What is guest blogging?
Guest blogging is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways to attract visitors to a website.
With blog blogging, you’re hitting three birds with not one stone:
- You’re improving your SEO by getting at least one high-quality backlink to your site.
- You attract a new audience t your site.
- You get email subscribers (if you know how to do it)
But the process of finding, pitching, and accepting guest blogging opportunities can be tedious and complicated. That’s why I’ve created this 12k-word article in which I’ll show you how you can grow your site with guest blogging. I left no stone unturned. This is the most complete guide on guest blogging ever.
How to Find Guest Blogging Opportunities
I can imagine you right now: you’re excited and ready to start writing amazing content and getting it published in major publications. It’s great that you have this optimistic attitude, but before you write a word you need to know where you will be publishing and if they want you to write for them. There’s nothing worse than spending hours writing an amazing piece of content and seeing everyone reject it. You come up with the perfect idea that you want to write about. You give all your best suggestions, create simple but useful graphics with Canova, and use interesting quotes and research to back up your ideas. Nothing can go wrong, right?
Well, it can. You can reject your pitch. And that amazing article you wrote? It will cost nothing. This represents a huge waste of your time and effort. I know someone who went through this painful process. It wasn’t me, of course. This is a friend. It’s called, um, Ian Kellner. Ian learned the hard way that creating content first is not the way to start with guest blogging. You first need to find a site that accepts provide guest posts Do follow and NO follow links, which is less common than it was a few years ago. Next, the site needs to be relevant to your interests and expertise. Finally, the site needs some sort of authority (both SEO and brand-wise) and traffic.
The entire course of finding guest blogging open doors can be separated into the accompanying advances:
Step 1: Create the sheet
Before you do your first Google search, you need to set up an organized sheet that will help you organize all the places you find with their relative relevance and authority.
You have several options to choose from: you can use Ever note, Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel (a new app created by some whiz kids at a little industry called Microsoft), or good old pen and paper.
(No, that’s not the name of a new app, although that makes me think…) In my case, I’ll be using Microsoft. In your app of choice, create 5 to 10 columns. In each column, you’ll include every attribute that will help you see if it makes sense to come up with ideas and pitch them. This list of attributes depends on what you want to focus on and how sophisticated you want to make it. The basic idea is to create a simple CRM where you will track the different sites you have found and how you are doing with your reach.
Step #2: Find Guest Blogging Goals
There are two ways to find your guest blogging goals. The first step involves looking for sites that accept guest posts and seeing if they are high-quality sites and relevant to you. Many sites publicly mention that they accept guest posts and even welcome pitches. This makes the cycle much easier for you. The problem this creates is that many of these sites are not high-quality or relevant. In other cases, despite publicly stating that they accept guest posts, these sites do not accept the majority of them. For example, despite Hub spot saying they accept guest posts, they generally don’t consider any pitches unless you’re an expert or one of their content teams. There should be no connection (at least that’s my experience).
How to Find Blog Manager Email
I have found two apparatuses that can assist you find any blog manager’s email. Let’s say you wanted to publish on Crazy Egg. The blog is managed by Shawn Work. To find her email information, here’s what you’ll do. First, you’ll go to Hunter and add the site to the search bar. Then, you’ll find the manager’s email in the results. In the example below, we cannot find his email address. Fortunately, Hunter tells you the most common email patterns so you can anticipate a manager’s email.
