach will help you seem like less of a stranger when you eventually pitch your guest post idea.
5 Effective Guest Blogging Strategies for Your Business
1. Know Your Goals
In order to create a successful guest blogging campaign, you must first understand what your goals are. Once you have a clear direction, it will be much simpler to put together a plan that will help you achieve success.
The typical goals for a guest blogging strategy align with the benefits described earlier. They include:
- Driving traffic to a specific landing page (or to your site in general) to get more leads and sales
- Building awareness of your brand, products, and services
- Improving SEO by attracting inbound links
- Positioning yourself as an expert so you can be cited more often and get speaking engagements
- Increasing email subscriber numbers or your social media audience
It is important to have a specific goal in mind so that you can write your bio in a way that is appropriate and makes sure that the people who find it will get what they are expecting. This is the best way to build trust with new people who you are trying to attract.
2. Write Great Content
After your pitch is accepted, you should write your guest post. You want to make it as good as possible, especially if it’s your first time writing for a particular site.
Craft a Stellar Headline
Is there a way you can change or improve it? First, look at the headline of your pitch and see if there is a way to change or improve it. Some of the best headlines:
- Include the benefit for the reader
- Use action words
- Tap into emotion
Here is a guide to writing great headlines so you can be successful too.
Research Keyword Phrases
Use a couple of core phrases to optimize your guest content so that site owners will love it when it ranks well in search engines and drives traffic to their site.
If you want your content to be found by searchers, you need to use keywords throughout. However, don’t stuff your content with keywords – this will show search engines that your content is not relevant.
Link Appropriately
It’s ideal if your guest post has links, since this helps with search engine optimization (SEO) and building authority. So be sure to include relevant internal and external links in your guest post.
When creating content, be sure to link to other relevant and high-quality content from the website you’re writing for. This helps to improve the content’s link profile, which can be beneficial for SEO and increasing the overall authority of the site. Additionally, linking to useful external resources can also be helpful for readers.
Follow the linking guidelines set out by site owners. Some sites limit the number of links in a bio section.
Include Images
If you’re looking to include images in your guest post to make it more engaging for readers, you can use free image sites to help you find high-quality options.
Format the Post Correctly
Finally, make your post look similar to others on the site by using the same formatting techniques. This will make you more popular with the site owners. Some sites provide guidelines for guest post writers. If this is the case, follow these guidelines.
3. Be Responsive
Make sure to respond to comments on and mentions of your post.
The reason for being responsive is twofold: good manners and building connections with a new audience. The latter can help you reach some of your goals.
If you’re responsive, blog owners will be more likely to be receptive to new pitches, or they’ll suggest ways you can contribute further. This gets you closer to achieving your goals for guest blogging.
If allowed by the blog owner, subscribe to comments on your guest post so you will be alerted via email when anyone makes a comment. You can also track how often the post is mentioned or shared by setting up a Google alert.
4. Promote Your Content
Content promotion is key to getting people to read your guest blog content and follow it back to your site. The site owner will be happy to see increased traffic.
You can use the same channels you use to promote your content to promote guest blogging content. You can let people who subscribe to your email newsletter know about it, and share guest posts on social media. If you encourage people to visit, comment, and share, some of them will do it.
If you use Buffer to promote content, add those posts to your queue. You can also use drip marketing by adding your guest post to Missinglettr if you have the right plan.
In order to add a blog post, sign into your account and click on the ‘add blog post’ button.
Enter the URL of the post and press Next.
The site will allow you to create a drip campaign. Your guest post will be shared gradually over the next year.
5. Track Success
You can measure the success of your guest blogging strategy by using some of the tools mentioned earlier in this guide.
If you want to see if your content is bringing in more leads, you can track traffic to your landing page with Google Analytics, to assess the success of your marketing campaigns.
You can use Buzzsumo to see if your guest content is being shared on social media, as well as to track all your guest content in one place. To do this, enter “author:[your author name]” in the search box.
SEMRush can be used to see how well your guest content ranks for target keywords, as well as to track any new inbound links and related traffic coming from your guest posts.
You have now learned the steps necessary to create a successful guest blogging strategy. In addition, you have learned how to avoid common content marketing mistakes and how to measure the ROI of your content marketing. Be sure to follow us on social media for more guides, tips, and resources.
Conclusion
Writing guest blogs for respected websites is a fantastic way to take advantage of the success of blogs that are already popular in your field. To score a guest blog spot, you need to submit pitches that are interesting and demonstrate your value.
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