How to Write Guest Posts on Authority Sites [Even if You’re a Newbie]

Guest posting is NOT dead.

If anyone says guest posting is NOT working, they are wrong. Guest blogging is still one of the most powerful ways to increase your traffic, brand, and authority as a blogger.

But here’s the thing: write guest posts for authority sites.

We all know writing guest posts for biggest publications is never an easy task. It requires a lot of work, time and dedication. If you’re a beginner or someone who is struggling to land on authority sites with guest posts, this detailed post is for you.

Here are my 5 powerful tips for you.

#1. Build Strong Rapport

The first step to guest blogging success is all about building relationships with other bloggers.

Listen, if you want to land on big sites with your guest posts, connect with the blog owners, editorial staff or contributors first. Build rapport with them. Then, you can understand

Wanna expand your business and brand reach? Then do blogger outreach and build a strong rapport with them. You can improve user engagement and social visibility with these following tactics.

#1. Create a powerful list of followers: Focus on the top followers you already have. They are the brand ambassadors who already like your business and brand. Their following may not be as powerful as the blogger outreach influencers you are planning to target. But still, it’s good to engage with them, build rapport, and enhance your relationship.

Collect followers who share your content: Make a list of your engaged followers who have large audience base and shares your content. Follow them on a private list and retweet their stuff. It helps in generating building relationship between you and them. You can use a social media tool Sendible to build your contact list.
Monitor your influencers blogs: Check what content they are sharing and comment on those posts as often as you can. Become a part of their blogging community, and they will notice you for it.
Offer sponsorships: Offer your top followers sponsorships. Send them free products and offer steep discounts to promote your products or services.

#2. Get the list of most powerful influencers: The best place to begin your search is Google. Check all the links in the first search results page and look for bloggers with high domain authority. You can use Buzzsumo to develop your influencer list. Twitter and Linkedin are the best blogger outreach sources that help you to list all powerful influencers. Search using relevant hashtags and research the social media following of your potential influencers as well.

Here is how you can find your top influencers:

To identify your influencers, use this tool. With this tool, you can find influencers and then add them to a private list on Sendible tool.
Set up alerts on BuzzSumo for your brand’s top keywords and you will start getting a large volume of articles emailed to you daily. Now, monitor the content being shared to identify writers that are talking about similar and relevant topics.
If your influencers are ranking well in Google then obviously they are authoritative. Follow them on your list as well as Feedly.

At the end of the day, list them all in a simple spreadsheet with some essential information like site address, Twitter handle, Facebook account, LinkedIn id, social authority, domain authority, and email.

#3. Now approach bloggers: Now, you have your list of your top influencers and it’s time to reach out. You need to carefully craft a pitch letter that compels your potential influencers to give you an audience.

Here are a few helpful tips for creating your pitch:

They will not have the time to read long passages. So, always keep it short.
Give a positive start. You can craft a template, but you certainly can have a unique element for that specific influencer.
Convey a professional and authoritative confidence that will make your pitch compelling.
Be transparent about what you want and what you can serve up in return. After all, building a relationship is your goal. Don’t behave as a salesman.

#4. Create content that attracts influencers: Audition relevant topics that your potential influencers audience will enjoy before creating content. All your valuable blogger outreach efforts to pitch to an influencer goes waste if there is nothing in common.

Social media influencers you are reaching out to should match your brand’s strategy, audience, and personality.

#5. Build long-term relationships: Develop a long-term relationship. Invest more time and resources in a proper influencer marketing strategy. Think of the influencer as a new acquaintance and give your relationship time to develop to something genuine and long-term. Here are a few ways that you can evolve your relationships:

Continue following them and share their content.
Leave thoughtful comments on their blogs and social profiles.
Make a regular and continued effort to enhance the relationship so that it eventually blooms to something that’s mutually beneficial.

Building strong rapport through blogger outreach is a powerful way to move your business and brand.

#2. Write for Small Blogs when you’re Starting Out

When you’re just starting out, write for small blogs. Why? That way, you can develop your momentum. That’s how you improve yourself as a guest blogger. That’s how you build some quick relationships with other bloggers.

You can use sites like 750 words to write daily. This tool improves your writing skills and makes it easier for you to churn out quality guest posts.

Here are some of the tips that you can use:

Every day write 1000 words: You may wonder why to write everyday. Because, writing regularly helps you to become a skilled, confident and clear writer. Devote your energy and attention to doing what you love to do persistently.
Say stories: Well, who doesn’t love stories? If the story is filled with fun or initiates thrill, it gives amusement to a reader to read further. Every moment is a story. Try to link each story to your niche.
Reading blog posts gets you ideas: If you are trying to enhance your monetization strategies, the one way is reading. Pick a topic or subtopic and dig out the ideas by diving into a topic you love and do effective research before you start writing.

#3. Brace Yourself and get Going

Never give excuses to yourself from posting on your blog. When you start writing slowly, write every single day and post on your blog. Now, you may wonder where to get ideas for posts.

Use these five types of blog posts:

List based posts.
How to guide posts or step-by-step guide posts.
Curated collection posts.
Trending posts.
Presentation kind posts.

Well, how to write a blog post using the above list?

#1. Know your audience: Before you even start writing, it is very important to know that what type of audience you are targeting. Let’s say, your audience is into marketing. In that case, you need not write about marketing tips and all.

Because the one who is into marketing knows the basic stuff. So, it won’t help them. You can say what strategies will work in the current year by comparing stats.

#2. Pick up a topic for your blog post: Come up few topic ideas related to your niche and start working on that. How to get ideas? This is where your blog commenting helps. It gets you lot many ideas. Observe your competitors that what kind of topics they are choosing. You can further check Google trends for trending topics in your niche.

#3. Write an amazing intro: After the title, it’s the introduction that attracts readers. Whether your post is read or not depends on your intro part. So, grabbing reader’s’ attention is important. You can do this by telling a story or a joke or be empathetic or grip the reader with an interesting fact or statistic.

Then describe the purpose of the post and explain how it will address a problem the reader may be having. This will give the reader a reason to keep reading and give them a connection to how it will help them improve their work.

#4. Organize your content: Organize your content in such a way that readers are not intimidated by the length or amount of content. You can use sections, lists, tips, whatever is most appropriate. That is, break the content into fewer sections with compelling headers.

#5. Start writing: Once you have organized the outline, expand all points.Research and gather much information about it while writing. If you are stuck with words while writing then use Power Thesaurus which is a crowdsourced tool that provides users with a ton of alternative word choices.

Unable to stay focussed? Then use ZenPen which is a distraction-free writing tool that creates a minimalist writing zone designed to help you get words down without having to fuss with formatting right away.

#6. Proofread your post: Once you are done writing, proofread your post. Never ever ignore this section. This is to ensure that the content you wrote doesn’t have any grammar mistakes and sentence formation is good. After all, no one likes an ugly post.

#7. Don’t forget to insert Call-To- Action (CTA) at the end of your post: At the end of every blog post, insert CTA. It means what you want the reader to do next like subscribe to your blog, download an ebook, register for a webinar or event, read a related article, etc. Eventually, you will generate a lead when your visitors read your blog post and click on the CTA.

#8. Now, optimize your content for on-page SEO: So, you have done with the post. Go back and optimize your post for search. If you can make your URL shorter and use more SEO-friendly keywords then do it. Make sure that you optimize the sections: meta description, page title and headers, anchor text,

Don’t forget to pick up a compelling title for your post.

#4. Become Good at Email Outreach

Well, you have used all great SEO tools and did an amazing research to know the contact details of the top influencers. But when you send out your emails you get little or no response. If you experienced this, then here are the tips to ensure that you get fast responses from everyone you contact.

Read their blog before you even email: Do you let an unknown person to post on your blog without knowing what blog they have and what topics they write? No right. So, take a look at their latest posts and mention them in your outreach email.
Contact those who are looking for guest posts: If someone is asking for guest posts it’s more likely that they will accept yours. To find such people, use My blog guest, Blogger link up.
Keep it simple: Longer emails have a better close rate and shorter emails have a better response rate. So, send short and to-the-point emails.
Personalize your email: Don’t ask directly in an email that, do you accept guest posts? Mention something personal to that person’s blog, their name and the name of the blog so that they feel the email is specific to them and not just a template sent to thousands of blogs.
Search for blogs that have similar content: Enter your article title ideas into the search bar and hit enter to see sites that have similar posts live. If you find any similarity then it means your articles will be of interest to them.
Don’t write the content until the title has been accepted: No one will consider the pre-written content that wasn’t created with their specific audience in mind. So, unless you get approval for that title, don’t write.

Read: Why I Switched From Aweber to ConvertKit

#5. Avoid these Dumbest Mistakes

Guest post writing is not that easy. Every day hundreds of different websites across the internet publish guest posts. It requires a lot of research and can be difficult to write to the audience of a prospective website. If you are looking to start guest blogging on different websites, then make sure you don’t do these mistakes.

Don’t write duplicate content: Content duplication is one of the dumbest mistakes you can do to harm or risk your reputation. It also hurts your website’s ranking as well. This is nothing but copying and pasting 1 full sentence or paragraph from another blog. Use online plagiarism checker tools such as Copyscape.com once you are done with writing.
Don’t ignore guidelines: Almost every guest posting sites have a ‘Write For Us’ page that features set rules and guidelines that should be followed when writing a content piece. If you don’t follow these rules, your guest post will not be accepted at all. If they want a word count that’s over 1000, then make sure that you write that many words.
Your title pitch may not be approved first: Great guest bloggers approve title first before you write an article. The reason for this is that some websites may already have the content on their site and honestly, why would they want that topic written again? So, first contact them to know whether they are interested in a guest post or not. If you receive an answer from them, then send an article title pitch.

Over to you

Guest blogging is still one of the most effective ways to build a strong network online. Not only it helps you bring more traffic and backlinks but it also gives you an opportunity to build a brand for yourself.

So what are your thoughts? Do you have any questions? Or do you have any guest blogging tips to land on authority sites?

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