The Complete Guide to Guest Posting and Blogging for Blog Promotion
For bloggers and content marketers, guest posting represents an invaluable opportunity to expand reach, build credibility, and drive website traffic.
By leveraging external platforms, you gain access to engaged new audiences and increase awareness for your brand.
In this comprehensive guest posting guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know to utilize guest posting for blog promotion, including:
– The benefits of guest blogging
– Finding the best guest blogging opportunities
– Crafting compelling pitches
– Optimizing your author bio
– Promoting your guest posts
– Avoiding common mistakes
– Guest blogging metrics and ROI
– Sample outreach templates and pitches
We’ll include an extensive guest posting and blogging FAQ section to address additional questions.
If executed strategically as part of your overall content marketing plan, guest posting can deliver outstanding returns by growing your audience, authority, and traffic.
Why Guest Posting Matters for Blog Promotion
Let’s examine seven essential benefits guest posting delivers:
Increased Brand Exposure
Contributing blog posts beyond your site introduces your brand to new audiences that likely have never heard of you. Placing your articles and bio before these qualified, targeted readers provides publicity you couldn’t gain alone.
Backlink Building
Quality guest posts allow you to earn backlinks and citations on external authority websites closely related to your niche. These SEO backlinks signal to search engines like Google that other reputable sites find your content valuable, which boosts rankings.
Establishes Thought Leadership
Consistently publishing guest posts helps cement your status as an industry thought leader and authority by demonstrating ongoing value through insights versus direct promotion. You build meaningful mindshare.
Referral Website Traffic
The strategically optimized links to your website, blog, or offers contained within guest post bios provide a stream of referral traffic every time somebody clicks through to learn more about you and your work. This compounds with each new placement.
Audience Building
The exposure to new audiences that guest posting facilitates allows you to attract engaged new followers across channels like your email list, social media following, blog subscribers, and more through your profile and link promotions contained within the posts.
Relationship Building
Guest posting fosters mutually beneficial relationships with influential website owners, bloggers, and editors who may share and recommend your guest content across their platforms, further amplifying your message and brand through new audiences.
Brand Diversification
Publishing beyond your website or blog diversifies your digital footprint across the internet, so you aren’t dependent solely on your platform to reach readers. This expands and solidifies your brand’s authority.
As you can see, the multifaceted benefits of developing an effective guest posting strategy make it a precious tool for content marketers seeking to amplify their message and accelerate their growth.
Finding the Best Guest Posting Opportunities
The first step is identifying and vetting blogs, websites, and online publications that actively accept and publish contributor posts and guest articles within your niche or industry.
Not all sites are ideal targets, though. Focus on ones that offer the maximum visibility, credibility, and audience benefits.
Characteristics to look for include:
High Domain Authority and Organic Traffic
Prioritize sites that maintain relatively high domain authority scores (50+) and healthy levels of organic search traffic. Domain authority (1-100) signals a site’s prominence and influence on search engines like Google. More traffic means your articles gain more eyeballs. Check authority scores using Moz or SEMrush.
Matching Target Reader Demographics
The publication should attract reader demographics closely matching your target customer and audience profiles. This ensures your articles and personal brand exposure are being seen by highly relevant people.
Strong Social Following
Look for sites with an engaged social media following on networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. More significant followings expand the reach of your posts through shares.
Existing Guest Posts
Review if the site already publishes contributor and guest articles routinely. Sections marked as “Contributors” or guest submission guidelines are good signs.
Author Bio Linking
Confirm the site allows links within author bios, which are critical for driving referral traffic. Some only allow name/social profile mentions.
Relevant Topics and Categories
While vertical focus helps, mainstream sites covering a breadth of categories can work, too, if you pitch relevant ideas tailored to their audience.
By identifying strategic guest posting opportunities matching these criteria, you ensure your articles reach receptive, targeted audiences across multiple channels that value your content and personal brand.
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Conducting Guest Posting Outreach
Once you research and compile a list of 20-50 top-tier guest posting targets, it’s time to reach out and secure placements.
But cold emailing busy editors won’t cut it. You need to craft compelling pitches.
Elements of an Effective Guest Post Pitch Include:
Attention-grabbing, Benefit-Focused Headline
Summarize the core focus and benefit of your proposed guest post idea in a short, compelling headline. Avoid generic titles like “Article Submission”.
Relevant Trend/Data Mention
Open the pitch by briefly citing a relevant stat, behavior, news event, or trend that makes the article idea timely and resonates with the target site’s audience.
Post Synopsis
Provide 2-3 concise sentences summarizing what the proposed article would cover at a high level, key points, and main takeaways or benefits readers will derive.
Proof Points on Your Expertise
Quickly establish your credentials and background that qualify you to write the article you’re proposing effectively. Avoid an overly salesy bio. Share any relevant links that lend credibility.
Links to Your Past Articles
Include 2-3 links to some of your best-performing articles that received social shares, links, or traffic. This helps showcase your writing skills.
Call to Action
Close the pitch by thanking the recipient for consideration, politely requesting acceptance of your proposed idea, or asking for follow-up if they need additional details.
Following this proven pitch framework tailored to each publication sets your guest articles up for success and approval right from initial outreach.
Be sure to customize pitches while keeping language professional. Follow up if no response after 1-2 weeks. Send the complete draft upon approval.
Optimizing Your Guest Post Author Bio
Most guest publications will allow you to include a short 1-3 sentence “About the Author” biography under the article.
Properly optimize this prime real estate to maximize personal brand visibility, build authority, and drive traffic.
Author Bio Best Practices:
– Include a quality headshot photo to put a face with your name. Smiling photos tend to perform better.
– Share any impressive credentials, awards, or affiliations that establish your expertise on the post topic.
– End with a robust and benefit-driven call to action, encouraging readers to click through to your site, blog offers, or social profiles.
– Hyperlink your website URL, blog, landing pages, or social profiles. Vary anchor text – don’t just repeat your name each time.
– Navigate relevant niche keywords into the bio to associate those terms with your brand in search results.
– List your name, website, and contact info. Some sites auto-include emails, so check the guidelines.
Even short, this optimized author bio makes you instantly clickable while incentivizing readers to further engage with your brand after enjoying the post.
Promoting Your Guest Posts
Just landing the guest post placement isn’t the end goal. You must actively amplify top-performing guest posts to maximize visibility and referral traffic.
Promotion Tactics:
– Share the post across your branded social media channels, personal accounts, and email lists linking to the publication website. Don’t solely retweet the outlet to build your ownership.
– Highlight guest post links prominently as featured “As Seen In” type content on your website showcasing press wins.
– Monitor comments on the post and respond to any reader questions to further build engagement.
– Adapt guest posts into other formats like video summaries, podcast interviews, or slide decks to repurpose and extend reach.
– Insert calls-to-action within posts inviting readers to sign up for your email newsletter or download a related resource.
– Track website visits, lead captures, and conversions generated by each post. Tie this to ROI.
Active promotion and amplification extend your guest articles’ shelf life, funneling website visitors over the long-term versus short-lived one-off traffic blasts.
Avoiding Guest Posting Pitfalls
While the benefits are immense, there are also some common mistakes to avoid when guest posting:
– Using over-promotional language or focusing too heavily on your brand versus providing standalone value.
– Neglecting to adequately research the publication for fit and relevance for your niche before pitching or outreach.
– Failure to customize pitches results in ignored canned outreach emails.
– Not taking time to study examples of evergreen, top-performing posts on a site before proposing ideas.
– Forgetting to insert optimized author bios and links to drive traffic back to your assets.
– Lacking clear calls-to-action within posts themselves to boost lead generation.
– Failure to subsequently promote placements, costing you 50%+ of the potential traffic.
By sidestepping these missteps through careful targeting, compelling outreach, always providing reader value first, and diligent follow-up promotion, your subsequent guest posting efforts will yield significantly higher returns.
Prominent Online Marketer Neil Patel has an excellent article that further defines the concept of guest posting. Please read it HERE.
Measuring Guest Posting ROI
Consistently analyze key performance indicators to understand guest posting opportunities with the best ROI:
– Google Analytics traffic from specific referring domains.
– Conversions and leads generated from guest post links.
– Backlinks gained through posts via Moz or Ahrefs.
– Social shares of article links on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
– Click-through rates on calls-to-action inserted in your author bios.
These metrics reveal your top placement sites driving results and help refine outreach efforts.
Guest Posting Provides Powerful Promotion
When executed strategically as part of a comprehensive content marketing plan, guest blogging offers unparalleled exposure. Alongside owned channels like your blog, guest posts significantly accelerate audience growth and authority around your brand.
But like any promotion channel, results come through consistent testing and refinement over months. Be patient, focus on delivering genuine value to audiences through your articles, and let traffic and loyalty flow naturally.
Hopefully, this guide will provide you with a blueprint, tips, and templates to maximize your next guest posting campaign. What topics would you most like to guest post about? Which blogs are at the top of your pitch list? Let us know in the comments!