Without a doubt, you'll start a heated debate. Some will say it's a waste of time. Others will swear by it and treat it like an essential part of their marketing strategy.
As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle: yes, it can be a waste of time and resources, but, done right, it can be a powerful fuel for your growth. Aside from the brand awareness aspect of it, guest Posting sites can also be an ethical and sustainable way to build high-quality backlinks and improve your SEO performance.
That's why I wanted to create this comprehensive guide to guest blogging that anyone, from any industry, can start using right away.
Here you'll learn the essential steps to creating a successful strategy:
Set specific, achievable goals.
Choose topics that will benefit your own business goals.
Find reputable guest blogging sites.
Conduct guest blogging outreach.
Write the post.
Track your posts' results over time.
But before we dive into the strategy, let's first define what guest blogging really is.
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What is guest blogging?
Guest blogging is a content marketing tactic that involves writing and publishing one or more articles for other websites.
These articles include your byline and, often times, are highlighted by the editor of that website (or publication) as being written by a "guest author" or a "contributor".
Depending on the publication, you might receive compensation for your guest posting services efforts. However, that's not always the case.
Some publications will offer non-monetary rewards for your post, instead, like a link back to your personal website or social media accounts.
Let's dive into a few major benefits of guest blogging:
Benefits of Guest Blogging
Here are some of the biggest benefits people get from guest blogging:
Build a profile as an industry expert/thought leader
Grow your personal brand
Grow an audience (social followers, subscribers etc.)
Improve SEO performance
Build authoritative backlinks
Build relationships and drive new partnerships e.g. co-marketing partnerships, job offers
Drive referral traffic
Improve a company's brand awareness
Get more leads, users and even customers
Now that we've covered that, let's dive-deep into each step of the guest blogging process if you want to become a successful guest blogger for major publications
How to Become a Successful Guest Blogger
Set specific, achievable goals.
The first step to start a successful guest blogging process is to set attainable, measurable goals.
These goals might be related to your business performance (like getting more leads or clients) or your website performance (like improving your search visibility or your referral traffic).
Whatever your goal is, make it SMART. When you have a clear goal, it becomes much easier to the pick topics you write about, the blogs where you want to publish, how frequently you write, and so on. Most importantly, a SMART goal will tell you if this tactic is right for your business and how much you should invest in it in the future.
If you're just getting started, here are five examples of measurable goals you can set:
Get X referral visits from your guest posts OR Increase referral traffic by X% from your guest posts
Get X leads from referral traffic from your guest posts OR Increase the number of leads from from your guest posts by X%
Get X clients from your guest posts OR Increase clients from your guest posts by X%
Improve your SEO performance or SERP visibility by X%
Get X number of high-quality backlinks to relevant content from your guest posts
My personal preference is to set goals around referral visits, SEO traffic, and backlinks. A change in these metrics can be somewhat easily traced back to guest posts. Clients and leads are obviously more important for the business and can be influenced by guest blogging, but correct attribution can be a challenge.
Next let's talk about keyword research and how that fuels the content creation process.
Choose topics that will benefit your own business goals.
Many times, guest bloggers fail because they focus on the publications instead of the content. That's a good strategy to make sure you get published, but it serves the publishers' goals, instead of yours.
To have a successful guest blogging program, pick topics that serve your ultimate goal — whether that's referral traffic, SEO performance, leads, or clients.
Whether you’re a seasoned blogger or you’re just learning how to start a blog, you should build a successful guest blogging program by picking topics that serve your ultimate goal, whether that’s referral traffic, SEO performance, leads or clients.
Start by making a short list of your top website pages that you want to promote and include in your future guest blogs. For each page, analyze your current status, like your monthly SEO traffic, and set a goal that you want to achieve in a certain timeframe of guest blogging. You can have an overall website goal as well as page-specific goals.
Content Mapping for Guest Blogging
For each target page, pick an overarching topic that is relevant to your expertise and would be useful for readers. Then you can start using keyword research tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs (just to name a couple) to fuel your bank ideas for future guest posts.
Let's take a meta-example and say we build a guest blogging strategy around the overarching topic of "guest blogging". We can create different types of content under the umbrella of this topic: how-to articles, thought leadership, case studies, and ultimate guides. For each type of content we can find relevant article ideas using keyword research tools.
Guest Blogging Topic Map
Find reputable guest blogging sites.
Now that you have your content ideas mapped out, it's time to find relevant publications and guest blogging sites.
Start by putting together a list of target websites, as in the example below:
Guest Blogging Sites List
Here's how you can discover guest blogging opportunities and populate your list:
Use Advanced Search Operators — where you use advanced search operators like "intext:submit a guest post".
Use Google Reverse Image Search — where you take the headshot of a popular guest blogger and you use it to find places where they've published in the past. Those publications most likely accept guest posts
Look for lists of top websites that accept guests posts.
Check your competitors' backlinks.
Next, make sure you prioritize your list and only pitch blogs that have:
Domain Authority of 40 or higher (or Domain Rating if you're using Ahrefs)
ject done: measuring the results.
