If you’re not using guest blogging as a content marketing strategy, you’re missing out on a great way to promote your brand and increase your visibility.
If you haven’t been guest blogging, it’s time to start now. Guest blogging has been speculated to be dying for years, but it remains one of the most effective ways to promote yourself and your business.
Here are just a few examples that show how effective guest blogging can be. For example, Elna Cain used guest blogging to make a full-time income from freelance writing. Another example is Buffer, who used guest blogging to attract 100,000 customers.
In this guide, you will learn how to create and execute a successful guest blogging strategy by using successful guest blog post examples. Guest posting is an effective way to gain more visibility for your business and brand and improve lead generation.
What Are Guest Posts?
You can publish an article on someone else’s website as a guest post.
It’s that simple.
And people do this so they can get more brand awareness and traffic back to their website (also known as referral traffic).
Determine Your Guest Blogging Goals
Choose one of these three goals for guest blogging:
- To grow an audience for your blog
- To get new leads for your business
- To build relationships with other bloggers, and get backlinks to your website
Now that you know your goal, you can start submitting guest posts to blogs that will help you achieve this goal. Knowing your goal is crucial in deciding which blogs would be most appropriate to submit guest posts to.
You can use content on popular blogs to improve your search engine optimization, bring in more web traffic, and get more people to convert once they reach your site. You need to find blogs with strong domain authority. You can use a free tool like Ubersuggest to check this.
If you are trying to attract a wider audience or engage with your current audience, then you will want to find blogs that have a wide and engaged audience.
Benefits of Guest Blogging
If you want to improve your traffic and ROI for content marketing, guest blogging can be a helpful strategy.
As the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) points out, guest blogging is an essential part of your marketing funnel, providing offsite expert content.
Some more benefits of guest blogging are that it is an excellent way to build brand awareness, and the content you post on other sites tells new audiences about you.
New readers who visit your site or landing page as a result of guest blogging can help improve lead generation by subscribing.
If you regularly contribute content to other trusted and authoritative websites, people will see you as an expert in your field and this will positively impact the reputation of your business.
When considering the benefits of guest blogging, SEO should be one of the main priorities. By building links from high-quality sites, not only will the SEO ranking improve, but the position on search results pages will as well.
As a guest blogger, you gain from the guest blogging strategy, as does the blog that hosts you. Guest blogging helps site owners meet their content needs by providing content.
Guest Blogging Strategy Guide
In order to be an effective guest blogger, you must follow certain steps.
Know Your Goals
Your guest blogging strategy should start with knowing your goals. You need to know where you want to go if you want to be successful.
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’s important to have a specific goal in mind so that your bio is framed correctly and provides the information that you promised. This is the best way to build trust with the new audience you’re trying to reach.
Find Sites to Contribute To
Before you can write a guest blog post, you will need to find an active website that is looking for new content and is willing to accept guest authors. Furthermore, you should make sure that writing for the chosen website will help you achieve your desired goals.
How to Find a Site That Accepts Guest Posts
There are many ways to find websites that would be happy to accept guest posts.
For example, you can use Google to find sites that accept guest posts on the topics you want to write about. Some sample search queries include:
[topic keyword phrase] + “write for us”
[topic keyword phrase] + “guest article”
[topic keyword phrase] + “become a contributor”
You can also find guest posts on Twitter by searching for “guest post” or “guest article.” This will bring up a list of tweets with links to guest posts.
Make a list of all the sites where you found potential opportunities. You will need this list later to see if the opportunity is right for you.
If you want to find places where you can guest post, one option is to look at where your competitors are guest posting. Many people share their guest posts on social media or in email newsletters as a way to build their reputation, so you can usually find this information by following your competitors or subscribing to their newsletter.
You can find out where a website’s inbound links are coming from by looking at Domain Analytics » Backlinks in SEMRush.
Type the URL of the site you want to check into the search box to get a report on the site’s backlinks, anchor text, referring domains, and more.
Another place to find guest posting opportunities for your guest blogging strategy includes Alltop, which lists the top sites in almost every niche
How to Assess Guest Blogging Opportunities
In addition to finding guest blogging sites, you must determine if the site will be beneficial to your guest blogging strategy and goal.
The following are some areas that can be evaluated. Choose one of the locations you selected earlier to begin.
The first step is to check the domain authority for the site you’re considering. You can do this by using Moz’s Open Site Explorer. This will tell you if the site is well regarded online and whether it will provide good value in terms of links and possibly traffic if you post a guest blog.
How to Find Guest Blogging Opportunities
The first step in getting started with guest posting is to find opportunities. 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)
For example, to find guest post opportunities when selling plant seeds, it is helpful to look for gardening blogs that have an engaged audience of gardeners.
Google Searches
Just replace the keyword with keywords from your industry. Any of the following keyword searches can help you find guest posting opportunities on blogs related to your industry.
- keyword “submit a guest post”
- keyword “guest post”
- keyword “guest post by”
- keyword “accepting guest posts”
- keyword “guest post guidelines”
Searching for a blog’s guest post guidelines page, guest post submission page, or actual guest posts by other writers will help you learn more about how to become a guest blogger.
Prolific Guest Bloggers
Do you know any bloggers who post a lot of guest blogs? If you read a lot of blogs in your industry (which you should), you’ll recognize some of the same names appearing often in guest blogs.
Some of the most influential marketing guest bloggers are Neil Patel, Jeff Bullas, Mark Traphagen, Tony Right, Jenny Halasz, Brian Harnish, Kevin Indig, Adam Riemer, and Robyn Johnson, Benji Acciola, Kevin Rowe, Anna Crow, and Kirk Williams.
If you want to find guest blogging opportunities in your industry, start by searching “prolific guest bloggers” in your industry on Google, along with the phrase “guest post by.” This will show you all of the blogs that these guest bloggers have posted on in the past. These are likely good places for you to guest post as well. If you know a guest blogger in your industry, ask them to introduce you to the owners of the blogs they’ve guest posted on in the past.
Competitor Backlinks
If you’ve ever looked at a competitor’s backlinks while working on your SEO campaign, they probably have backlinks from guest posts.
If you have access to tools like Open Site Explorer, you can look at your competitor’s backlinks to find any blog posts they have written.
If you can’t find any, try searching on Google.
Replace “domain.com” with your competitor’s domain to find out which sites they have written for.
Example:
link:backlink.io -neilpatel.com “guest post”
Social Searches
A good way to find out which blogs are looking for guest posts is to do a Twitter search for “guest post.” This will give you the latest tweets about guest posts in your industry. Just follow the links to see which blogs are accepting guest posts.
MyBlogGuest
Lastly, there is My Blog Guest, a community of guest bloggers. By signing up for free, you can search for blogs that accept guest posts. Even better, you can post your information stating that you are looking to write guest posts on a particular topic, so blog owners can find you!
How to Be the Best Guest Blogger
If you want to become a regular contributor to a blog or get the blog owner to brag about you, then promote your post to your own audience. The owner will love it if you bring them new readers.
Be sure to reply to comments or questions that people leave on your post if you want to build authority in your industry.