How To Write 100+ Guest Posts Every Year

Breaking into the guest posting game isn’t easy. Not only do you need to be posting on a wide variety of sites in order to get the best returns, but you both keep a rapid schedule of posts in the pipeline and maintain a high level of quality.

After all, you could write 1,000 guest posts a year and get nothing from them if you half-arse it.

Back at Process Street, we published 124 guest posts in the past year, and have seen first hand how valuable they are in increasing your website’s traffic. As such, we’ve developed a couple of processes and sticking points to consider to help you successfully write as many guest posts as possible.

Target Relevant Blogs

Whilst it’s a bit of a no-brainer, you need to make sure that all of the blogs you send pitches to are relevant to your audience. By doing this, you’re boosting your guest posting efforts in three distinct ways.

First, you’re making all guest posts easier to write (and therefore quicker to produce). This is a natural benefit of having similar target audiences, as most topics you discuss in your writing will bleed over into your guest post.

Second, you’re more likely to get accepted as a guest poster on the target site. Put it this way; if you’re a resident authority on SEO tools and have a lot of quality content to back up that claim on your own blog, it will be much easier to convince an SEO-based blog to accept a post from you than, say, a casual knitting endeavor.

Third and finally, anyone who reads your guest post will be more likely to click your backlinks and head on over to your native content. Whilst it may sound patronizing to spell out like this, if the native audience of your target blog are interested in the same kind of content that you produce, you’re more likely to catch their attention and get some extra referral traffic.

Start Off Small

It’s all too easy to get carried away when you’re sending pitches, but (at least at first) you shouldn’t go sending TechCrunch your ideas before proving yourself with some of the smaller fry. Doing so both serves to cement your credibility as a reliable voice on your given topics, and will inherently benefit your more in terms of backlinks purely for SEO (which I’ll explain a little later).

An added bonus of targeting smaller sites is that they will, in theory, be easier to get accepted on for a couple of reasons. Not only will there be fewer guest posters to compete with due to the site having a smaller audience, but they will probably be more inclined to consider your pitch based on the content you have under your belt, rather than the span of sites you are published on.

Think of it like building a guest posting portfolio which doubles up by giving your site and the posts you link back to a huge backlink boost. When you start guest posting, you need to prove yourself with the smaller sites before you can get noticed by the bigger ones.

Build Relationships Before Pitching

It always helps to have a friend on the inside, and one of the most effective methods I’ve found to get a foothold on sites like The Next Web is to make your name known before even sending your first pitch.

Start off by identifying the influencers on the site you want to target. These could be the head of the marketing team or just a frequent native blogger, but the key here is to single out a particular influencer to try to build up a rapport with.

This can be done by taking your list of influencers and looking at the most prolific content creator who publishes content which aligns with your area of expertise. After all, you’re going to be pitching to this person, so there’s little point in building a relationship with someone wholly unrelated to your target area.

Once you’ve identified your key candidate, start interacting with their content through the occasional comment on the site itself, a share on Twitter, or anything along those lines. Don’t go crazy and comment on everything they write (you’ll come off as more stalkerish than friendly) and don’t interact with something that didn’t grab you – if you didn’t like the content, don’t lie about it.

Do this for at least a month in the run up to your pitch; this should give enough time for you to naturally become a name which is familiar to the influencer, and makes your pitch that much more likely to get read.

Post Far And Wide

As most of you reading will know, in terms of SEO benefit, backlinks run on a system of diminishing returns. That is to say, the first link you get from a website is worth more than the second link, which is worth more than the third link, etc.

Knowing this, if your only aim is to boost your search ranking for a specific post, or to give your site more natural authority, your best bet is to publish one post on as many different sites as possible, rather than multiple entries on a single site. Five posts on five sites is (in SEO terms) worth more than five posts on one, even if it’s TechCrunch.

This is best achieved by going for mid-low tier sites (in terms of traffic / authority), as these sites will be much easier to get accepted on, are much more numerous, and are potentially a little more forgiving than the big hitters. That’s not to say that you can put in minimal effort and expect to get away with it though.

In fact, speaking of which…

Don’t Skimp On The Quality

This is a guest poster’s greatest temptation, and greatest downfall. If you send a low quality post to a site you’ve pitched and been accepted on, all of your previous efforts are likely to go to waste, as the content will be flat-out rejected.

Not only will this waste everyone’s time, but it could even tarnish your chances of getting accepted onto that site in the future – remember that the post might not be going on your website, but it’s still got your name attached to it.

Don’t settle on 600 words that don’t say anything valuable. Don’t fill your paragraphs with pointless drivel. Don’t get greedy and stuff in every backlink you can – put in only the few which are most valuable to you, otherwise you’re begging to get all of your links stripped out in the final cut.

To this end, I’d recommend making a semi-formal guest posting process to follow every time you’re drawing up a post. Not only will this ensure that you don’t miss an opportunity to put some extra value into your writing, but the extra quality control will quickly show why it’s one of the most valuable marketing processes you can formalize.

There you have it; some of the most valuable tips we developed in our (successful) quest to publish over 100 guest posts in a single year. What about your own guest posting efforts? Have any killer tips to share? I’d love to hear everything in the comments below.

Happy posting!

Tags: guest blogging, guest posting, Guest Posts, guest writing