Are you looking to generate more targeted traffic and gain more powerful backlinks as part of your content marketing strategy? If you answered YES, you know that guest blogging should be your no.1 priority this year.
In this guide made by Profit Engine, we share actionable tips on how to develop and execute a winning guest blogging strategy that will turn your website into a traffic haven.
Ready? Let’s dive right in.
Understand your goals
What is your goal for guest posting? Knowing and drawing up your goals in advance helps you determine the appropriate blogs where you’d like to submit your guest posts.
Below are the common goals for a guest blogging campaign to influence your decision:
- Drive traffic to a particular site or landing page for more leads or sales
- Create awareness for your brand, products, or services
- Optimize your site through inbound links
- Increase your social media following or email list
- Position yourself as an industry expert
With the best content and a clear sense of direction, you can achieve any of these goals without much hassle. For instance, if you aim to build backlinks to your site, you should earmark a blog that has substantial domain authority.
And if you’re trying to build traffic, create awareness, or increase your following/subscription, you want to find a blog with a sizable, engaged audience.
Look for guest posting opportunities
Now that you’re clear about your campaign goals, your next assignment should be to find where to guest post. Here, you only have one specific purpose: to partner with sites in your niche or industry.
Also, before deciding to write for any site, confirm that their blog has engaged readership; you can determine this by the number of comments on their posts as well as a social activity.
There are numerous techniques you can employ to find the best guest posting opportunities including:
Google search
Google is an excellent place for finding guest blogging opportunities. All you need is to conduct simple searches as follows:
- Topic keyword phrase + “write for us”
- Topic keyword phrase + “submit a guest post”
- Topic keyword phrase + “become a contributor”
- Topic keyword phrase + “guest post”
Social searches
Social media platforms especially Twitter can serve as credible sources for finding guest blogging opportunities. Simply type in the keyword “guest post” in the search button.
You should be able to see the latest tweets on guest posts. Follow the links to determine which blog to submit your posts to.
Competitor backlinks
Tools like Moz Open Site Explorer grants you access to your competitor’s backlinks and determine what blogs they’re writing or have written for. Alternatively, you can follow them on social media or subscribe to their email newsletters as it’s a habit for website owners to share guest posts to build reputation and traffic.
Pitching a guest post
Before you can even think of contacting a site’s admin to propose your guest post, you must do a few things.
Understand their blog’s content
Sure, they might be having niche-related content but that’s not enough. You need to dig into finer details like the level of audience they write for (beginner, intermediate, advanced), the type of audience (general consumers, B2B), and the kind of content they write.
Check how other guest posts perform
Do guest posts get as many social shares or comments as compared to those posted by the owner? If there’s a wide gap in comparison, you might want to look elsewhere if your goal is to build traffic and authority.
Investigate what posts perform well
If their audience seems to love specific topics more than others, you might want to pitch content about those topics to increase your chances of getting accepted.
Check out who the guest bloggers are
Some site owners are more likely to accept proposals from certain types of people over others. Go through a few guest bloggers’ bios to determine if they’re freelancers, agencies, business owners, or fellow bloggers. This will help you craft your pitch accordingly.
Build some rapport with the site owner
A great way would be by actively following them on social media, commenting on their blog posts, signing up and responding to their email newsletters.
Choose an irresistible topic
By now you already know what topics perform best for a specific target audience as well as what’s deemed acceptable by the site owner. Put this into perspective to write about a topic that’s hard for them to reject.
You can choose to add value or more information on a popular topic, respond to what’s on the site, or write about something new on a topic that’s likely to attract a massive audience.
Contacting the site owner
Before that though, you want to check if the site has specific guidelines for pitching. Review them keenly to ensure your pitch adheres to all the dictates.
Here are a few bare minimums for pitching:
Keep it short and sweet
Site owners especially those with authority and a massive following receive tons of pitches regularly. Imaginably, most don’t have time to read your long compositions.
Address them by their name
This tells them that you took your time to dig into the entire website and that you’re not just sending automated messages to them.
Include your post title and a short description
Mentioning a topic that piques the site owner’s interest in your pitch is half as good as winning the deal. Besides, briefly describe your guest post in just a few sentences or bullet points.
Explain why you should be considered to write guest posts for the site
While at it, don’t make it sound like a resume; just a few killer points that capture the owner’s imagination.
Accepted? Now write exceptional content
After successful pitching, your next step is to ensure that your content is exceptionally written. Additionally, try to optimize it for SEO, proofread it well, and keep it engaging.
For this, use enticing headlines, research keyword phrases to include, link to several authority sites and other pages on the owner’s site, and formatting your content appropriately.
Promote your guest post
If you thought the journey ends at crafting and submitting stellar content, then the joke’s on you.
How will more people read your posts and follow them through to your website if you don’t promote them?
Luckily, there are several content promotion channels you can leverage. A few obvious ones include social media, email newsletters, influencer marketing, direct messaging, and social networks like Reddit and Quora.
Continue looking for more guest posting opportunities
One guest post may not move the needle which is why you mustn’t stop at that. Continually seeking more opportunities to guest post will help grow your online presence, attract more traffic, increase your site’s authority, and acquire more leads and sales.
Track your success
Is your guest blogging campaign bearing the kind of fruits you were looking for? You can only find out by measuring the success rate using specialized SEO tools.
For example, you can use Google Analytics to see how much traffic a guest post is bringing to your landing page.
Are you using guest posting to grow your online business? How has your experience with this link building technique been like? Share with us in the comments.
