Internet Marketing

How to Make Sure the Next Blog Guest Post You Submit Gets Accepted

get your guest post accepted guideGuest posting is one of those kill X birds with one stone methods. With guest posting you can:

  • Position yourself as an authority in your niche, since the most popular blogs in it will have featured an article of yours.
  • Gain more visits to your website instantly.
  • Capitalize on the social media power of another person.
  • Get a powerful backlink from an important blog in your niche.
  • Get more followers on social media (depending on your niche and article).

 

Even if you look at it from a link building perspective only, guest blogging is the most powerful (and free) way to increase the value of your web property for search engines.

You can easily start raising your search engine ranking position for your main keyword even after writing your first guest post, so don’t waste any more time, start writing for other sites straight away!

 

How to write guest posts and how to get accepted as a guest blogger

Guest posting is a win-win situation for both you and the website owner that you’re submitting your article to. You will gain all the aforementioned benefits and the website owner will get one more page of unique content, and the ability to focus on something else that might be more important (like creating a new product) rather than searching for one more subject to write about.

You might think that submitting an article for inclusion as a guest post on a blog will be like a God-sent gift for the website owner and that you will always be accepted. And that’s where you’re wrong. (Sorry for that, you asked for it! Come on!)

Submitting a guest post and actually getting it published is not an easy thing to do. You’re not the only one trying to submit guest posts and since we’re looking for high traffic sites to submit our articles to, you can be sure that there are many, many others that are doing the same. There are cases that you won’t even get a reply from the author of the blog simply because they are tired from all the spammy articles they’ve had to read and reject in the last month alone!

 

So what can you do to increase your chances for your articles to be included? Differentiate yourself!

In order to do that, you should do the following things:

1. You should state in your email that this article will not be “reprinted” anywhere else, not even your own blog. This is a crucial point to make because one of the most important things that a blog owner doesn’t want to deal with, is duplicated content.

2. You should know a lot of information about the blog and the blog owner. A first email along the lines of “Hey George, I’m a fan of your blog and really enjoyed your article about scuba diving in the Red Sea! Should be an amazing experience… I’m Nick and would love to…” will be much better than starting straight away with your pitch. Be personal; let them know that you’re a fan, and that you’re interested in the blog and want to provide quality content.

3. If you’re not that familiar with the blog yet, you should do your homework! Read the blog before submitting a guest post in order to find what guest posts that person accepts, and at the same time, see what they love talking about. You shouldn’t for example write a post about a service that 10 posts ago that author buried.

4. Your first email shouldn’t be an email saying that you can guest post about that blog, but in fact, also include the guest post itself! Bloggers in general don’t have enough time to going back and forth with emails, and they will appreciate you, treating their time as valuable.

Tip: Always tell them to send you a mail back if the article won’t make it on their website so you can use it on another person’s site. This makes them also take your time seriously and makes them understand that you do this professionally and not just doing it on your free time.

5. You should make it easy for them to include your article on their website! You should always attach the following files to your email:

 

A DOC file with the actual article, already formatted so they can easily read it as they would on their own blog.

A TXT file with the same article, but ready to be copy-pasted onto their blog. You can post it as a draft on your WordPress site, and when you’re done, switch to HTML view and copy the code. This will save them a lot of time, because even styling and formatting a post can take more than 15 minutes. If you have any images, add them to the compressed file that you’ll sending to them and also state where you bought them from, so they know that you just didn’t “borrow” them.

Last but not least,

A TXT with the code you want them to add in the author’s box, together with the link.

Having done everything for them will make them ten times more willing to allow your post to be published.

 

How to find sites to submit your guest posts to

 

When searching for places to submit your guest post to, you should first search the blogs in your niche that you already read frequently.

Scan their blog’s main page and see if they have something on accepting guest posts. Also check their last ten articles and see if they were written by them or by someone else. If their last posts have other people too, you’re in luck! Contact them with your post and there’s a big chance for you to be accepted.

When you are done with the sites you already read frequently, now is the time to use your best friend, Google! (what else did you think? :P)

Go to Google and use the following search queries to look for places that you can submit your post to.

 

your niche keywords + “guest post”

your niche keywords + “submit article”

your niche keywords + “submit an article”

your niche keywords + “write for us”

your niche keywords + “submit post”

your niche keywords + “submit a guest post”

your niche keywords + “become a guest blogger”

your niche keywords + “want to write for”

your niche keywords + “suggest a post”

your niche keywords + “this guest post was written”

 

The quotation marks are used in order for Google to give you back results that have exactly that phrase somewhere in the targeted site.

With this method you will have endless sites to submit your posts to. Always keep writing down the places you have asked to write a guest post, and all the sites you have already an article live.

 

Keep in mind…

You SHOULD always submit your BEST articles as guest posts and not articles that you just wrote last night while you were sleepy.

A quick way to see if a post you’ve written is a good post for you to submit as a guest post, is the following: Ask yourself: Would you post this on your own blog? If yes, that’s the first check. Ask again: Are you sad that you won’t have this on your blog? If the answer is again yes, then this is a great post that you can submit.

The reason behind it is that you should have great articles on other blogs, because the site you will submit your articles to will have more traffic than you and more people will see them and judge if they will click your link in the end of the article. If the article is an amazing one, then the chances for them to click and go to your website are very high.

Last but not least, here’s something you should test no matter what. Write some guest posts and submit them, linking to your bio the main page of your blog, and submit some others, linking to your lead capture page, and see how they compare.

The idea behind this is that in some niches, if you point them to a landing page, they might get “angry” that you immediately tried to pitch to them, and leave your site once and for all. So you will lose what could be a great subscriber for your blog and a potential subscriber to your list too!

What I am trying to do, is to try to submit both these links on my author’s box, but first have the link to my blog so if they just check one link, that should be my blog.

So that’s it! You are now ready to start spreading amazing content and at the same time create good link value for your domain too!

About the author

Angel

13 Comments

  • Being a blogger (part-time) I found this post very interesting. I must look into guest blogging a bit more. Thanks for making it so simple to follow and for sharing on Bizsugar.com

    • Thank you for the comment Sian! Guest blogging can really help you not only gain a good amount of visits, followers and link value, but if your guest posts are amazing, great motivation after reading great comments on your GuestPosts.

  • Guest postings are empowering prosumers and attract attention to reciprocate, engage and share! I’m convinced that it’s a great and viral way to expand one’s business!

    • There are many websites that can do that but in my experience, joining a network like that can bring you limited opportunities to write for good blogs. Usually powerful blogs have new guest posts submissions on auto-pilot so they don’t need to join such networks. Your best bet is to find the blogs to write by using google.
      Thank you for the comment Richard!

  • I think this is where I will be focusing a lot of my attention in the coming months. Would like to know what has more value however – writing a post for your own blog or for somebody else’s? Where should your effort be focused?

    • I think the most optimal ratio should be 80% on your blog and 20% as guestposts, especially in the beginning.

      Since you don’t have power in the search engines and you don’t have social media following when you are just starting out, a great amount of articles should go towards building your profile on the internet.

      Thank you for the comment!

Leave a Comment