Tips To Find and Place Guest Blog Posts

August 01, 2013

Here’s the thing... Most people tend to do article marketing all wrong, because they don’t understand the PURPOSE of it in the first place.

That’s right. Now most people would have you believe that article marketing is all about the links... And that is a HUGE benefit of it. But the links don’t help all that much if no one actually reads your article and clicks on those links!

While the benefits of the backlinks you can build are helpful in your potential ranking for keywords, the point is that ITS ALL ABOUT THE TRAFFIC!

Your whole purpose for submitting to article directories is to get your content syndicated amongst third party sites that already have a targeted audience who would value your content.

Step 1, submit to the directories, and step 2, build relationships with the publishers who find and use your content on their site. (Filter out the autobloggers and spammers...)

Guest Blogging is going directly to the source. You are publishing high quality content on someone else’s site, and in return you can include a resource box with a short bio and a couple links back to certain pages on your site.

It is a tremendous win-win because you can get in front of these pockets of different audiences made up of various market segments.

Instantly you can get in front of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and potentially even millions of fairly targeted readers which can easily result in hundreds of new email subscribers, twitter followers, facebook fans, and even sales.

Now you won’t always hit these kinds of numbers but if you target the right blogs you can get great results, consistently.

How Do You Do It?

There are really only three steps to Guest Blogging:

  • The first step is to identify a guest blog that would be a great fit for the type of content and topics you write about.

  • The second step is to contact them about providing them and their audience with some high quality content about “X“ topic.

  • The third being to create the content and send it to them to be published.

You can rearrange the order of these three steps as the sequence isn’t rigid, for example, you create the content first; but that’s how it works.

Remember to ALWAYS followup and thank them, again you want to BUILD a relationship with them.

How to Find Guest Blogs

You can find tons and tons of blogs through sites like Alltop, or you can google using a query such as ”Your Topic” Guest Post...

This little trick may pull up search results for people who have guest posted on sites centered around your topic, which you can then look into further.

Go ahead and make contact with them and approach them as a fan and briefly introduce who you are and that you would like to write a guest post for them that would really be valuable to their audience.

DON’T get into your whole life story, and bla bla bla... Nobody cares. They get requests like this a lot, so DO make it stand out and DON’T make it sound like a robot. Show them that you actually have read their blog, or that you like something they’ve done, etc. Just be real.

Don’t waste time asking for permission to send them the guest post, just go ahead and send it to them right in the first email contact. Ask them to let you know if they are interested or that they are not going to publish it.

Contact in a couple days if you haven’t heard a response and follow up with letting them know that you’d appreciate a response, either way, so that you can find another home for it on another blog.

*For starters, you can use the following services to find places that accept guest posts:

Guest Posting Tips:

  • Know your keywords and use anchor text in the resource box.

  • Link to a targeted giveaway

  • Always write your own resource box

  • Send your best posts as guest posts.

  • Guest post at LEAST once a month. Best to do it every week.

Again, Guest Posting is probably the best way to generate traffic and build reputation and authority around your topic and brand.

Like i said, short and sweet. Again, this is one of the most powerful traffic strategies that can have long-term residual benefits.

If you are creating content and publishing it online, you SHOULD BE doing guest posts every month, and preferably every week!

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Homework:

1. Gather/create new content that you can use to post onto a guest blog.

2. Find and email three guest bloggers and send them your guest post for their blog, along with a little note that comments on a blog post they’ve written or something they’ve done.

If the site owner okays it - you can even use the SAME article/blog post you already written and published on YOUR site. :) Often times they don’t care, but you should check first. It’s probably a better idea to write something fresh for this exercise though. ;)

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