A 10-Step Guide On Guest Post Outreach for 2023

Guest post outreach allows bloggers to reach out to other bloggers and guest posting sites and pitch them to publish your content on their websites. The main purpose of guest post outreach is to create quality content that gives value to their audience, establish yourself as an expert in a specific niche, and get better exposure as a writer.

While only 7% of bloggers pitch to 100 or more blogs each month, 50% of bloggers reach out to 10 or fewer connections each month for guest posts.

Guest post outreach comes with many benefits. More specifically, it will allow you to

Boost Traffic

One of the key advantages of guest post outreach is the ability to drive traffic to your website. When you publish a guest post on another site, you can add a link pointing to your blog, which is a great source of referral traffic. If people read your content on other sites and like it, they may become interested to learn more about you and your writing. As a result, they will visit your website to discover more of your articles. This way, your website will get a lot of traffic.

Establish Relationships

Guest post outreach gives you an opportunity to build connections with other bloggers and websites. By giving value to their audience with your insightful articles, you have a great chance to establish yourself as an authority in your niche and a credible source of information. This, in its turn, can open up more opportunities.

Improve SEO

Another advantage of guest post outreach is its ability to improve your blog’s SEO. When you get a lot of backlinks from high-quality websites, your domain authority and search rankings improve.

For instance, if you own a blog about pets, approaching a pet website with an offer to write a guest post can help you in gaining a valuable backlink pointing to your website. The more high-quality backlinks your blog receives, the higher your search ranking will be.

Increase Brand Awareness

Finally, you receive exposure to a new audience when you publish articles on other websites. As a result, you can expect to see increased awareness of your brand and more people reading your blog.

For instance, let’s assume you run a small SEO agency and want to expand your audience. The first thing you need to do is to find popular blogs in your niche and reach out to them with a guest post offer. After publishing your post, you can use social media platforms to promote your piece of writing.

If you manage to create high-quality content, more people will discover your content and visit your website or start following you on different social media platforms. As a result, you will gain more brand recognition.

3 Ways to Find Guest Post Outreach Opportunities

Below are some popular ways to find websites that accept guest posts.

1. Find Other Blogs Relevant to Your Audience

To find the right guest blogging websites, you need to identify who your blog audience is.

Make a list of blogs whose audiences are similar to yours. Find out how often those websites have been updated in the past few months. If the website has good traffic and has been frequently updated within the last six months, then it is worth checking out those websites.

Once you finalize your list of appropriate websites for guest blogging, contact the website owners and ask if you can write for their blog.

2. Use Google Search

Google is the most popular search engine which can be used to find guest post opportunities. All you need to do is to use the right keywords for relevant results.

When searching for websites accepting guest posts, pay attention to whether those websites are trustworthy. There are plenty of spammy websites. So, do your research before reaching out to a website owner.

You should also make sure that the website and its content are relevant to your niche. If you are writing about fashion, but another website is about pets, then there is no sense in writing a guest post.

Last but not least, you need to learn whether the website receives enough engagement. If readers are actively commenting and liking, then it is worth writing a guest post for that website.

3. Join Online Communities

The third option is to join online communities. You can find them on Slack, Reddit, LinkedIn, and other platforms that allow you to create your own groups.

As for guest posting, some people share the guest blogs they wrote for other websites. They also share the names of blogs that accept guest posts. So, join these communities to find guest posting opportunities.

To do so, find and join relevant online communities. Next, actively take part and contribute to the discussions in your community. This way, you can gain people’s trust, and they might come to you with great offers and opportunities.

Successful Guest Post Outreach in 10 Steps

Crafting a perfect guest post outreach campaign might seem daunting. However, with the steps outlined below, you can achieve great results.

1. Build a Contact List

Creating a good contact list will free up a lot of time and money. After all, you don’t want to contact a person who will not reply. Therefore, it is essential to include only those relevant to your niche and likely to respond.

However, creating a contact list is not enough. You should also maintain and keep it updated to ensure there are no irrelevant people in your list or invalid email addresses. Use an email list management tool or software to regularly clean up your contact list.

2. Pick an Outreach Method

An outreach campaign will succeed only when you have a solid strategy. The strategy will depend on what you are trying to achieve with your campaign.
You might want to target as many websites as it is possible. This kind of outreach is much faster and does not require you to invest a lot of time or resources. You are not wasting anything even if you send two hundred emails and only get ten replies. All you need to do is to understand what content your target audience prefers and use relevant email templates to look more professional. These will have a huge impact on your open and reply rates.

The second approach is more focused. Instead of targeting too many websites, you can concentrate on only those that are truly valuable for your campaign. This method requires you to spend a lot of time researching blog owners.

You will also need to personalize every email, make it clear that you have enough knowledge of the target company, how your goals match, and how you both could take advantage of cooperation.

So, make sure to think about your goals and choose an outreach approach that best suits your needs and interests.

3. Choose an Outreach Tool

Outreach can be daunting sometimes. However, there are plenty of outreach tools that can help you with that tedious task. All you need is to do proper research to find the right one.

4. Do Your Research

Contacting the right people is crucial to guest post outreach. The prospecting stage is important. There is no sense in contacting people that are not interested in what you’re offering. Therefore, it is recommended to spend extra time on research in advance.

Here is what you should do:

• Ensure you are familiar with what the brand promotes and how that fits your interests.
• Find out whether they accept guest posts. Even if they don’t, it’s still worth trying. If you manage to craft perfect outreach emails, they might change their mind and start accepting guest posts. So, make some effort.
• Explore their blog. This way, you can gain a basic understanding of what kind of articles they write and how you can contribute.
• Identify the blog’s target audience. Try to learn the demographics as well as their interests. This will allow you to create content that aligns with the target audience’s interests.
• Try to learn about the person you’re going to contact. Checking social media pages is one of the most effective ways to get information about a person.

5. Choose a Topic

The choice of topics for guest posts is important and requires you to do some research. You must choose a topic that will benefit your reader and your website.

Understanding the website owner’s blog well is essential. Figure out what topics are discussed and focus on them.

However, you should still pick topics that you are knowledgeable about. For instance, it makes no sense to write a guest post about fashion if your niche is digital marketing. Instead, focus on topics you are passionate about.

6. Write an Email

Writing an email might seem like a challenging task. However, there are many outreach templates that can help you and enable you to have a better idea of how to structure your emails.

It goes without saying, but you make sure your emails are catchy, informative, and personalized enough to grab the attention of website owners.

Below you will find the main elements of a guest post outreach email.

• Subject line – A good subject line is short, concise, and catchy. If you manage to write a good subject line, it will help you stand out.
• Introduction – Briefly introduce yourself (name, positions, etc.).
• Body of the email – This is the part where you should make it clear to website owners why you are reaching out to them and ask if they accept guest posts.
• Call-to-action– Indeed, you also need a powerful CTA. It should make them take the desired action. In this case, the desired action is discussing things further and accepting the guest post offer. So, try to write copy that will motivate them to collaborate with you.
• Closign– Ending your email with a friendly goodbye is a good idea. Finishing the email with a pleasant “look forward to hearing from you” will be the best decision.
• Signature – Using an email signature is a great way to add a personal touch to your email as well as share important information, including your name and position. This will enable blog owners to learn more about you.

7. Personalize Your Guest Post Outreach

Personalizing your outreach campaigns is a great way to grab blog owners’ attention. Using their name or mentioning a line from one of their blog posts can leave a positive impression on them.

So, make sure to come up with a unique way to personalize your emails. It can highly impact your email open and reply rate.

8. Be Honest

It is always a good idea to be sincere with people. Pretending to know more than you actually do would only hurt your outreach efforts.

So, be honest. If you are honest, there is a high likelihood that the blog owners will trust you and be willing to cooperate with you.

9. Send Your Email at the Right Time

Sending emails anytime you want is not a good idea. Instead, find out when the target website owners are active and contact them at specific times. This way, they’ll be more likely to open your email and actually look through what you have to offer.

10. Track and Improve Your Campaign

Monitoring your campaign’s results is essential to future campaigns’ success. Learning what works and does not will enable you to alter particular aspects of your campaign if needed. Besides, you will be able to notice a pattern of tactics that lead to good results, record them, and use them for future campaigns.

While tracking, make sure to brainstorm to understand what you should do to make your outreach campaign better and implement those strategies next time. This way, you’ll find a tactic that works for you.

Summary

Guest post outreach can be a powerful way to expand your reach and drive traffic to your site. By following the above-mentioned steps, you can highly improve your chances of success and build positive and strong relationships with website owners relevant to your niche.