The Beginner’s Guide to Guest Blogging [INFOGRAPHIC]

The Beginner’s Guide to Guest Blogging

What is Guest Blogging?

Guest blogging is a link building and brand building technique used by online marketers for the purpose of spreading awareness of their company, promoting their names or increasing their search engine rankings by contributing engaging content to 3rd party website owners. In exchange for the content, the guest blogger can receive credit via a hyperlink, publicity or both.

Step 1 – Do Some Research

Advanced Search Queries

• “guest blogging” [TOPIC]
• “guest bloggers” [TOPIC]
• “guest blog posting” [TOPIC]
• “write for us” [TOPIC]
• “contribute” [TOPIC]
• Learn more from @GeoffKenyon here or on his site.

Learn from the Experts

• BloggerLinkUp.com – An excellent way for guest bloggers and webmasters to meet, delivered straight to your inbox, by @CathyStucker.
• MyBlogGuest.com – Great community of guest bloggers and webmasters, all powered by an easy-to-use system, by @SEOSmarty.
• CitationLabs.com – Robust software to research, filter and expedite your outreach efforts. Worth every penny! Software built by @GarrettFrench.
• The Twitter Tool – Fantastic research tool and spreadsheet. Make sure to read the instructions here before using. Created by @EthanLyon

Step 2 – Prepare Your Work

Make your work presentable – When sending content along to the site owner, make sure your grammar is correct and includes your desired links. Most people have Word, but not always the new version, so make sure to save as a .doc.

Use heading tags to separate topics – Nobody wants to read a huge block of text. Separating topics in your article with the proper H1 and H2 tags makes it easy on the eyes.

Provide relevant images – It’s mostly a courtesy, but some webmasters prefer you to provide images. Save yourself a step and do it right from the get-go. Don’t have any? Go to Flickr and search, but give the owner credit.

Make sure the content follows the webmaster’s guidelines – Not following rules is a quick way of getting your post denied. Just read the rules on their guest blogging page. If they don’t have a page, use the industry standard – 400-words, 2 links, not promotional, on topic.

Include an internal link for the webmaster in your article – What better way to show the blog owner that you care about them than to show that you actually read their blog? Including an internal link to one of their other posts can go a long way when trying to get published on a blog.

Step 3 – Time for Outreach

• Rapportive – Simple plugin for Gmail that shows you important information about your contacts or those you’re about to contact. Excellent way to know who you’re talking to, before you click send.
• Boomerang for Gmail – Easy to use plugin for Gmail that can remind you in the future when an email hasn’t been responded to. Thes plugin is essential for guest blogging outreach to prevent forgetting about a webmaster.

Optimizing your response rate

Huge thanks and shout out to @JamesAgate, the founder of Skyrocket SEO for testing some of these theories. Summary below and full write up here.

• Women have a better response rate – Out of 437 positive responses received, 263 of them were sent from a woman and 174 from a man.
• Approach as an in-house employee or freelancer – The average positive response rate for an in-house employee and freelancer exceeded 60% compared to 50% as a marketing agency.
• Use proactive wording and be direct to save time – You need to “assume the sale” during outreach. Be confident in your content, attach it in the first email but make sure you’re following their directions. If they already accept guest bloggers, you don’t need to ask.
• Add a personal touch, don’t be a robot – This is a good time to use the Rapportive plugin for Gmail as discussed earlier to personalize your email.

“For guest posting, you want to have a more personal approach in your email. However, you don’t want to be overly personal and invade their bubble.” – @PeterAttia, Founder of CucumberNebula.com

Step 4 – Managing your Projects

Choose your weapon:

• Microsoft Excel – pretty much limitless, requires experience, allows multi user collaboration, costs involved.
• Google Docs – not as robust as Excel, easy to share, allows multi user collaboration, free.

We recommend the following column headings in your spreadsheet:

• Client
• Keyword
• Target URL
• Project
• Status
• Submitted to
• Webmaster Name
• Webmaster Contact
• Live URL
• Published Date
• Article Title

Tip: Try using conditional formatting on the “status” column to color cells based on what stage they are currently at. It makes it easy to view the progress at a glance.

This beginners guide brought to you by: GuestBlogPoster.com – Scalable guest blogging for SEO agencies, in-house teams and individuals. Contact us at (888) 297-0801 or email at [email protected].