If you’re considering a solid link building method, how to build your popularity or how to boost your brand’s online image within your industry, contributing to relevant blogs is one of the best ways to effectively accomplish any of those goals. With old link building methods getting the boot from Google’s introduction of machine learning, building links is more important than ever and blog writing is an excellent tool you can use to your advantage.
Leveraging Free Services
Guest blog posting isn’t necessarily new, but it’s spreading like wildfire. An increasing number of websites are creating “write for us” pages and services like BloggerLinkUp.com, and MyBlogGuest.com to make it easy for others to offer articles.
If you’re approaching websites manually, there are some easy advanced search operators to get you started. Try:
- • [KEYPHRASE] “write for us”
- • [KEYPHRASE] “guest blog”
- • [KEYPHRASE] “guest bloggers”
- • [KEYPHRASE] “contributors”
Once you find websites that accept outside content, either follow their contact instructions or approach them via Facebook and Twitter. In fact, social media is very powerful when it comes to finding blogs. A post promoted on YouMoz revealed a very useful Twitter guest post finder. The tool allows you to type in your keywords and it will return any websites found on Twitter that have posted guest posts on that topic in less than a minute.
Getting Accepted is Most of the Challenge
Just because a site owner wants content, doesn’t mean they want yours. Unless you can talk the talk within the industry, you may get a door shut in your face. Here are five simple tips that will help increase your odds of actually getting your content posted on another website. Thank you in advance, James Agate, for contributing to this list.
- • Being female helps. In a blog outreach test, women got a much better response rate than men. While women got a positive response rate 64 percent of the time, men only came up with 46 percent success.
- • You need to walk the walk. Approaching a blog using your job title yields a much higher success rate, which is not all that surprising. All things considered, if I were the one allowing guest posts, I would want to make sure the person talking is competent in the subject they’re presenting.
- • Make the process easy. If I’m posting your content, don’t make me do half of the work. Make sure you triple check all your spelling and grammar. And because nobody wants duplicate content, make sure you tell them that it’s been copyscape.com checked (and actually do it). Also, unless they ask you to pitch ideas beforehand just give them the article upfront. By doing this, there will be less email back and forth and they will have everything they need right from the get go.
- • Stroke their ego. If you can show them that you actually care about their website, it’ll go a long way. Try to include an internal link in your blog post to another page on their website. This helps show genuine interest in their blog.
- • Try, try, and try again. People get busy and because guest bloggers are not top priority for most, it’s possible that your guest blog pitch might not get heard the first time. While most site owners will respond the first time, if you don’t get a reply within a few days take the time to write again. Doing so will drastically increase your odds of getting your content published.
Hopefully this guest blog posting advice works for you as much as it does for us. What are some of your creative tactics to entice a blog owner to publish your content? Share them with all of us below!
About the author
Thanks for the post, Aubrey, and for the link to James Agate’s excellent information, too. Your pick and summary of his key points was spot on, and clearly conveyed.