How To Nail Your Next Guest Posting Campaign

Guest posting is one of the best ways to build backlinks to your website, especially when you don’t have a large budget to work with in order to buy links from highly authoritative blogs and websites.

You can’t just grab a few templates from the internet, research a list of sites that you want links from, and then start mass mailing all of the owners in hopes of getting your content featured.

Life just doesn’t work that way.

Instead, you need to develop the right mindset. Getting into the right mindset will help you see substantially higher returns on your effort, making it easier for you to keep pushing forward than if you were to send out a few dozen emails and get zero responses.

This post isn’t going to necessarily break down the tools that you need to use, or the exact ways you should go about landing guest posts on bigger sites, but will dive more into the mindset that you need to get into and the best practices to help you land more posts for the amount of emails you send out.

To get started, I will break down one of the strategies that I use, that sees average returns on the time I’ve invested, making it great for people who don’t necessarily have the creative power to land guest post spots with highly influential people, and people that do not have substantial amounts of time available to devote to the strategy.

When you’re able to take what I’m giving you, and tweak it so that it fits your specific campaign, your results will dramatically skyrocket. That does take effort on your part, so I want you to avoid getting into the mindset that you can take shortcuts.

Taking shortcuts is actually going to add more time to the process. Trust me, I know. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and nothing works better than being honest about what you’re doing, what you want, and getting straight to the point.

Most shortcuts that I have found have come from actually doing the process, so they’re not exactly shortcuts in the common sense of the word. Instead, they’re more efficient ways to approach the process.

In the end, there are no “hacks” or shortcuts to help you see success quicker because you’re dealing with live human beings that have an audience they need to take care of.

The biggest shortcut you’re going to be hearing spouted by other people is that you need to use the same basic principals to find blogs and websites that you want to obtain a link from. These shortcuts actually reduce your results because of one specific reason.

If you’re using the same methods to find new blogs that are being touted by the gurus, every other person that has found their blog, and their methods is going to be using the exact same strategies.

By thinking on your feet and evolving the methods they’re giving you, you’ll be able to get in front of people that don’t normally get hammered with guest post requests -- and your results will increase.

Also, I want to make a note that most people reading this really shouldn’t be buying links. I’m not saying that buying links doesn’t work, but the strength of the links you can get by shooting out a few emails (after reading this in its entirety) you’ll be able to save substantial amounts of money and obtain all of the links you need for free.

I’ve built links in some highly competitive industries, and I can tell you that the strength of the links that I receive by spending a few hours of time sending emails greatly outweigh the strength of the links that I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on.

Let’s get started, shall we?

How To Easily Get Links To Your Website

There’s no mistaking that backlinks are powerful. Both in terms of search engine rankings, and driving traffic to your website outside of the search engines.

Search engine algorithms still rank the strength and niche relevance of your backlinks as one of their biggest ranking factors, and that fact isn’t going to be changing anytime soon.

If you want to alleviate your dependence on search engine algorithms, you’re going to need the same high authority, niche relevant links pointing to your website.

If the algorithms ever decide you’re not worthy enough to send traffic to, those same high authority, niche relevant links are going to continue sending traffic to your website for years into the future.

here's one of my authority sites - 100% of the link building has been done via outreach and guest posts

You can go ahead and do away with all of the SEO knowledge you’ve gathered from the big name SEO blogs and gurus, touting that you need to gain links the natural way.

By natural, what they’re really saying is “slow” and “build it and they will come”.

You have to take their advice into perspective. Their “content marketing” strategies are based on already having a large following, and having to perform much less work to generate new links than folks like you and I have to do.

This is especially true when you’re starting a brand new website, and aren’t going to be able to get links from massive websites like TechCrunch or The Huffington Post.

Step #1: It Starts With Your Content

If you’re trying to get people to link to your content, you’re going to need content that is actually relevant to their audience.

This is especially true if you’re working in a smaller niche or industry and want to obtain links from bigger, more general websites.

The goal for your guest posting campaign should be to receive high-quality links that are highly relevant to the content on your website.

This is the best way to ensure that you’re actually going to increase your rankings in the search engines over the long term, but it’s also going to help you rank your guest posts higher in the search results, which gives you another source of traffic.

more guest posts = more traffic sources

Larger, authoritative websites will have a built in audience that can be funneled through your links for years to come, as long as the content on your website is actually something that they want to see.

When your guest post ranks in the search engines, it’s going to continue delivering traffic even if your website happens to take a hit and gets demoted in the search results.

This is an aspect that you have to consider as you move along and works best when you already have an idea for the types of websites you want to get links from.

As you find new websites, you can custom tailor the content on your own to match up well with what their readers want to see and increase your chances of landing the guest posting spot.

Step #2: Figure Out Who To Write For

There are hundreds of different ways you can find websites that will accept your guest posts. One of the most common is to use Google’s search results and the list of queries that will help you actively target sites that you know are willing to accept posts.

To give you a disclaimer, the search queries I’m about to list are going to be used by everyone and their brother, so if you intend to use them yourself, you’re going to need to come up with creative methods of your own to keep you separated from the rest of the pack.

Here’s a basic list of queries you can type into Google to find websites in your industry that accept posts:

To use them, replace the word keyword with a keyword related to the content on your website.

Remember, the closer you can match the content on your site to the content on the site that you want a link from, the better your results are going to be.

As you’re going through the results, make a couple different lists inside of your spreadsheet. You want to gather as much information as you can about who they are, what they write about, how to contact them, and how often they accept guest posts.

Put each of the links in your spreadsheet, and move onto the next step.

Step #3: Research Their Website

Once you’ve built a spreadsheet of 50-100 different blogs that you want to guest post on, you’ll need to start digging in and figuring out as much as you can about the website owners.

While you’re researching each website, write down a few ideas for content that you think they would accept. This is going to help you in the next step when you actually start sending emails to each of them.

You’ll also want to track down as much contact information as you can. Gather their contact form URL, their email, any social profiles you can find, and the editor’s information, if the website uses one.

Put your Sherlock hat on and dig in to the  research

This is an area where a lot of people are going to drop the ball, and a lack of research will show through whenever you start sending out emails. If you want to increase the number of links you get compared to the number of emails you send, spend more time researching than you do reaching out.

Make a note of how often they publish guest posts.

Sites that have a higher guest post publish rate are going to be more eager to accept the content you send over to them than sites that consist of 95% of the owners content, with very few guest posts.

Step #4: Create Your Pitch

Now comes the fun part. 

Emailing each of the owners that you’ve just researched, with a few ideas for content that you think their readers would want to see.

Again, this is an area that you don’t want to take shortcuts because coming up with the ideas you want to pitch to the owners will help get their wheels spinning and make them curious about the content you can provide.

You also don’t want to use the same pitch that’s been overused by so many other bloggers.

If the owner can sense that you’re being impersonal, they’ll delete your email. If they can tell that you’ve done your research and actually crafted a pitch tailored to their website and their audience, your chances of landing the spot dramatically increase.

I’ve seen the best results by keeping my pitches short, and sweet. Here’s a basic template you can use (and tweak) to fit your needs: