Being an online marketer could be compared to racing. You must always be ahead of your competitors to win the game.
What is the core element of any race? It is speed. If you are slow, you are doomed to failure.
The same rule works for online marketing. You must do everything fast and up-to-date. Any procrastination gives the green light to your competitors who will crash you eventually.
If you deal with an online business, you know that content marketing is an integral part of it. It allows you to promote your brand, gain traffic to your website, and convert users into customers.
And all these points could be reached via guest posting.
But how to publish guest posts on the top-notch blogs without any issues? And how to write articles fast?
You will find the answers to these questions (and even more) in this guide.
Shall we begin?
1. How to Generate Tons of Awesome Guest Post Ideas
When you write guest posts on a regular basis, you notice that it gets harder and harder to come up with fresh ideas. The internet is full of different pieces of content that highlight almost any topic related to the niche you belong.
How to find new ideas that would impress any blog owner on your radar?
I have a few actionable ways to find a solution in this case:
- Ahrefs Content Explorer tool
- Quora
- BuzzSumo
- Other popular blogs
- Skyscraper technique
- Content Explorer is the first place I use when I need to find a couple of ideas for future guest articles. How does it work?
Let’s assume that you’re willing to write a post that would cover an “email marketing” topic. The tool gives the list of nearly 472K results, which makes it pretty hard to choose the topic. Likely, you can narrow down the results with the help of filters. Let’s see what I can do here:
I sorted the results by the date (last month), the amount of search traffic, and language (English.) But you can choose your preferences like filtering down by the amount of referring domains, social shares, etc.
Reviewing the list that Content Explorer offered me, I can already get a few awesome ideas:
“A Complete Guide on How to Use Email Marketing Effectively”
Or
“A List of Free Email Marketing Tools for Outreach”
You can use this method for any topic you need. It works for sure.
- Quora is a popular Q&A platform. It is another great place where you can find fresh ideas for your publications. Put a query you are interested in and see what you will be able to get:
Again I decided to see what ideas Quora can offer me for “email marketing” topic. I filtered down the results by the past month, and I can use two questions from the list for generating content ideas. Here is what I got:
- I can turn the question “What challenges are you faced with email marketing?” into “X Challenges You Will Have to Overcome Doing Email Marketing.”
- I can use the question “Is email marketing dead or alive in India?” for writing a case-study “Email Marketing: Does It Make Sense Today?”
Quora can help you much.
- BuzzSumo is a tool that is used explicitly for content marketing purposes. It is beneficial when it comes to searching for guest post ideas. Do the above steps. Type your inquiry and apply filters the tool has. Let’s see what top content we have for the past year by the amount of Facebook shares:
I already see two guest post ideas that might be a good fit for some blog’s audience, like:
- “Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: What Brings More Benefit?”
- “A List of Email Marketing Obstacles and the Ways To Overcome Them”
BuzzSumo is an actionable tool that you should be armed with.
- I recommend you to visit different blogs where your famous peers publish their content and get traction. It won’t take a lot of your time to find the right blogs related to the niche you work in.
Let’s view an example of a blog to see the exact steps of finding guest post ideas.
HubSpot is the blog that covers all the things related to marketing and sales. Put your request in a searching box and reap the benefits:
A good indicator of how a particular topic would work for you are the comments the post has. Pay attention to what people say about this piece of content. If it is a success, pick the subject and write the article.
- Skyscraper technique works fantastically too. This technique has been put to use by Brian Dean, and it still works like a charm. The main idea of this technique is to give a second wind to the piece of content that brought you an enormous amount of traffic.
You will need to do the following to use this technique successfully:
- Identify the post that has lots of social shares, backlinks, traffic
- Update it with the new information
- Contact those people who linked to it before
- Show them an updated version of the post
Go ahead and get another portion of traffic to the topics in-demand.
2. How to Find Guest Post Opportunities
I have already published a fair amount of guest posts on different blogs, and I know the mistakes you can make. Here are the most frequent ones:
- Writing the post before you discussed the topic with a blogger
- Sending a single topic for review
It will be too frustrating to waste your time writing the post, send it for review and get it rejected. Believe me. I made the same mistake before. Furthermore, I offered a single topic that could not spark blogger’s interest. However, I reconsidered the approach to successful guest posting. And here is my plan:
- Find at least ten blog opportunities
- Send your guest post pitches with at least ten topics included
- Start writing the post
- Send your post for review
This scheme works for me without any glitches.
Now let’s view the ways of finding guest post opportunities.
I use three ways:
- Google search
- Ahrefs Content Explorer
- Google search comes to my mind when I want to find opportunities for guest posting hassle-free. I use the following phrase combinations to get the results I need:
- Keyword + “write for us”
- Keyword + “submit a guest post”
- Keyword + “guest post guidelines”
- Ahrefs Content Explorer tool could be used as well. However, in this case I recommend you to search for guest post opportunities by the name of a particular author. Let’s take my name as an example and see what we will get:
You can see a list of opportunities where my guest posts have been published. Use other names of famous contributors, and I am sure you will find your luck.
- Twitter is the last method I recommend you to use. Just put an inquiry into the Twitter’s search bar and get the tweets that offer blogs for guest posting.
I believe these three ways will help you a lot and you won’t have any issues with searching for guest post opportunities.
3. How to Pitch a Guest Post Inquiry
You have a list of blogs that accept guest post publications, let’s start an email pitch then. However, I advise you to do a few things first:
- Discover what topics each blog accepts
- Pay attention to the number of comments and shares the posts have
- Review guest posting guidelines
Good, now you can move forward and reach out to blog owners. I don’t want to give you email templates that I haven’t tested by myself. I will give you the pitch that I’ve been using for six months.
To Sum Up
I have just introduced you a guide on writing guests posts without any issues. I gave you all necessary pieces of advice and considered the obstacles you may face in the future.
Remember that guest posting is one of the most proven and legitimate methods to earn backlinks, gain traffic, and spread the word about your brand. Furthermore, it is one of the crucial aspects of the entire content marketing strategy.
I would like to hear your opinion on this post in the comments. Please, feel free to share it on social either.
4. You Got Accepted to Be a Guest Contributor
It is the stage where you start writing the post and present it to a blog editor. It will take plenty of your time and efforts to create a genuinely worthy piece of content. I recommend you to use the tools that will help you along the way:
- Grammarly is the tool that will help you fix all grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors
- Hemingway Editor gives you some recommendations on how to make your post easy to read
- Capitalizemytitle will capitalize all your titles as they should be
- Polish My Writing checks lexical and stylistic mistakes
Well, I think this equipment of a professional writer will do its job to your favor.
To Sum Up
I have just introduced you a guide on writing guests posts without any issues. I gave you all necessary pieces of advice and considered the obstacles you may face in the future.
Remember that guest posting is one of the most proven and legitimate methods to earn backlinks, gain traffic, and spread the word about your brand. Furthermore, it is one of the crucial aspects of the entire content marketing strategy.
I would like to hear your opinion on this post in the comments. Please, feel free to share it on social either.
Sergey Aliokhin is a Marketing Manager at andcards. Apart from exploring different marketing and SEO things he likes reading, playing the bass, and studying martial arts.