101 Guide to Guest Posting for Bloggers

The Bright and Dark Sides of Guest Blogging

Thus, Jon Morrow (Smart Blgger, ex-Boost Blog Traffic) relied on guest blogging to build the audience.

And you know what? He managed to get 13,000 subscribers even before his blog had been launched! What Jon did was writing guest articles to authoritative websites and sending traffic to his landing page with a blog launch trailer.

Leo Widrich (Buffer) had published 150 guest posts in 9 months. Solely through those articles, BufferApp acquired around 100,000 of their first customers.

And here’s Aaron Orendorff. Guest blogging and a regular contributor to top dogs like Unbounce, Copyblogger, Fast Company, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, and many others helped him build the personal brand (IconiContent) and join the team of key influencers in marketing.

These guys are heavy-hitters! Their stories are palmar examples of what stellar guest blogging should be. But the ugly truth of life is, we quickly give up on the good when a bad comes.

Did you hear that oldy-moldy verse about translators?

“Many critics, no defenders, translators have but two regrets: when we hit, no one remembers, when we miss, no one forgets.”

Replace “translators” with “guest blogger” – and the meaning remains there still.

So when that squad of audacious marketers and hard sellers came and cracked the bright side of guest blogging, most webmasters went all out on escaping its dark side.

How?

• They suspect guest bloggers of ulterior motives (read: link building) and, therefore, stop accepting guest posts at their websites.
• They adjust the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all outbound links they publish at their blogs.

Sad but true:

Guest bloggers have a quite shaky reputation today.

But They Are Different in 2024

We all remember the case of anny Iny whose guest blogging strategy allowed him to grow from 0 to 23,000 monthly page views, don’t we? Specifically, he had to write over 80 guest posts of high quality (it matters!) for high-quality (yes, again!) publications to get this result.

As you can see, it depends. I would say that modern guest bloggers write for traffic only when their personal blogs are not that huge to generate it. But even in this case, some choose spending resources on epic content for own blogs in hopes for natural backlinks and brand authority rather than creating it for others in hopes for traffic.

This suggests that modern guest bloggers care about lead generation.

They don’t worry about Google algorithms updates because they know: Google is smart enough to tell the difference between writing for SEO and people. They concentrate on blog posts quality, telling stories to trigger emotions and solve readers’ problems because they understand: value and emotions, not links, are what builds trust and generate leads.

Modern guest bloggers develop a personal brand and build their audience. They contribute content for more people to know them and, therefore, back to them. Networking is one of their primary goals because they realize:

Connections are what determines business success.

And what is the best way to connect with authoritative bloggers? You name it: to write a guest post their audience will love!

Or better yet, write two guest posts for them.

Or even three.

Productive relations are the most valuable thing to get from guest blogging in 2018. Writing for others, you come to the fore and make a lot of friends.

So…

Authority, brand awareness, lead generation, and networking with key influencers are the focus of a modern guest blogger.

Whether they get referral traffic or not, and whether they backlink from guest posts or not, they still profit from exposure and credibility. Guest blogging allows them to build a solid portfolio to prove their awesomeness to prospective customers.

Who cares about backlinks when your work is live on Forbes or The New York Times, after all? Not the worst way to have the better of your impostor syndrome, huh? 😉

So now let's talk about how to actually do guest posting in 2024 - the right way.

Determine Your Goals

The first thing you need to determine is what you want to achieve from your guest posting campaign. Embarking on this road without a clear goal in mind is a surefire way to waste a lot of time and energy.

Some of the most common guest blogging goals include:

• Getting Traffic to Your Site: If you’re new to the market and your audience is practically zero, guest blogging can be an excellent way to increase your exposure and put your name on the map.
• Positioning Yourself as an Expert: If your platform is not big enough, you can leverage some else’s popularity to showcase your expertise in your industry. In this day and age, when people are bombarded with information, establishing yourself as a thought leader can help you stand out.
• Build Backlinks to Your Site: A few years back, Matt Cutts from Google serenaded the death of guest posting. After creating an uproar among marketers and SEO professionals, he later said that he was referring to guest blogging as an aggressive link building technique. So, what’s the truth? The truth is that guest posting can help you with your SEO efforts as long as you get backlinks only from high-authority sites in your niche. So, be very careful when searching for guest blogging sites.

That brings us to…

Find Guest Posting Opportunities

This is probably one of the most difficult parts: deciding which blogs to target. To make the most of your efforts, take your goals into account.

Blogs within your industry are an excellent way to establish yourself as an authority in the niche, but they’re not very effective if you’re trying to get your brand’s name out there.

Blogs in related niches, however, will give you access to a larger audience pool, meaning that they are perfect for driving traffic to your website and building your email list.

Here are the steps you should follow if you want to find the right guest posting opportunities:

• Do a Google Search

Google can be one of the best places to look for guest posting opportunities – if you know how to use it. By using certain Google query commands, you can ensure that the search engine only returns relevant results.

One trick is to use the inanchor command to find blogs and websites that use your keyword as the anchor text for links. To ensure that the results you’re getting allow for guest posting, add keyphrases, such as “guest post,” “contributed by,” or “article written by” after the inanchor command.

Example: inanchor:”keyword” “guest post.”

Just replace “keyword” with actual keywords from your industry.

Example: inanchor:web design accepting guest post

• Reach Out to Prolific Guest Bloggers

If you are reading blogs related to your industry, which I’m sure you do, then you already know who has a large audience and can help you grow your startup. For example, in the online marketing space, the list includes names like Neil Patel, Gregory Ciotti or Jeff Bullas.

If you don’t know for sure who the most prolific bloggers in your niche are, then you can do a Google search with the name of your industry followed by the key phrase “guest posts by. “

• Study Your Competitors’ Backlinks

If you’re just starting out and don’t have a backlink analysis of your competitors you can, once again, turn to Google for help. All you have to do is go to the homepage and do a search for link:domain.com –domain.com guest post, where you replace “domain.com” with your competitor’s domain. This trick should reveal the sites your competitor has written for in the past.

If you want to make this part easier, you can just purchase a few great tools that can help you find potential target blogs:

• One Site Explorer
• Ahrefs
• Majestic SEO

Come Up with a Fresh, Creative Guest Post Idea

You’ve narrowed down the list of websites that can help you accomplish your goals. The hard work isn’t over yet.

Prolific bloggers get tons of guest posting requests every day. To maximize your chances of getting your post published, you need to pitch an idea that is creative, original and adds value to their audience. Simply rehashing the same boring topics that people have already read about a million times won’t help you make the cut.

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Use tools like BuzzSumo to look for the most shared posts for each of your target blogs. Ask yourself, can you approach these top stories from a different angle and improve the original story? Can you provide new insights that can add value to an old post?

Before you put effort into creating your post, make sure that your idea is truly unique. You want your blog post to say something new about the topic and help the audience find a solution to a problem they’re having.

Prepare Your Pitch

There are a few things you should do before you reach out to bloggers and pitch your ideas. First of all, you need to get yourself familiarized with your target blog’s content. Of course, you know the blog is related to your niche, but you need to ask yourself what level their audience is (beginners, intermediate, advanced,) what type of audience are they writing for (B2B or B2C,) and what type of content do they usually publish?

Then, you need to take a look at past guest posts and see how they performed. Did they get as many shares and comments as regular posts? Does the audience seem interested in this type of content?

Lastly, you need to become a familiar face in the blog community before reaching out and pitching your ideas. The blog owner will be more likely to accept your guest post if you’ve been an active user on their site and social media channels. Take the time to read and comment on their latest post and engage with them on social media. That way, when you pitch your guest post idea, you won’t be a complete stranger.

You should also make sure that you spend enough time crafting your guest blogging proposal. Here are a few best practices you should keep in mind.

Read the Guidelines

The first thing you need to do before sending your proposal is to read the guidelines (if applicable, of course,) and follow them closely. As I mentioned before, prolific bloggers receive a lot of requests, so if you can’t even bother to read and follow these basic guidelines, they will assume that you’re not a professional, and they’ll ignore your pitch.

Write a Professional Subject Line

The email subject line can determine whether your email will get opened and read or sent directly to spammy. clickbait subject lines, such as “Check My Amazing Blog Post!” or “I am a successful blogger. HIRE ME!” will make you look unprofessional.

Instead, you should write a subject line that is clear and straightforward.

Example: Guest Post Submission: 10 Creative Ways to Use Snapchat for Business

Personalize Your Email

As someone who has made a career from guest blogging, I can tell you that nothing annoys a blogger more than receiving a generic email that starts with “To whom it may concern” or “Dear Sir or Madam.”

Find the recipient’s name and use it. Write your email in a professional yet friendly tone, and don’t waste too much of their time with irrelevant details.

Tell Them Who You Are and Why They Should Care

Start your email by presenting yourself. You can also add a link to your LinkedIn profile, Twitter account or other social media networks to prove that you are, in fact, a real person.

Be sure to explain why they should consider you as a guest blogger. Provide a few links to posts you’ve published in the past (including your blog) and tell them about your current project. Don’t be modest. Even if you are not a big deal yet, try to sound like one.

What Next?

You’ve managed to score a few guest posts on important blogs in your niche. Now, it’s time to kick back and relax.

Not so fast!

You still have some work to do.

The next step you need to take to ensure a prolific guest posting campaign is to promote your article both on your blog and social media channels.

In the end, don’t forget to measure the results of your campaign:

• How much traffic each guest post sends to your website?
• Check the number of comments and shares each post receives.
• Are your guest blog posts generating any leads?

Look at all these metrics to determine how effective your guest posts were and what you can do in the future to improve them.

Guest Posting Mistakes to Avoid

I have a confession. I am really embarrassed when I tell people about my blogging journey.

The “gurus” and “experts” tell you that blogging success is a smooth line when it is, in reality, a big mess.

My blogging experience was like the second graph.

When I first started blogging for my copywriting business I was overwhelmed, but I thought it was best to jump in and start.

One of the methods I read over and over for getting more traffic, credibility, and authority was guest posting.

I spent months sending out guest post pitches into what felt like an abyss. When I finally managed to land a position, my first post was rejected. Ouch.

I thought about throwing in the towel, but luckily I had a Mickey Goldmill in my corner encouraging me.

Guest posting was a long and emotional process of learning a ton of lessons. I want to help you avoid the journey I had to go through.

I am going to share with you the five most common guest posting mistakes I see bloggers make when trying to guest post (Yes, I made each one of these mistakes at one point or another).

1. Limiting Yourself to Your Field

I get it.

It makes sense to try to guest post on a blog that writes about exactly what you do and has the same market as you do.

But when you really think about this, it is a terrible idea.

You are trying to siphon off a blogger’s audience. It does not work very well for getting an audience, but can build authority. I had to learn this the hard way.

I learned if you write about the same topics and appeal to the same market, the blogger you are pitching to will most often not respond.

If you do manage to get the guest post position, it will result in minimal traffic because the audience will likely be loyal to the blogger, so they will not leave to consume your information.

Imagine if your small town grocery store went up to Wal-Mart and said I would like to pass out my ads in your grocery store. What do you think Wal-Mart would say? Yeah, right. Over Sam’s dead body.

Instead, the fastest way to get more traffic is by going outside of your domain. One of my most successful pieces of content had nothing to do with my business.

Here is how all of this works, awhile back I worked as the main marketer for a dog training business (Trained Special dogs like hunting dogs, guard dogs and search and rescue dogs).

They wanted me to work on expanding their web presence and to be seen as an authority, not just in their local area, but across the web. They wanted to begin creating dog training programs.

I wrote articles on websites that were unrelated to dog training, but that could still relate to dogs in one way or another.

Since they were known for guard dogs, we went to home security blogs, video camera blogs, etc. We pitched articles like, “Adding extra defense to your home with a guard dog.” “How to keep your dog out of the garden” was another blog post I wrote on a gardening website.

Here are the results of that article, most of the traffic did not stick, but it allowed the dog training business to pick up more customers.

Many of these people were interested in what we have to offer. The goal is to think about who your audience is and all the potential places they may hang out.

Do not limit yourself to your field.

What can you write that targets your audience, but is on different topics?

2. Not Bringing Out Your Nutty Professor

The movie “The Nutty Professor” has been remade a few times, despite how terrible of a movie I think it is. I do think we can learn the value of research from the movie.

Ever stumble on a blog post on your favorite blogger’s website, read an article and think your favorite blogger is doing a terrible job with the post?

You later learn that you somehow skimmed over the fact that it was a guest post article.

The best guest posting articles are done by those who do their research. They research the blogger’s audience, their language, their humor and their style of writing.

Believe it or not, people do write guest posts without doing any research of the blog they are trying to guest post for. Do not be this person.

The audience of the website you want to guest post for loves a certain format, style, and certain blog topics. They also love knowing there is a purpose for every article.

Do not try to write something you think will be different and better for the audience. They will not be able to connect with your writing.

Chances are the place you want to blog for has done their research on their audience to know what types of articles work best, what style to write in and a thousand other variables.

I made this mistake. Remember how I said I finally landed a guest posting position and later had my post rejected after spending 15 hours writing the article? It was because I did not do my research.

It was not that the article was terrible, but it did not speak the language of the blogger’s audience and was not formatted in the same style the blogger’s website was.

Save yourself from my mistakes. Doing the research first will save you hours when it comes time to write the blog post or pitching potential places to post.

Simple research can be done using Alexa Rankings on the blog you want to guest post at, or to make things super simple, just ask the blog owner if you are really uncertain.

For example, trying to pitch Sue on how social media is ruining business probably is not the brightest idea someone could have.

If you spend even one second on her website you would know she is a strong advocate of social media. Yet, I am willing to bet she has received a pitch like this because I know I have seen some like this.

3. Making an Opinionated Post

Look, your mom is an awesome person, but she was wrong when she told you that you were special.

Nobody gives a crud about you or your opinions unless you are considered a thought leader in your industry.

Your points need to be backed up by data, facts, charts or numbers. The level to which you will have to back up your points depends on the blog you are posting for. If you do your research then you will know.

For example, posting on a site like Lifehacker will require much more data and facts.

The audience over at Lifehacker tends to love numbers and charts. They do not take opinions lightly and will not blindly be led to drink the water.

On the other hand, a site like Tiny Buddha does not require as much data. It can be more based on stories and opinions.

4. Incorrect Linking

Listen, if your reasoning for guest posting is simply for backlinking or to make money through affiliate links, then you need to rethink your process.

If you pitch to places, we can generally tell if you are trying to get backlinks, make sales or are genuinely wanting to provide value to our readers.

Linkbacks are nice, but your main goal should be to provide value and get that value into the hands of other readers.

I have never done this myself, but you would be surprised the links people will put into a guest post article. I have seen people try to link to their website like every sentence.

I have even seen people include their own affiliate link on a blogger’s website.

All of this is just bad ethics. Some websites may be okay with this type of linking, but most sites frown upon it.

Popular bloggers value the relationship with their audience well before they value the sale.

Focus on delivering excellent content so the audience will want to go back to your website and read more of your content.

Be mindful of your links. Every website has different rules. One author may accept any link back to your website while others may not allow any. I have published on both types of websites.

To find out, ask the site owner, or many places post “Guest Post Submission Guidelines” somewhere on their website.

5. Making the Blog Owner Work

To secure a guest posting position, you need to make it as easy as possible for the site owner to say yes.

If they are popular, then they do not have time to play around with your article all day.

This means you need to make the guest posting suggestions, write the article, and make it so the article can be dragged and dropped right into WordPress or whatever management software they use.

I use this as a selling point when I am trying to guest post. Notice I said I will do all the work. I am going to make it so simple that all she has to do is say yes and then copy and paste.

Conclusion

I’m not going to lie: Guest posting takes a lot of time, hard work, and trials and errors. It’s not a once-and-done tactic, but one that takes the effort to implement and generate results. But, the efforts are well worth it in the long run.