Guest posting is, without a doubt, one of my favorite ways to drive traffic to my website. Not only do you increase your visibility in the search engines such as Google and Bing, but if you guest post on sites that are somehow related to yours, you'll get targeted referral traffic too.
Anyway, most of you already know the benefits of guest posting. So I'll just get into the point of this post, which is to show you how to guest post effectively, from start to finish.
FINDING GUEST POST OPPORTUNITIES
The first step is to find sites to guest post on. There are numerous ways to accomplish this:
- Do a simple search in Google for your niche. Add the word blog, news or reviews to find even more sites.
- Many sites have a blogroll in their sidebar. Check each of these out. This can create a snowball effect as many of the sites you check out will have a blogroll too.
- Look up the back-links for your competitors and use the same sites they did.
- On sites that accept guest posts, go through each guest post and visit the sites that submitted a post. Often times these sites will accept guest posts too.
- Do a search for “write for us, guest posts, submit a guest post” and other similar phrases in quotes with a + then your niche. You’ll find a list of sites that you can be very certain will accept your post.
Keep in mind that you don’t need to stick to your niche either. Everyone is so concerned about relevancy, however, no one stops to think about the fact that many niches can be relevant to yours if you add a twist or approach it from an angle.
For example...
You can guest post on any hobby or activity site for your dating site. Many couples like to go see movies together, go to the beach, play cards or race go-karts. So if you run a dating website, why wouldn't you ask these types of sites if you can submit a guest post?
Another example is internet marketing. I had a client that wanted to build links to a specific city and zip code. After thinking for a bit, I came up with the (genius) idea of submitting guest posts that explained how to do geo targeting and why it was important. It was extremely easy at that point to add an anchor text of, Beverly Hills 90210, to the article, while still looking and sounding very natural.
Do you get the idea? You don’t have to stick to one kind of niche so long as you can somehow relate your niche to the sites you’re trying to contact.
What Sites To Contact?
The next step is to contact the sites that you've found.
Remember that you don’t need to guest post at each and every site you come across. You should be picky of which sites you write for. They should have traffic and well written content. Don't bother writing for spammy websites. It's not worth your time.
There are a few tells or traits to help you determine whether a site is worth posting at or not:
- They have an active Facebook fan page with lots of fans. I’d say 1k+ is a good number to aim for.
- They have a large Twitter following.
- Not every post on the site are guest posts (the owner writes too).
- They have lots of RSS readers.
- There are comments on many (if not all) of the posts.
Following this you should have no problem finding sites worth contacting.
WRITING THE EMAIL
The most important part of guest posting, in my opinion, is sending the email. If you don’t do this part well you won’t get the opportunity to submit a guest post.
There are a number of things that I feel make up a solid guest post email.
First and foremost, you should address the website owner, if possible, as well as introduce yourself and your website or project that you're looking to promote.
Next, I lead into my pitch with what article I think would be a good fit for their site. This is very important. By coming up with an article in advance, the blogger can immediately decide if that’s an article they want. You save the time of emailing back and forth before even getting to that point. Also, coming up with an idea shows familiarity with their site, since you’d have to know what’s on their site in order to come up with post ideas.
Once I pitch the article, I give them other details such as estimated word count, whether or not the post will be formatted and the approximate time frame for completion. The more questions I can answer in advance, the better. It’ll leave the blogger with all the information they need to make an informed decision.
Then I sign off.
My emails are usually pretty short. Maybe 5 paragraphs max, with a couple of sentences in each one.
This has gotten me a pretty good response, about 25-35%. If I don’t hear back from them, I then send an even shorter follow up email letting them I sent an email and that I haven’t heard back. I found that this can increase my conversions by another 10% or so.
FOLLOWING THROUGH
Once you've gotten the OK, let the blogger know when they can expect your guest post. Then do everything in your power to make sure that post is done and ready to go by then. I've found that very few bloggers have a tight schedule when it comes to guest posts. Even then, if you’re going to be late you should email the blogger and let them know. It’s common courtesy.
Once you've finished the email (be sure to double and triple check it), send it. I've found that most bloggers will read it and let you know when it’s going to post, assuming they didn't post it upon receiving it. If they haven’t posted your article within a couple weeks, kindly send an email asking if they've had a chance to look at it. In my experience many bloggers will apologize and post it right away, or let you know when to expect it to go live.
After the post goes live, be on the lookout for comments. Most bloggers ask that you comment on posts anyway, but this should go without saying. Getting into the trenches and talking with the other readers will improve the chances that they visit your site and/or use your services.
That’s It
That’s how to guest post with success. It’s not that hard. You just need to approach it as if you were a real person, and offer content that you would want to have on your own site. Then do a good job. If you can do this, I can assure you that you will land more guest posts than you can handle, and that you’ll quickly build traffic to your websites/projects as a result.
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