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White Hat Guest Blogging Made Easy

Guest blogging is one of the most effective but overused link building techniques today.

It has helped many companies and bloggers increase their brand visibility online and attract loyal visitors andpotential clients/customers back to their website.

In today’s post, I’ll be sharing to you the white hat SEO guest blogging process that I have been implementing forour past and our current clients with great success.

What You Will Learn

The truth about guest blogging

How guest blogging really works

How to prospect for high quality blogs

How to qualify blogs based on standard metrics

How to do outreach that gets results

How to create content that attract natural links

Why relationship building is a continuous task in guest blogging

Is Guest Blogging Dead?

When Matt Cutts published a post on the decay and fall of guest blogging, many internet marketers and SEOsstarted to ask the question, is guest blogging dead?

Though you will see a lot of answers and discussions on this topic (most of which are contributions from industryexperts), the mystery answer to that question is still in search.

All I know for sure is when done right, guest blogging is a highly effective traffic, branding & SEO strategy.

Guest Blogging Is Alive & Kicking – When Done Right

Guest blogging is still alive. But the road trip to striking success with this method is not the same as it used to be.

Today, you need to spend time planning a strategic approach (from prospecting to outreach phase) that will standthe test of time and will deliver great results for your brand.

The Benefits Of Guest Blogging In 2015

It’s one of the easiest ways to get in touch with industry bloggers/webmasters to build authenticrelationships with them.

It is a powerful tool to build a slow momentum of exposure and branding for startup companies or newly-built blogs.

Getting consistent daily/monthly visitors if the campaign is targeted to high tier blogs that have active andengaged community of readers.

Links from relevant blogs can help move up rankings for branded keywords, which will intensify thechances of getting press and interview opportunities.

Contextual links from relevant and high quality blogs can help improve the site’s search ranking potential.

Guest blogging still works. It is a practice I pursue with all of my/clients site, take a look at this example from theSEO niche-

And this example that follows the exact same process in the relationship/dating niche-

When you do guest blogging right – the benefits are tremendous. It takes a bit of time & effort but that is time &effort that is very well spent.

The 5 Steps Of White Hat Guest Blogging

It is really easy to break the process down into 5 simple to follow steps-

1. Prospecting

2. Blog qualification

3. Outreach

4. Content creation

5. Relationship building

This new guest blogging approach is the updated version of the process that I created 8 months ago.

I have refind the process to make it quicker, easier and most importantly to protect against Google changes duringthat time.

Step 1 – Prospecting

The first thing we need to do is find a list of potential prospects that we might want to publish a guest post on.

All we need to do is head over to Google and search for potential prospects. Here are a few examples of searchqueries you can use-

“write for us” “industry”

“write for us” “keyword”

“guest post” “industry”

“guest post” “keyword”

I’ve been using above queries for two years now and they’re still giving me some good list of quality blogs.

Once you have a list of potential prospects you need to start thinking about contextual relevancy.

Contextual relevancy is the principle of finding industries that are horizontally and vertically relevant to your brand.

This allows you to see new thematic link opportunities that you haven’t thought of from the start ( Pro tip: Thisapproach also applies to other link building tactics).

Why Is Contextual Relevancy Important?

This is something many people running guest blogging campaigns skip over but there are a number of reasonswe need to look at contextual relevancy-

It extends your capability of targeting blogs from other industries that are also relevant to your niche, whichmight also bring new ready to buy customers/clients to your brand.

It helps build your list of targets both horizontally and vertically in your niche so you never run out ofpotential prospects

Opens new partnerships from other brands in other niches that will help increase exposure for your brand(e.g. new partnered suppliers or manufacturers).

Contextual Relevancy Made Easy

So with that said how do we actually apply contextual relevancy to our guest posting campaign?

Let’s say you own a running and corporate shoes company and you want to gain visibility online and hopefullyattract potential customers through guest blogging.

To get started, you need to list down all industries that you think are relevant to your brand.

Using our above example (running and corporate shoes company), here are niches that are worth consideradding to your list:

Fitness blogs

Corporate blogs

Student blogs

Running blogs

With that list of industries, you can now start prospecting for guest blogging opportunities using both free andpremium link search tools. Chose any of the following products.

Ahrefs

Google search

Buzzsumo

Alltop

Dmoz

These tools have good features that will help you find high quality blogs where you want your best content to beplaced on.

Ahrefs

If you’re mastering competitor link analysis, Ahrefs is that tool that you need.

It will help you search for linking sites that have high domain authority and are capable of passing quality link juiceto your website.

Reverse engineer your main competitors and list down all blogs that linked to them.

This can populate your list up to hundreds of guest blog opportunities.

Google search

Aside from common guest blogging searches like “write for us” and “guest post”, there is one search query that I

failed to take advantage of when prospecting for content contribution opportunities.

That is – the related advanced search function of Google.

If you think you’ve already pulled off all guest blog opportunities in Google, then use related search query to addmore sites to your spreadsheet.

Instead of just following the footprints of your competitors, you can now create your own footprint by acquiringlinks from blogs where contents of your competitors may’ve not been placed on.

Buzzsumo

This is one of my favourite content searching tools because it has filters that can help you narrow down searchresults to very specific content types.

Simply type in your keyword/phrase in Buzzsumo’s search bar, then click search.

Once done, you can filter the results by “Guest Posts” (simply check the filter option at the left side of the screen).

You can also sort the results from highest to lowest social shares (can be in total/general or your preferred socialsharing site).

You may also want to export the list straight from Buzzsumo to have a database for guest blogs prospected fromBuzzsumo.

Alltop

Alltop is an easy tool to find high quality and community-oriented blogs.

Because Alltop has strict editorial guidelines when accepting blog directory submissions, you’ll rest assured thatthe blogs that you’ll find have high quality contents.

One thing to consider in Alltop search is its suggested niches/topics that will pop up after typing a keyword/phrasein its search bar.

You can find more relevant blogs when you click on those suggested topics.

Step 2 – Blog qualification

Qualifying your guest blog targets based on specific minimum standards can help you filter out low quality sitesthat’ll not contribute to the success of your brand’s guest blogging campaign.

Here is my own set of qualifiers to separate the chaff from churns (among my list of guest blogs):

Domain authority (metric used by Moz)

Trustflow (metric used by MajesticSEO)

Number of referring link domains

Placement of content

Niche-specific / multiple-categories

Panda-proof content

Domain authority (Moz’s metric) and trustflow (MajesticSEO’s metric) are initial qualifiers to identify the authority ofa site/page.

Domain and page authorities are numbers that you can easily see in Chrome extensions which can help youquickly determine if the blog in your list is good to go or not.

Another qualifier you can consider is the number of linking root domains pointing to a specific blog.

This metric doesn’t only give you numbers in your spreadsheet but it helps you determine if the blog managed toearn contextual links through its valuable contents (check if backlinks from linking pages are mostly in-content).

When top heavy update was announced by Google, many websites with so many ads that buried down thecontents in their homepages were penalized by the said search engine.

In that case, when you’re looking for a blog to target for distributed content, you’ll have to see if multiple ads (ofwhatever type) are pushing down the contents in the page. If you find one, then remove that to your list of guestblogs.

You should do the same if the content is not readable or poorly written.

Relevancy should be the top priority when prospecting for link targets for your site.

In guest blogging, you can look at the site’s categories to see if they’re tapping too many niches and industrycommunities.

Filter out blogs with multiple categories across many niches since relevancy of those domains are mostly dilutedand they tend to focus on several groups of readers without any emphasis on which industry they can buildauthority on.

Another consideration you should take on is the health of that specific guest blog. Was it hit by an algorithmicpenalty (e.g. Panda)?

Use SEMRush to see the historical data of the site particularly on its organic search data.

Then refer to this Google algorithm change guide on Moz to check if the site was hit by a content/link-basedpenalty on a specific date/month.

Those blog qualifiers I mentioned above can help you refine you list of blog targets so you can get the best resultsout of your guest blogging efforts.

Let’s move on to outreach.

Step 3 – Outreach

Outreach is the phase in guest blogging where you can actually engage with the guest blog target whether youare applying for a regular content contributor or as a one-time guest blogger.

This stage starts with finding the contact information (i.e. name and email address) of the person you’d like toconnect with.

Here are some ways on how you can look for the contact details of your guest blog target:

Check out the blog’s branded pages (About me, Our Team, Contact us).

Get the possible corporate email of your link prospect by using VoilaNorbert.

Use RankCracker (Matt’s free tool) to extract possible email addresses found in a list of URL’s.

Once you’ve identified the email addresses of your guest blog targets, it’s time to send them a guest bloggingpitch.

In this case, you have two options: use Buzzstream (paid tool) or an email management system – combined toolsof Gmail and RightInbox (which costs $5 per month) or Boomerang.

When pitching to guest blog targets, it’s very important to personalize your email towards the interests of yourrecipient.

When you get a positive response – accepting you to become the blog’s regular content contributor or a guestblogger, you may now proceed to the content creation phase.

Step 4 – Content creation

Creating content is a common work for search professionals these days.

However, there’re still some marketers who are not producing great content output for the reason that they don’thave a simple process to follow.

In our link building team, we use this simple content creation process for all of our clients’ guest bloggingcampaign-

Create an outline for a specific article and guest blog, which will include the URL pointing to the blog’s guestblogging guidelines, writing instructions, voice and tone of the article, pages of the client needed to belinked to and deadline of completion.

Submit the outline to the in-house writer or you can outsource it if you don’t have full time writers.

Let the content writer finish the article within the expected turnaround time.

Send the draft to the blog manager and to client (optional) for feedback and approval.

Edit the content if necessary, which will depend on the discretion of the blog manager/client.

Submit the proofread article to the guest blog target and ask for feedback.

Follow up after one week if the bloggers/webmaster didn’t respond.

Pro tip: Use Trello to easily manage your content creation process.

Once the content is published, you don’t want to leave your post behind. Start engaging with the communityreaders of the guest blog.

Step 5 – Relationship building

It is very essential to solidify your connections with your guest blogging prospects to build an alliance that’ll benefitboth parties (in terms of promoting other brand’s content, absorbing blog readers and social followers for bothsides and attracting more contextual links – but not in a reciprocal way).

Here are some tips to make relationship marketing works for your guest blogging campaign:

Participate in discussions in the comment section of your guest post (there might be some questionsneeded to be answered).

Share new content assets (blog posts) of your guest blog target.

Link to high quality content of your guest blog from your site’s internal content (when both pages arerelevant to each other).

You can read these useful resources if you want to learn more about relationship marketing:

Relationship Building: The “Free Method” to Get High Quality Links

How To Find & Engage Your Target Audience Online For Profit

Relationship-based link building on Quicksprout

Wrapping It Up

So there you have it – an effective and easy to follow guest posting process to help drive your site to success.

This guest blogging process will not only help your website earn links consistently every month but it will alsoguarantee that it will improve your site’s branding presence online while building traffic.

If you have any questions please feel free to ask in the comments!