Guest blogging was perhaps one of those holy grails of blogging that was pretty much kept secret for a very long time, till the message got out and the blogosphere got flooded by guest posts.
The best part about guest blogging is that you don’t need to have a blog, or build a readership or pretty much do anything to build an audience. One can simply leverage the power and reach of other bloggers and use it to your own advantage and benefits.
If your content is good and whatever you are selling is both high quality and relevant then there is nothing much that is required from your end as the target blogger who is going to publish your content already has a readership base on his blog, an email list for newsletter and social media reach and followers. In short, the bloggers are ready with their audience; you only need to have good content to keep feeding this hungry audience.
Here, in this article, we will discuss several steps to get your guest posts published quickly.
1. Build a Connection: Most bloggers who accept guest posts don’t publish content from total strangers. There are a number of things that can go wrong if someone accepts content like that, so in order to get a pitch read, one has to build a genuine connection with the blogger.
Start with blog commenting and post a really good comment on the latest post of the blog. After adding your comment, share the post on the social media and make sure to tag the blogger while sharing. Make sure to do this for months before pitching a guest post request.
2. Research the target blog well: Not all blogs are same, even if they are on the same niche; the way a blog writes and publish content is unique to it. In such a case, one has to learn the tone well so that the post is well received by the blogs audience.
Along with that, look into content formatting. Check how the sub-headings and other forms of content presentation are used. Try to make sure that your content looks similar in format when you send over your post to the blog owner.
3. Pitch content that isn’t already published on the blog: If the blog has been running for some time then it might be possible that a similar content to what you are planning to write is already present in the blog. This is why it becomes extremely important why you should always search the blog for content similar to what you are working on.
4. Make sure to write the article well: As a blogger and a writer, you should always edit and fix the article to its most polished form before publishing it. However, when you write for someone else, it becomes even more important to edit and check the article for hundred percent accuracy before forwarding it to the blog owner.
Do note that it becomes difficult to edit the posts at a later time for several reasons which are outside your control. But while the article is still with you, make sure to edit it properly.
5. Always be ready to edit and re-send the drafts: Most of the popular and premium blogs are difficult to get posts published. Their editorial standards are usually high on such A-List blogs. In such a case, be prepared to write, edit and re-send the articles as many times as the A-list blog asks.
Even if the draft you resend, gets rejected and you get more edits and corrections, you should still try to complete those edits and re-send the draft once again.
6. Be very polite while following up: Sometimes you don’t get a response when trying to contact the blogger. Everyday, pitches like yours, about a hundred of those are received by the blogger. It can be easily possible that the blogger is busy and might miss your emails. In such a case, always make sure to be polite and wait for their response.
This can be even more difficult when you send a draft post for publishing and you don’t get a response from the blogger. You might get tempted to scrap the guest post idea and pitch another blogger and get the post published. This is a bad idea, because when the blogger finally manage to post your content, it will be published elsewhere already. This will eventually cause duplicate content – thus it is always better to keep patience while guest posting.
7. Once published, share it enough: Now that your post is finally published, it is time to start sharing your content. Share your published guest posts on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other social media sites. Feel free to share your content with your email subscribers or social media followers.
The more you share your content, the more authority you will gain for yourself. Try to get your guest post linked from other bloggers, that way your post will start to rank and trend.
8. Use the published post as a reference to get more guest posts approved: Now that your post is live, don’t stop here. Start pitching more blogs and this time, as a reference use this published post so that people can check your content quality before allowing you to guest post for them.
Bloggers want to see quality and actionable content and the moment they see a quality guest post published, they will start allowing you to add more content. Another thing to note is that, when a post is published on a bigger blog that has more authority, smaller bloggers who value the popular blog naturally accepts your pitch and allows you to post on their blog easily.
9. Set up an As-Seen-On page: Just like testimonials or about us, make a page that showing the list of all the guest posts that you have published so far. Similarly, one can also make a page that lists all the sites that has ever linked to you or mentioned you in their posts. This way you will have a reference to the posts that you have published and along with that, people will see your guest post quality and allow you and invite you to write for their blogs.
Getting your first guest post published will help you to build a port folio and use this as a reference for pitching more blogs. Make sure to target the bigger blogs too as these blogs has a huge authority and getting posts published on such A-list blogs helps a lot.