Guest Blogging Guide: Build Authoritative Backlinks And Grow Organic Traffic in 2023

To put it simply, guest blogging is an inbound marketing strategy where you contribute content on other blogs. Ideally, it looks simple. But, it is not that easy. Guest blogging holds more potential towards your brand exposure if you pitch it right. This guest blogging guide can give you hand for your successful guest posting efforts.

Have you tried guest blogging as a part of your content marketing? How successful was it? How do you rate its success?

I guess you will be overwhelming with plenty of lengthy articles out there about guest blogging. Let me make it simple here, today. So, let’s see how to prospect, how to outreach, what type of content will work, and much more. Ultimately, you will explore how to guest blog and make utmost out of it.

Basic Understanding about Guest Blogging

I am sure that you know the fundamentals of guest posting. If so, skip this and move on to the next section. For beginners or other bloggers who are not familiar with guest blogging, run through it.

Aforesaid above, guest blogging is nothing but spreading out your insights on a topic as quality content on other blogs. For which, you must get approval from the target blog owner.

Keep a note in mind that quality wins over the volume of your guest blog submissions. And, guest posting is not for link building. It is not a link building method. You must treat it as content promotional strategy.

Indeed, guest posting can offer huge benefits other than quality links. You will get to know about all those, keep reading.

“Guest Blogging is Dead?” It’s up to you

Earlier it was flat and simple to do guest blogging. Though there are many good reasons for doing guest posts like exposure, reach, branding, etc. Over time, people intended to practice with the sole intention of building backlinks. Hence, a gang of low quality or spam sites have latched in to and ditch guest blogging in risk.

Experts like Matt Cutts just wanted to save the baby from peril. He called off guest blogging if entertaining low-quality spammy sites for guest post submissions. Guest blogging strategy is always a good friend for high-quality guest bloggers like Boing Boing.

Which category does it fall under? Blogging is alive if your guest blogging goal is honorable.

Haven’t you established your goal yet? Without knowing the destination, your journey won’t be meaningful. Let me assist you to determine your goals of guest blogging.

Set your Guest blogging goals

Before you step ahead, it is obvious to conclude your guest posting goal. The way you will have to execute the strategy differs based on your objective. Basically, there are a few core aspirations behind guest blogging strategy.

#1  To build authority in your niche
#2  Brand exposure
#3  To generate backlinks
#4  Attract new set of audience

Apparently, submitting high-quality content on top authoritative blogs, you can achieve all of these above. If you are aiming #1 or #2, you must target blogs that more popular with huge audience base. In the case of #3, you must approach blogs that have good link profile with strong root authority. To achieve #4, isolate blogs that drive more potential organic traffic. Anything you decide to set your goal in advance to make most out of your guest blogging campaigns.

Benefits of Guest Blogging in SEO

If you want to share your ideas among your target audience in your industry, you must try guest blogging. It can help you building trust in your brand among the audience.

Are you not convinced still? Why you have to break your mind in creating amazing content for the other sites?

With guest blogging strategy, you can claim more benefits than what you invest in. The great thing is, it uplifts your brand as well as recognize you personally as a high-quality guest author. Here are the few benefits of guest blogging that I inspired and experienced.

#1 Drive more highly-targeted traffic

Obviously, you will have to submit your guest post article on a prospective site in your niche. It means that the readership of that target blog is likely to be your potential audience. Without any deep research, you can identify and reach your target audience.
Organic traffic is the backbone of any online brand or business. Only thing, you will have to execute it in the right way.

#2 Build relationships with other bloggers

Hardly, you will get opportunities to build relationships with other pro-bloggers. Your quality content can avail you that. Regardless of your existence in the blogosphere, you are open to contributing your write-ups to any authoritative blogs. Since you have a key (say well-informed quality content) that can add value to the target blog’s readers. Guest blogging also supports new fresh bloggers.

If you manage to expose yourself to as many as expert bloggers in any community, then grabbing guest blogging opportunities becomes simpler. It is reversible too. By contributing remarkable content on any popular blog, your doors will be open to friend with more bloggers of that range.

The friend’s circle will extend as one introducing you as a high-quality guest author, to others. Personally too, you will become familiar.

#3 Enhance your social profile engagements

Growing your social followers or social engagements is really a great sign for your online success. You must write shareable content with more appealing visual elements like infographics, to get more social shares. Embedding such engaging functionalities in your content can help you generating multiple times more shares than formal text content.

You can also mention other popular bloggers in your content valuing their ideologies. Think about your content is shared among a different set of social users, belonging to your niche.

#4 Improve domain authority

By means of contributing guest post articles on authority blogs, you are proving your credibility. This can motivate your target audience that you are a trustworthy one being recognized by such popular brands. They will start believing that the content you create and publish in your blog must be real and accountable.

This, in turn, improves your brand or site authority.

#5 Get your brand noticed

Make use of this guest blogging strategy as a key to influence your authority in your niche. Concentrate on writing unique content that must offer a solution to its blog readers. Through which, you can tell your audience how your brand product or service can bring a way out to their problems.

Don’t be an identical writer. Have your own style of writing. Some of the popular guest bloggers prefer to have a conversational flow of content with sentences short and simple. Hence, easy to read and people will remember you forever and love to read wherever you write.

#6 Strengthen your backlink profile

Not to mention the benefit of guest blogging is, building backlinks. Most bloggers allow you to contribute your content to their blogs with a link to your site. Also, few may not recognize your hard work leaving out at least a single dofollow link to you.

Anyways, you will get a backlink either in the body of the content or in your author bio. Use it to the extent with proper anchor text that can highlight your brand or keyword-optimized. After, you are not allowed to have backlinks for any commercial intent keywords as anchor texts.

Irrespective to the attribute type of the backlink, you can benefit out of it in a way or either.

#7 Generate more qualified leads

As we see above, the traffic your target blog driving is literally your target audience. They are the individuals who might be already curious about your brand offerings. Ensure you are rightly pinpointing the place to submit your article that is already generating steady traffic from various sources.

Instead of potential customers coming to your site, think about driving interested individuals to your site by means of guest blogging. Your sales funnel optimized now, and you can reduce your sales cycle length notably.

#8 Hone your content marketing skills

Guest blogging gains a strategic approach to content marketing. In every module like prospecting, content research, outreaching, pitching in the right way, targeting the potential audience, etc.

Though you come across loads of marketing articles in years, you could master in marketing only if you try yourself in real-time. By deploying a whole guest blogging strategy, you can examine yourself and sharpen your content marketing skills.

Are you a skeptic? How can guest blogging impact your SEO? All the above-discussed benefits are in strong correlation with your website SEO. Obtaining these betterments, it is damn sure that you will see an active boost in your SEO.

Guest Blogging Guide – An Detailed Outlook on Guest Posting

Here exactly, we are into the actual game. We never invest in any paid advertisements to drive organic traffic. Guest blogging is powerful in bringing a lump of organic traffic to your website. Let’s dive into the core of how to do guest blogging in the right way.

Step – 1: Identifying Guest Blogging Targets

The first thing to start with is finding your guest post targets. That is the most relevant blogs to contribute your content. When hunting for such blogs, you must look for the following criteria to be met –

•  Same niche or industry
•  Having an audience who might be interested in your niche
•  Blog owner or webmaster must be active in blogging and social media
•  Blog has loyal and engaged readers
•  Has good domain authority
•  How popular its blog content is, in terms of blog comments and social shares?
•  Previous guest post articles and link provisions
•  How energetic in content promotions?

For an instant, if you are into dog food supplies, then your target must be an authoritative pet care blog that drives decent traffic, where the blog owner must be actively promoting in content across multiple media.

Here are the different ways to identify such target blogs for guest blogging.

#1 Google Searches

No Surprise. Google would be the first place to start searching for guest posting opportunities. I am enlisting the maximum possible search queries you may use to have decent numbers of guest post accepting sites in your niche. Replace keyword with your niche keywords.

Google search queries to identify guest blogging opportunities –

These search queries can take to the right destination where you can grab your guest post opportunities. Either you will land on the target blog’s guest post submission page, or guest post guidelines page or posts contributed by other guest writers.

#2 Popular Guest Bloggers

If you are active in the blogosphere and read other blogs often, you might be familiar with a few popular names in the industry. You might be seeing those names over and again contributing articles to other blogs.

You may use a Google search, popular guest blogger name + “guest post by.” For example, Leo Widrich + “guest post by.” You will get to know the places where he has contributed so far. Those are the appropriate blogs you are supposed to do.

Above all, being a friend of such popular blogger (if any), you may request for an introduction to the owners of the blogs wherever they have submitted content.

#3 Author Bio

Like search using image URL, you may also copy a sentence randomly from the author bio of any guest blogger. Search it in Google with a quotation. Probably, you will get results that are the places where the particular guest writer contributed guest articles with the same text in the author bio. Here is your list of hidden guest blogging opportunities. It helps you only if guest bloggers practicing the same text in the author bio section.

#4 Image Search

Even Google can help you in multiple ways. Hence, it is dominant. Use Google Image Search to fetch the entire mentions of the particular webmaster online.

It’s cool to do. Copy the image URL of any specific guest author in your niche.

Head over to Google images and paste the image URL there.

The results are the mentions that are related to the particular image either guest posts, interviews, or anything.

#5 Social Search

Most of the bloggers share their guest post contributions across social media or mention it in a ‘featured on’ list. Though Google can be your bestie, Twitter can get you fresher results with its quick index.

Just using the ‘Search Twitter,’ enter your keyword + “my guest post.” You will get results of the personalities who post about their recent guest post on the same niche. Dig those blogs where they have guest posted on. Here is a sample for you –

#6 Competitor’s backlink analysis

There is no wonder, how competitor’s backlink analysis can help you in getting guest posting opportunities. Just pick a master blog in your niche that ranks for thousands of potential keywords. You can use any popular SEO tool or backlink checker to perform competitor backlinks analysis. For now, I am taking Adam Connell’s Blogging Wizard and using Ahrefs. Digging its link profile is amazing. Links are pointing from such authoritative domains. Below are just a few among around 30K backlinks.

From the list, you can filter ‘one link per domain,’ then ‘blogs’ only, and backlinks that are tagged with ‘content.’ Since most of the blog owners offer a link in the content to value the contribution of any guest blogger. By narrowing down your results, you can easily sediment the backlinks that are generated by guest blogging. Export that list, and catch those blogs for you.

#7 Alltop.com

Alltop.com, the ultimate place or even you can say the repository of the best blogs over the web. Use it to get a massive list of authoritative blogs in your niche. Though it is not a curated list of blogs that accept guest post, still, you can do some groundwork to handpick a few out of it.

#8 Blog Comments

If your blog post content attracts more comments, then it is absolute that your content is appreciable. This is a good signal of engagement and that your blog readers like your content.

Take advantage here. Move forward and interact with those regular comment contributors. Send them a mail to thank for their contribution in the comments section and request for a guest post opportunity.

As a follower of your blog content, your request won’t be ignored. Approval becomes melting ice.

#9 Blogger Outreach tools

There are superior outreach tools available to make your job easier. Tools like Ninja Outreach are extraordinary, particularly. I am not here to promote it. I have experienced its features. Hence, suggested to the core is a real user.

With your niche keyword, you can prospect the potential blogs based on multiple metrics like DA, social mentions, link weight, and so on. It can reduce your workload to the extreme. You will have half-cooked data available from these tools that are specially developed for blogger outreach strategy.

#10 Lists of guest post accepting sites

Why struggle if others can feed you with ready-solutions? Simply search in Google for “List of guest blog accepting sites” or “list of sites/blogs accepting guest posts” or similar. You will get a massive list of blogs that are gathered by your friend bloggers.

Instantly, go for it. These results can keep you engaged for even years. Look at the results down –

Step – 2: # Research & stick to your target sites

With any of the above method, you can able to get a huge list of guest post accepting sites. But, you could not also you are not supposed to contact those blog owners directly. You must do some groundwork to sort perfect sites to pitch. Let me take you through different ideas to separate the sheep from the goats.

# Sort out perfect sites based on Quality Metrics

You cannot check out each site in the list, manually. It kills your time. Instead, you can filter the good ones from the odds based on a few metrics. With this, you can minimize your list drastically without even digging deep.

Domain Authority –

The popular SEO metric developed by Moz to understand that ranking potential of any domain. The DA value ranges from 0 to 100. Higher the value, higher the domain credibility. Based on the link profile, quality of the linking domains, number of backlinks, etc. Moz rates each domain. With Moz bar, note down the DA of the all the sites in your list.

To start with, I insist you ignore most popular sites with high domain authority. First, concentrate on the blogs that are less familiar since there are higher possibilities to get approval for guest blogging on those sites. Later on, after submitting some reasonable number of guest posts, then you might target more popular sites.

For an instant, if your blog’s DA is around 30, then I would suggest you target sites that have DA around 40’s. Initially, you can motivate yourself by targeting sites that are most likely to accept your guest post request.

Alexa Rank –

Alexa rank can make you understand the traffic flow of any particular domain. Unlike DA, here the standardization differs. Lower the Alexa rank, higher the traffic that the site receives. For an instant, the site having Alexa score below 1,000 will have more traffic than a site with Alexa score, 10,000.

PBN’s –

It is a kind of network of blogs managed by a single owner or a group of people. Basically, these blogs are intentionally created. Being active altogether, these PBNs’ can improve other commercial sites of the same owner. It falls under the black hat technique. Since a single person owns these blogs solely to boost a money-making site.

And, PBN’s are used to game the search engine results with manipulations. Probably, these PBN sites will have identical hosting, themes, website design, backlink profile, site ownership and duplicate content (almost). If you suspect any such PBN blogs, then you must ignore those sites upfront.

These are the various factors based on which, you can single out the real blogs where you can submit a guest post.

But, I didn’t mean these are the ‘PERFECT’ sites to pitch.

Further, you will have to optimize your list to filter out the worth sites that can make your guest blogging campaign the more beneficial. I will take you through some hints with which you can research the sorted sites and stick to the best sites for pitching.

Above all, you need to guest post on sites that –

•  Have high-quality blog post and guest post articles
•  Can value your efforts and offer to follow links in the content
•  Recognize you with a neat author bio section
•  Can drive more organic targeted audience
•  Are real blogs with a healthy link profile
•  Having active social profiles with massive followers

To show you, we have recently submitted a guest post on Rankwatch.com. You may check out its link profile, social followers, content quality, author bio or anything. It fulfills all the expectations.

Step – 3: Get your target blog owners to notice you

Now, you have a handful of target blogs where you can contribute your guest articles. The very next process is to get prepared for the right pitch. Before pitching, you must warm up your targets to let them know you.

Being a stranger, there is no point to expect blog owners to accept your guest post request. Hence, it becomes obvious to build a relationship with bloggers before outreaching.

You can start interacting with target blog owners as below.

#1 Use the power of social media

Every webmaster must be eager to grow their social followers and engagements. Hence, bloggers are likely to monitor their social profile performance. Here is an advantage. Get connected with your target blog owners, follow and mark your social signals like retweets, likes, comments, and shares.

You may frequently share any of their popular posts tagging the particular blog owner. You will get noticed, maybe for the first time. That’s a good start.

#2 Blog Comment

Probably, you must be following your target blogs. Take some time to contribute insightful blog comments legitimately. By blog regularly commenting with some helpful points, you are getting closer to the blog owner.

Few blogs I regularly follow and read its content. Among which, Erik’s NoPassiveIncome is one. I will always find his article more simple and easy to grab. I will never miss marking my comments after reading every blog post. Here are my comments on NPI articles –

#3 Shoot warm up emails

A week or two before pitching, send them a few remarkable emails appreciating their good works. Say, for example, mention a piece of content from their blog, highlight any tips or strategies or infographics included in the particular post and tell about how it inspired you. How was that article helpful to you? Talk about it or the inspirations you have with them.

Here is an email conversation I had with Ryan, Blogging From Paradise. He is a popular travel blogger too. I was asking him about Tiberr – the blogging community. Surprisingly, he has written a Kindle book about Content Promotions on Triberr.

I am sure that this personalized email complimenting their efforts can turn their eyeballs around you.

#4 Include in your roundups & interview series

Perhaps, no blogger would ignore if you want them to include in expert roundups or take an interview. Conduct group interviews and let their online journey and achievements reach out to more audiences by you. Literally, you will be in their good books.

However, you must get closer to your target blog owners before pitching. Any of your attempts must impress and remember you among the crowd.

Step – 4: Preparing to pitch a guest post

That’s great. You are not a stranger now. Still, if your guest article topic or title is not in line with their expectations, you cannot succeed. Hence, I want to tell you a few suggestions about pitching with the right guest post topic. To pitch perfectly, you must do some groundwork.

# Analyze the target blog’s content

Knowing about the target blog content and its audience, matters. You must analyze what type of audience it has, like beginners, or intermediate or experts. What sort of content they prefer publishing. It includes detailed tutorials, or promotional content, or general concepts or breaking updates, etc.

Whom are they targeting? Are audiences end consumers or B2B? Are they geo-specific? Do they any specific content flow? All you need to research and make a note to prepare yourself to execute.

# Check out its previous guest post articles

You must run through its previous guest post articles. How it appeals? Do those guest posts attract more comments and social shares? How was the guest post content promoted?

If its readership is tuning only for the blog owners blog post content, then it is hard to empower your guest post goals. Hence, understand the blog, and its readership nature, previous guest post articles before you are deciding upon something.

Moreover, some blog owners will accept guest posts only from specific writers or active member in the blogging community. Not from all. Get to know what category of authors possibly contributes guest posts over there. With those clues, you can introduce yourself to the target blog owner either as a blogger, writer, consultant or freelancer.

# Must-to-do: Read Guest Post Guidelines

Every blog will have unique guest post instructions and guidelines based on various factors. Depending on its website or blog design, theme functionality, and readership, guest post guidelines will vary. So it becomes a key to read its guest blogging guidelines to uplift the chance to accept your guest post.

# Hit upon with a Perfect Guest Post Topic

You don’t require breaking your mind to come up with perfect guest post topics. It’s like a piece of cake if you are a good reader. You must have the practice of following more blogs in your niche.

Head over to your target blogs and make a list of its popular blog post articles. Apparently, you can get those articles in its homepage sidebars under ‘popular posts.’ It’s sure that those posts are great in attracting more comments, shares and hence, traffic.

Alternatively, you may use tools like Ahrefs to identify the best-performing posts on any specific blog.

BuzzSumo can help you greatly in finding top trending topics in your industry. Bloggers won’t encourage you to contribute content on any boring topics. They want something hot that can attract huge audiences. Hence, write an article on any trending topic, likely to accept your guest post with no hesitation.

# Guest Post title is a game changer

No generic topics can help you. “How to do perfect on-page optimization?” Though it comes under an informative piece of writing (how to’s), it seems more identical. There might be thousands of articles crunch about it over the web.

Blog owners won’t pay more attention to these types of guest post titles. “The most unusual on-page optimization techniques, haven’t heard so far.” This talks about the same on-page optimization. But, driving will be different. Few bloggers like Robbie Richards will have awesome titles.

Step – 5: It’s time to Bombard, Pitching

With tonnes of tasks in the queue, people won’t pay attention to your generic guest post pitch. They will go off just hitting the delete. Your entire efforts make zero if your pitching fails. Hence, make sure you outreaching email templates has the below –

• Professional subject line
• Personalization
• Short intro about you
• Mention something specific about their site and your involvement
• Don’t drag, keep your mail short and sweet
• Tell them the purpose of the mail clearly (don’t talk blah, blah,)
• Suggest them with 2 or 3 topics that can excel
• Show them your previous quality works to bring confidence
• To put it simply, you must soft sell

Here is the email template I use with which I have submitted a decent number of guest posts till date.

Guest blogging Outreach Email Template –

Step – 6: Nothing but Guest Post Content Writing like a Pro

Glad that your guest post request is approved. It’s time to write something to prove or keep up your promises on the topic that they choose.

Before you start writing, you can plan properly. You cannot write a lengthy content of more than 3,000 words for all the target blogs. Hence, categorize the opportunities into two.

The first one, the undisputable authoritative blogs that you inspire to follow, read and learn stuff. And the other one is the moderate blog where high quality is enough to get fulfilling.

Only if your content is unique and precious than something usual, you can hit the ball. Else, you might lose the opportunity though the blog owner accepts your guest post request.

For the reason that you have shared their content on social media or comments on their blog posts, they won’t be ready to downgrade the standard of their blog content value. Keep this in mind.

Here are my few suggestions to write a mind-blowing guest post content that impress both blog owners to hit ‘publish’ and blog readers to love reading.

• Don’t ever try to use it for your promotions
• Follow the same content-flow or outline that blog has
• Write lengthier content minimum 2,000 words
• Add media formats like infographics, screenshots, and images appropriately
• Format the content similar to its other posts (lessen their work)
• Interlink to other content on the same site that is relevant to the topic
• Place other informative source links that are of high quality and relevant
• Include a call to action compelling readers to contribute comments
• Craft your author bio with your blog or website name, social profiles, and your uniqueness.

Don’t give a loophole to ignore or hesitate to publish your content for any reason. Proofread the final piece of content, twice and submit for review.

Step – 7: Your job is not done to the whole – Needs follow up

Congrats. Your post is live now. To be the best guest blogger and to get the most out of your efforts, you must do the following.

# Thank blog owner for the opportunity

This is not going to be your last day in the sphere. You will have to be in a relationship with bloggers. Send a thank you mail to the blog owner for the acceptance and coordination in bringing your post live. Be the first commenter, thanking the blog owner and encouraging the audience to mark their comments. Let them know that you are readily available and glad to respond to their comments.

# Respond to the blog comments

You should not go idle once your guest post comes live. You must check it often and respond to the comments offering valuable insights. By which, you can showcase yourself as a master on the topic and authoritative in your niche.

# Share your guest post on social media

Only content promotion can take it to reach a huge audience. Creating valuable content and dumping it in the archive is meaningless. Hence, share the guest post article on your social profiles and request the blog owner to do so. Also, distribute it among the blogging communities, social media groups, create threads in forums and wherever possible.

This is the point where both the host and the guest can reap the utmost benefits from the particular guest post drive.

Reasons for the failures of Guest Blogging

So far, we have seen how to do guest blogging. If I am not wrong, it’s obvious to know how not to do guest posting. Here are the few typical reasons, why the guest blogging campaign fails to yield though.

• Outreaching as a stranger
• Targeting blogs that are irrelevant
• Improper outreach email template with no personalization
• Pitching inappropriate topics
• Writing low-quality content
• Guest posting for the sole purpose of building backlinks
• If you own PBN’s or low-quality blogs that legitimate your value
• Rarely, your blog is newly born and has low authority

Make sure you are not entertaining any of the above that can spoil your guest blogging efforts and online reputation.

Guest Blogging Pro-tips

Let’s call off this splendid article with a handful of tips that you aren’t familiar with.

#1 Throw out your misconception. Bigger the site, higher the benefits will be. No, it’s absolutely not. More popular the site is, higher the organic traffic will be. Hence, prefer to target more popular blogs that not just have visitors; but having fellow readers.

#2 Check out your target blog post’s comment section always. More the number of blog comments that it gains; you are likely to stick to it. More engagement your guest post article receives higher the organic traffic drive will be.

#3 Probably, Google ignores link in the author bio section. Hence, it is significant to grab a link in the body of the article. Before choosing the guest post topic, decide upon which post you want to link in your guest post. So, linking will be more natural and relevant.

#4 Write your author bio in such a way that it must trigger the readers to visit your blog. Give them a valid reason why they want to redirect to your blogging space. Make it easy for readers to follow your social pages.

How Can Guest Blogging help to build Email List?

Though, the organic traffic, links and social engagements are valuable. Above all, you can also tune your guest blogging campaign to build your email list. Do you wonder, how? Experts are doing it greatly.

# Create a free or bonus resource like ebook, video tutorial, checklists, access to your promotional strategies, etc. related to your guest post topic.

# Secondly, create a landing page with a thank you note, specifically for your guest post readers. Provide access to your bonus materials with a CTA button for the price of their email address.

# At the end of your guest post article you may highlight your free bonus offerings, triggering them to land on your target page. You may use the author bio section also to pitch your free bonus provisions.

It’s so cool, isn’t it?

Guest Blogging Guide – The Few Final Words

Hope this step-by-step guide on guest blogging can benefit you for sure. Even beginners can follow this, probably. I made it simple. I have different ideas, perspectives and tips to pitch your guest post perfectly. Which one would you like to attempt first? How it goes? How it improves your organic traffic flow? Let me know in the comments section.

If you have any other success strategy form your experience, share it here that adds more value to the readers.

Also, if you find it hard to manage your own blog post content, then you may also open up the opportunity allowing other bloggers to contribute content to you. By which, you can feed new blood to your readers, and you can drive a new set of readers from the blogosphere.