Guest blogging is a great marketing technique that can bring you many benefits.
Whether you want to drive traffic to your website or build links, becoming a successful guest blogger actually requires thoughtful preparation and execution.
There are certain guidelines you should follow in order to successfully post on other blogs.
Following the 7 steps outlined in this article can help you achieve that goal.
1. Define Your Goals
Before starting your guest blogging campaign, you should develop a strategy and define the goals you want to achieve with blogging. Knowing your goals will help you find suitable blogs to pitch your ideas to.
Gaining more exposure, raising brand awareness, increasing your website traffic and building relationships with influencers are all good reasons to start a guest blogging campaign.
Whatever it is you decide to achieve with guest blogging, you should focus on providing thoughtful, well-researched, original and useful content.
Even though guest blogging is an excellent way of getting backlinks – SEO and building links shouldn’t be your only goal.
Posting as a guest blogger should have a bigger purpose of providing high-quality content that will be of great value to your readers.
2. Find Guest Posting Opportunities
The easiest way of searching for guest blogging opportunities is using search strings on Google. These are just a few of the many different variations you can try:
- keyword + “submit a guest post”
- keyword + “write for us”
- keyword + “guest post guidelines”
You should target blogs that publish high-quality content, have decent traffic and are active on social media.
Having valuable and informative content is important because it is one of the ranking factors and on top of that, Google even penalizes sites with low-quality content.
If your goal is to drive traffic to your blog and position yourself as an authority in your niche, you should focus on finding blogs that have a large audience that is highly engaged.
The more the audience is engaged, the higher the chances you’ll attract new visitors to your website.
Building backlinks requires you to find blogs with a high domain authority.
That means a site has many links pointing back to it, which indicates it offers relevant, high-quality content.
Since backlinks are a ranking factor, having backlinks from a site with a high root domain authority will improve your SERP ranking.
3. Do Your Research
After finding a suitable blog for guest posting make sure you become familiar with the content of the blog and actually read the articles they publish.
Pay attention to the style and the tone of the articles and take note of the kind of topics they write about. Also, make sure your target audience visits the blog.
You should take a look at other guest posts as well. Pay attention to the topics they write about and how many comments and shares their posts get.
If you already have an idea for your post, make sure it hasn’t already been covered.
Finally, read the guest post guidelines and take note of the most important information such as the editor’s or blog owner’s name, contact information and submission guidelines.
4. Connect With Your Prospects
Before sending a pitch, it’s a good idea to make a connection with the blog owner. This is especially useful if you are thinking about outreaching to a high-authority blog owned by an influencer.
You definitely want them to get familiar with your name.
Follow their blog on social media, and comment and share their content.
Take some time to leave thoughtful and meaningful comments on their blog posts.
You can also send them an email to thank them for certain content that they published and explain how they helped you with their post.
5. Write a Great Pitch
Writing a great pitch is probably the most important part of guest blogging.
How well you execute this step will actually determine whether you will get a chance to submit a guest post.
The pitch should be short and personalized.
Address the owner of the blog by name and tell them why you like their blog. Shortly introduce yourself, mention a specific article and explain how it helped you.
Then share your post ideas and give them an outline of each one.
Tell them why you think their readers would benefit from the posts.
Don’t forget to share links to your previous work so the owner of the blog has a chance to check out your writing style and see if it fits with the style of their blog.
If you don’t get a response wait at least two weeks before following up with a reminder.
Don’t be pushy, just remind the owner of your first email.
6. Write an Awesome Article
Once your ideas get accepted, it’s time to think of an engaging headline and write a high-quality, original article.
Before you start writing, go over the guest post guidelines again and pay attention to demands regarding word count, style, formatting, the number of lines in a paragraph and link policy.
In general, you should aim to write in paragraphs of 3-6 shorter sentences. You can make the text easy to read using subheadings, bulleted lists, bolding and italicizing.
Adding photos or other visual elements such as infographics or videos helps break the text in easy to read chunks.
If the blog allows links in the body of the article, you should link to relevant external resources that add value to the text, as well as to other related articles on the blog.
End your article with a couple of questions that can spark a conversation and entice readers to leave comments on the post.
At the very end of your article, include your short bio with links to your website or social media accounts.
Before sending your post, make sure you proofread several times.
7. Promote Your Post
Now that you’re done with the hard part, it’s time to help drive traffic to your post. After your post is accepted and published to the blog, you should share it across all your social media accounts.
Develop a relationship with your readers by answering questions in the comments on your post.
This is your chance to provide more exposure to your brand so don’t neglect this part.
Finally, don’t forget to send a short email to the blog owner and thank them for the guest posting opportunity.
Final Thoughts
Guest blogging can help you establish connections with industry influencers and help you position yourself as an expert in your industry.
Getting your guest post published on a high-authority blog can direct numerous visitors to your website. It can also help you gain new subscribers and grow your email list.
Becoming a successful guest blogger can be challenging, but these seven steps can help you get one step closer to publishing a high-quality post on an influential blog.
If you are interested in the process of ranking on top of search engines and want to learn more about SEO & content marketing read our Ultimate Guide to SEO for SaaS.