Your Ultimate Guest Posting Guide: Benefits and Tips for Writing Guest Blogs

Whether you’re an author, entrepreneur, or content marketer, you probably don’t need us to tell you about the importance of maintaining a high-quality blog or website.

But if you’re only writing content for your own site, you’re missing out on a goldmine of growth opportunities. Guest blogging is one of the most effective ways to boost your traffic and exposure, but you need an effecive strategy to succeed.

In this post we’ll show you more of the benefits to writing guest posts, how to find the best opportunities, and tips for pitching and writing great content that will get you more leads and traffic in return.

What Is Guest Posting?

Guest posting, or “guest blogging,” is writing and publishing a post on someone else’s website or blog. One of the main reasons for writing guests posts is so that the guest poster can build more brand awareness and direct traffic back to their own website.

Ideally, as the author of a guest post, you would write for a site that is within the same niche as yours, and gets around equal or greater traffic than yours. The audience of the target blog should be interested in what you’ll be writing about.

Benefits of Guest Blogging

Whether you’re a business owner, author, or any other type of professional looking to grow your platform, there are several important benefits that you can reap from guest blogging.

These include:

Reaching more of your target audience: When you write guest posts on popular sites within your niche, you’re opening the door for hundreds or thousands of readers to discover and follow you, and also boosting your authority if more people come to recognize you as an expert on the subject.

Boosting your own site’s SEO: Your site’s SEO (search engine optimization) improves when relevant, quality sites publish content that links to yours. These “backlinks” will help improve your own search engine ranking. You might also get more visitors to your site to sign up for your email list!

Building important connections within your industry: When you write guest posts, you’re building connections and potentially long-lasting relationships with influential thought leaders from your niche or industry.

So now that you understand the key benefits of guest blogging and how it can help you grow your platform, let’s take a look at how you can find the best opportunities and seal the deal with a published post.

How to Guest Blog

Here are some of the best practices for identifying guest post opportunities, preparing your pitch, and writing and submitting your posts.

1. Determine your goals.

The first step to successful guest blogging is to determine your goals and reasons for writing guest posts in the first place.

What are you trying to achieve by writing guest posts? Most likely, your goals will fall under one of the following:

You want to be seen as an authority and a trusted name in your industry.

You want to get exposure and direct more traffic to your own site or social media profiles. Maybe you want to increase brand awareness, or make sure people know about your products and services.

You want to boost your site’s SEO with quality backlinks.

Knowing your goals ahead of time will help you identify the best opportunities and and guest blogging strategies. If you plan your content and choose the right blogs, you can actually accomplish all 3 of the above goals!

If you’re focused on positioning yourself as an authority or getting more exposure for your site, you’ll want to target blogs that have established a large and engaged audience.

If you mostly want to boost your site’s SEO and rank higher in Google through quality backlinks, you should search for blogs with strong root domain authority, which you can do using tools like Ahrefs or Ubersuggest.

2. Find the right opportunities.

With your goals clear in your mind, it’s time to start hunting down the best guest posting opportunities.

The most obvious and important criteria is that the blogs you target should be relevant to your industry, and the audience of that blog should be interested in your industry. (Otherwise what’s the point?)

Another plus is if the blog’s audience is highly engaged. One clue is if their posts typically get lots of comments and shares. This means that their readers actually read and respond to the content, so they’re more likely to click on your links and respond to your call to action.

To get an idea of a site’s traffic, there are many analysis tools you can use, but one free and easy way is to use a site’s Alexa ranking. Alexa ranks millions of websites in order of popularity, with a ranking of 1 being the most popular (this rank is currently held by Google).

To see a site’s Alexa ranking, simply install their free plug-in, and once installed, click on the icon while you’re on a page of the site you want to check. A window will appear with the site’s Alexa rank and a list of similar sites. Here’s an example of what shows up for Google:

Now it’s a question of where to find blogs that are open to guest posts. Here are a few tricks for finding opportunities within your industry:

Google Searches

Google can help you find guest post opportunities within your industry if you just know which terms to search. Try searching a keyword that’s relevant to your niche or industry, plus one of the following variations:

“submit a guest post”
“accepting guest posts”
“guest post guidelines”

For the example above, I searched self publishing (a term relevant to my industry) and “accepting guest posts,” which led me to many list posts like the first result, “20 Writing Blogs That Accept Guest Posts.”

Check Out Your Competition

Another option is to find sites where your competitors have written guest posts. You can do this using tools like Alexa or Ahrefs to see your competitors’ backlinks (sites linking back to them), which might include guest posts they have written.

There’s no guarantee that those sites will accept your pitch for a guest post, but their record shows that they are interested in content from sites very similar to yours.

3. Make a shortlist of sites and topics.

As you get closer to pitching your guest posts, you may find it helpful to create an organized list or spreadsheet with all the sites you plan to approach. You can even rank them in terms of priority based on relevance, Alexa ranking, and engagement.

Find and save the links to their guest post guidelines (or the appropriate contact info if they don’t have a page for guest post guidelines), and make notes of potential topics you might pitch.

Speaking of topics, what should you write about anyway?

Take some time to research each site you plan to approach. Browse through their existing content to get a feel for what they (and their readers) are interested in. Try to identify and content gaps, or think of ways that your expertise or commentary might add value for their audience.

Your guest post should:

interest the target site’s audience
demonstrate your expertise and authority on the subject
be original or fill gaps in the target site’s existing content
create natural openings for you to promote your interests and connect with your ideal audience

Make sure you check that the site doesn’t already have a post on your proposed topic. You may also want to brainstorm 2–3 topics to pitch to each site to increase your chances of success.

Check out more tips for finding new content ideas.

4. Prepare your pitch.

Now that you’ve identified some great content ideas, it’s time to sell them. You have to make sure your pitch gets in front of the right person and makes a compelling case for why your post should be featured on their site.

Here’s what you can do to increase the chances of your pitch getting accepted:

Find the right contact person: Just like when you’re writing a cover letter, it’s always best to find the name of the specific contact person in charge of blog submissions. Search the website for the blog manager or editor’s name, track down their contact info, and reach out to them directly (addressing them by name, of course). Tools like hunter.io can help you find professional emails easily.

Read and follow any guest post guidelines: If you do find a page with guidelines for guest posting, be sure to follow them precisely. Make the managing editor’s job easy by giving them exactly what they asked for.

Make it personal: Even if you’re pitching to dozens of blogs this week, you shouldn’t just copy and paste the same message for everyone. Customize each one with a little something about their website using your notes from your initial research, and be specific about why your content and expertise is an ideal match for their site.

Highlight the benefits for them: Your pitch should focus on what the blog stands to gain from your collaboration. Tell them what their readers will gain and how your work will add value to their site.

Offer proof: Include a few links to samples of your related work, social metrics, or any other supporting material that you think could be persuasive.

Follow up: If you don’t hear back within a week, send a polite follow-up email.

5. Write and submit a great post.

If your pitch is accepted—hooray! You’re halfway there. But now it’s time to buckle in because you still have to write a great blog post.

You should give your guest post the same effort and attention as you would a post for your own site. This is not only because you may want to work together again in the future and build an industry connection, but also because the whole point of guest blogging is to reach a wider audience and convince them to visit your site or buy your services.

Focus on creating valuable content, not being overly promotional. Your post shouldn’t read like an advertisement for your brand, product, or website. You can, however, include a link to your website somewhere relevant.

You should also write a bio that tells readers who you are and where they can learn more. The host site will probably provide clear guidelines for how many links you can include, but if you’re allowed more than one, it’s good to include one in the body and one in your bio.

6. Promote your post.

Keep your new connection alive by following up with the host site and helping them to promote and manage the post.

Share your guest post on social media and link to it on your own site. Ask the host site if there’s anything else you can do to help promote the post.

Keeping in touch means you’ll stay at the forefront of their minds when another opportunity arises or they need a post that you’d be perfect for.

Does Guest Posting Still Work?

Guest posting is still a highly effective strategy for growing your platform and reaching a wider audience. It allows you to spread awareness of your brand and can even improve your website’s domain rating.

Guest posting does take effort, and you shouldn’t expect overnight results. But over time, writing quality content for other quality sites can certainly help you reach your growth goals.

Did you find this post helpful? Let us know in the comments below!

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