If you have doubts send me an email at george@kamayo.in or reach out via the contact page.
Today Kamayo.in my site gets hundreds of visitors and has a DR of 35. I did it in the span of a few months and so can you.
It’s easy to publish quality guest posts on others’ sites and get the needle on your ranking moving. In this post I’am going to discuss my guest posting strategy and how you can benefit from the same.
The problem with PBNs and blackhat strategies is there’s no guarantee how long the rankings are going to last. That makes them a pretty shaky ground. The May 14th update it seems has targeted PBNs specifically with sites that used them to rank tanking overnight.
However, you can always use white hat link building strategies at scale and get links to your site and rank well.
What kind of sites did I target?
I always chose sites that had a DR rating of 50 and above for building guest post links.
I must have specifically begun link building last year with November 2019. Now it’s May and I’m not really actively building links.
This post is designed to ensure that you know how to pitch, how to write and how to land great and awesome links.
But first,
WHAT IS GUEST BLOGGING?
Guest blogging is when you contact some blog owner and write content on their site to drive a backlink back to your own site.
With guest blogging, the site owner gets valuable high-quality content back to their own sites and the guest poster gets a link. This gives referral traffic as well.
With guest posts, you’re going to really lucky if you see an uptick in rankings and traffic immediately. It takes a lot of them going live to really see the impact.
Guest posts can help build your credibility and boost rankings. You leverage other people’s audiences to build up your own. This gives you tons of exposure.
Here are my top benefits of guest blogging.
1. BUILDING YOUR DOMAIN AUTHORITY
The domain authority and domain rating are all good scores that determine the authority and the quality of backlinks behind a site. It’s based on multiple factors. I find the Domain Rating metric to be more useful simply because Moz sucks at finding links and never manages to index even a tiny portion of links to a domain. That’s the reason domain rating is a much better score of a site’s actual authority.
These links from contextually relevant sites help improve your site’s DA and DR.
2. GETTING VALUABLE BACKLINKS
When it comes to links, links are a trust signal originating from other relevant sites back to your own site. Google considers them as trustworthy.
The more quality links you get, the better the chances of search engines trusting your content and ranking it high.
3. GENERATING REFERRAL TRAFFIC
When creating guest posts, other than the immediate advantage of getting links, you also drive lots of referral traffic to your site. WHen someone reads the guest post there’s a chance of him visiting your site.
4. CREATING NEW RELATIONSHIPS WITH BLOGGERS
Another key importance of guest posts is you’re extending your network and building valuable relationships that ultimately help you.
It’s a great guest posting strategy where you’re going to stay in touch with blog owners even after the post goes live.
Respond to emails, create great content and send those drafts on time. With more such relationship building you will maintain a relationship with them and get them to get back to you.
Create value
When you publish guest posts by contacting site owners, the first thing to know is this: provide value.
Understand what you’re going to provide so that people can understand what you’re worth to them.
Don’t just think about you, you and you alone.
Think if you can bring expertise to provide audience interests
Think if the writing style can impress them.
Think if the blog needs more content to fill their calendar.
Find out topics their audience would find to be extremely relevant to them.
With these pitching and guest blogging opportunities create real value.
2. CREATE A TARGETED LIST OF WEBSITES YOU WANT TO WRITE FOR
Once you wrap your head around the value you can provide, build your outreach target list of sites.
This list should ideally be a list of 5 columns containing names, email, their website and current status.
Also include a column for their DR rating.
Next, start adding more sites to this guest blogging list. Look at the site’s monthly visitors and tag their dr by putting it inside Ahrefs.
Always choose blogs that have a DR at least 45+. In some cases you can skip that if you see the backlink profile to be made of high quality links.
The higher the DR rating of a site the more value you’re going to get from it.
The higher the traffic the more valuable the site is in front of Google’s eyes. Plus it also means that people are going to check out your contnent.
In addition, look for engagement metrics. Traffic is great, but you also need comments, social shares and other things that point towards a highly engaged audience.
After this navigate and find out what’s the list size. If they’re sharing your content with other people on their list.
Once you add all these sites to your list, go through their guest posting guidelines in depth. Find out what they’re expecting from you; word count, tone of voice and other things.
To discover these guest posting guidelines search for site; .com guest post
You can reach out to sites that both require full drafts in advance or ones that need you to pitch with topics.
3. Tap multiple points of contact to find the right person to submit guest post to
Most people tend to give up on their outreach after just sending one or two mails. That’s not enough.
There are several different ways in which you can contact the right people to send your guest posts to.
At the start, use something like LinkedIn.
If you search for a company on LinkedIn you will usually get a list of all employees. If there are no editors or content managers, look for the name of the CMO.
Once you’ve rounded up at least 3 contacts, reach out to them by sending a connection request. If you have a mutual contact, this works even better.
Keep the connection message short and sweet.
If LinkedIn doesn’t work, you can also try reaching out via social media networks like Facebook.
You can always find their business page and send them a message. But this is often buried under gatekeepers and you seldom get your request approved this way. But, you might get a generic greeting.
Once you have sent those connect requests the work only begins. I use Hunter.io to find out a contact’s email id.
With their email id in hand you can send them a guest post pitch mapping out your detailed request.
There are several tools that help you find email addresses for free and paid. Two tools I use are Hunter.io and Clearbit for gmail.
Get their email addresses and note down the date you sent the request on the spreadsheet where you manage requests.
Do your outreach
Now that you have sent your connect requests and tapped them on social media, it’s time to send them emails to take the relationship further along the road.
There are plenty of cold email strategies out there. The best tips I learned are to keep your email short, provide value, and showcase your previous work.
You can use several cold email templates. Here’s one I use:
Subject line: Link building opportunity
Hey (First Name),
My name’s George and I blog at Kamayo.in.
I like your blog and your audience would resonate with my audience.
I just wanted to know if you’d be accepting guest posts on your site. In return I can build a link to your site on my site either as a guest post from you or insert a link.
Here are a few recent posts I did
(Sample 1 URL)
Here are topics for your blog
Please let me know if you’re interested and I look forward to hearing back from you soon!
Thanks,
George
This is the value packed email you’re going to send. Personalize the email, offer value and let them see that there’s enough in the opportunity for them as well.
If you already have published samples, email outreach is going to be easy for you. If you lack any samples, share drafts. Or the link to your blog.
But ideally, get some samples first.
The topic pitch
Once you have gotten a response its time to take things up a notch. It’s here where you send that perfect topic ideas that get a front seat
Whenever you have an idea do a site search on the blog to see if they have already covered the content before.
If it does think of another topic.
Go to Ahrefs and add the url to see the most value terms for the blog annd see if you can arrive at an idea that helps you pitch content that fills this content gap.
In addition, you can’t simply blabber along about the topic. It should be about your expertise and leverage your influence and authority.
Check the guidelines and see what kind of content they need, how they frame topics and ideate content.
Read articles on their blog to understand their flow and interests.
Also check which articles get the highest social shares. Do this with the help of Buzzsumo.
How to Pitch a Guest post
By doing this you can arrive at many ideas. Just pitch 3 and share them on your email.
Also mention that you’re always happy to send more topic ideas if these particular ideas don’t really resonate with them.
If you have followed the approach step-by-step you will get a response.
Scaling guest blogging efforts
Now when you have all these guest posts to write, it can be hard and you will find yourselves struggling between aggressive pitching and getting people to listen to you and write at the same time.
As someone who’s written over 85 guest posts over the past 7 to 8 months, guest blog writing is tough. Ther eare edits to do and it can sponge 8 to 12 hours of a day.
You need not write everything yourself. You can outsource part of the content creation.
Do what you’re good at: research, outreach and pitching articles and leave the heavy lifting to freelancers.
Work with a guest posting company or freelancer
It may not be apparent to you always but the one who generally takes the credit isn’t the person writing the post.
Most big and small companies outsource their content creation process. For guest blogging, there’s no issues having a ghost writer handle the content creation part for you.
If you have the topic idea, ideate the outline and make small edits to the final draft.
With a freelance writer on hire, guest blogging can be scaled like never before.
You need not outsource research and pitching. Simply outsource the difficult and time taking part of the job which is writing the damn thing. With this scaling is easy. You just divided guest blogging into a sum of its parts and scaled one process.
To talk in detail, here’s what to do. As author you pitch the topic. You research, create an outline and handle it over to the writer. The writer submits the draft, whereupon you insert links and send over the finished draft.
To make the process smoother use tools like Grammarly to weed out problems around flow and structure.
If you pitch high DA sites with content, there’s always the possibility that you can work with someone who will allow you to add links for free. Yes backlinks are avaluable both to you and to the writer.
Problogger job board is one of those quality job boards where you can post for this and get hundreds of relevant applications.
Create shareable long-form blog posts
We talked about offering value before. By creating high quality long and linkable content you’re doing the best you can to get the most value out of pitching sites.
Without images, data or shareable aspects you’re not generating value.
Have stats to back up claims, add images and other things to make the post go viral.
Format guest posts correctly
Without correctly formatting guest posts, you’re going to look more like a rookie rather than an expert.
It’s important that you format guest posts correctly for you to be effective.
This might mean including the correct header tags like h2 and h3s.
Google docs should be ticked off with the anyone with link can edit option. This means if there are suggestions and corrections the editors can make those.
Include image and screenshots while linking out to the source url
Add your links
When creating and submitting a guest post you’re always allowed a link back to your content. You can add 1 to 2 links to your site.
You might sometimes get away adding 3 or 4 or more links. Add these links in a contextually appealing manner so they appear as useful to the end reader.
Use different anchors every time. This helps to stay clear of over-optimizng your anchors.
Placing links means you can add two inn the content to relevant blog posts. Follow that up by adding more links to your author bio which can go to your homepage.
Use an attractive action oriented bio that shows people who you are and why they should care. Speak about results or successful past work to generate traction and excitement about your site.
Link to other authority content
Links don’t come cheap. Links can cost anywhere between $300 to $2000.
So, spread the love by linking out to different sites.
When you link on high authority sites you can always link out to other bloggers and influencers so that they notice you.
When it comes to breaking ice, that’s a great opening line you can use.
You can always send links to their high traffic blog posts so that the link is more valuable to them as it helps them rank better.
Once you have linked, reach out to them via email to let them know that you linked out to them.
By showing that you care and are providing real value, when the time comes they will either link out to or come up with more strategies to ncrease influennce.
Once all these links are placed, submit the guest post and wait for feedback from them. The process might take a few days. With Gdocs making edits and accepting suggestions happens in real-time.
Once the post is finally approved, wait for the publishing date that’s typically scheduled 2 weeks later.
Track results
Once you article is published, you can see all the hard work paying off.
The next thing to do is share all those articles to social media channels.
THe SEO benefits of ranking a content high aren’t immediately evident. TO know the real impact you need to give it sometime. Wait for a week or two to see the lift in rankings that happen as a result of your guest posts.
Patience is the biggest virtue you need.
Sites with links need to be crawled and link power attributed back to your site.
This means it’s going to take a long time to find correct search engine rankings.
When submitting to any site isn’t instant, the link power is not going to be felt immediately.
Once the new links are discovered the rankings update themselves and you’re on a winning spree after.
ORGANIC KEYWORDS.
Once you have a few guest posts going live, you will witness a steady uptick in rankings. By going to Ahrefs and keying in your domain, you can see all the movements for your site.
Note that the number of keywords you rank for steadily increases over time as you build newer and newer backlinks. The visibility goes up.
If possible you can track the results on a daily basis to see how rankings track up.
Does guest blogging work?
One of the biggest questions people have on their minds is if guest posting still works in 2020. It does. It’s a great way to forge relationships with bloggers and get your content before a new audience.
It helps build your reputation and improve the SEO of your site.
Immediately after writing 20 blog posts I started guest posting. When the steady flow of links trickled in it improved my SEO, traffic and rankings all of which are steadily climbing.
This is something you too can do for your own blog and see how things improve.
If you want to grow your blog or business guest posting is the steady number one tactic that can bring you results. This will help you make money quickly.
Do guest bloggers get paid?
No when you submit a guest post to another site, in more cases than not you’re not going to get paid anything for your effort.
Sites need content and give links in return.
Other sites charge a guest blogger money for writing guest posts.
This fee can be $50 to $200 or higher. Generally higher the traffic and metrics on the site, higher the charge they quote.
Is guest blogging good for SEO?
Guest blogging is fantastic for SEO since it helps you get both links and traffic for some effort. Do follow links pass link juice from authority sites back to your own blog. What this does is build up traffic and rankings for your site and increase the DA of your site and its DR.
As you improve these metrics you will be able to rank much higher.
When choosing guest post sites keep in mind that you go for sites with acceptable link profile and strong DR rating.
When using your links on other guest posts use a varied set of anchors to link back to your site. Keep the anchor text natural and relevant. This provides a great deal of value.
Never over optimize anchors as this has a detrimental impact on rankings.
To sum up guest blogging has improved my traffic and over the coming months I will publish more guest posts and see how they affect and improve my rankings. It’s a great way to offer value, build great relationships and receive valuable links in return. Forge new relationships with this strategy.
To get started, discover the value you can provide to other bloggers.If you have doubts send me an email at george@kamayo.in or reach out via the contact page.
