A Beginner's Guide To Guest Blogging For The First Time [Secrets Revealed]

Guest blogging can be a great way to improve your website's domain authority and build up credibility for your brand through brands that your customers know and trust.

Blogging, overall, is one of the best ways to boost your website's search position in the search engine, so why not explore opportunities to attract new customers by blogging on other brands?

In this article, I'm going to take you through the steps required to start guest blogging for the very first time, as a beginner.

So if you're already more experienced with this area, some of the things I'm going to say might seem like second nature.

Are you ready? Let's dive straight in then...

Why Start Guest Blogging?

Before you dive into guest blogging, you're going to need to ask yourself just why you want to guest blog.

There's a few questions that I've put together to help you decide what your goals might be when venturing into guest blogging on someone else's website:

1. Promotion of your newly founded brand to an audience in your space
2. Building high quality backlinks to your website
3. Obtaining website traffic to your site

Each of these three goals can be achieved through guest blogging on other websites, do you want to achieve all three goals?

Or maybe you're just looking to go after one goal in particular.

If you're looking to do all three, then guest blogging on some of the most popular blogs in the space and niche that you're in is going to be vital.

However, if your goal is primarily to build high quality backlinks to your website, then you can take a look at using the free SEO Moz Toolbar, it's a browse extension that you download and install.

How Do I Find Guest Blogging Opportunities?

Finding blogging opportunities on other peoples blogs can be a little challenging, where do you even start, you might already have a few websites and brands in mind, but do they really meet your criteria?

You can't just approach any random website and ask to guest blog, for instance, if your website is about selling clothes, then approaching a website about dogs or cats and asking to guest blog likely isn't going to go down very well.

There's going to need to be some criteria that you need to follow, and I've put together the exact criteria checklist for you, here it is:

• Will the audience of the guest blog be interested in your industry and website?
• Is the content of the guest blog suited to your industry and niche?
• Does the guest blog attract social shares?
• Is the guest blog owner actively engaging with their audience?

These are absolutely critical points when it comes to finding guest blogging opportunities online.

If a website that you shortlist for guest blogging doesn't meet that criteria, then don't bother trying to approach them with a pitch or proposal, move onto the next one.

Let's take a look at some of the ways to find some blogging opportunities...

Start With A Google Search

Every day, there's over 3.5 billion searches on Google according to an article from Oberlo, that's astounding numbers right?

Imagine if you started with a Google search to find a blogging opportunity.

And that's exactly what you should be doing, is searching on Google for opportunities, so here's an example for you.

Let's say your website is all about selling website consultancy services, you can try a few searches such as...

• Website consultancy guest post
• Website consultancy guest blogging opportunities
• Website consultancy submit a guest blog post
• Website consultancy start guest blogging

Of course, you'd replace the “Website consultancy” keyword with whatever keyword or niche your website is about.

A simple Google search like that will reveal to you a number of results, and for each of them, you'd work through the criteria checklist to figure out whether their website meets the criteria that you set out, if it doesn't move on to the next site.

Try A Social Search

Do you use Twitter?

Believe it or not, there's over 330 million monthly twitter users that are active, and most of them are active every single day.

What does this mean?

It means that searching for guest blogging opportunities on social media is a great way to interact and find relevant people in the space around you, that is, in the niche that you're in.

You'd head to Twitter, and do a Twitter search to find guest blogging opportunities much like the way you'd find them through a Google search, except you're doing this on a social media platform instead.

Of course, work through the criteria checklist, it applies here too.

Prepare To Pitch Your Guest Blog Post

After you've shortlisted and broken down which brands and websites you want to approach to guest blog post on, you're going to need to prepare to pitch to them.

It's a little bit like a job interview, you're selling yourself to them and explaining why your content should be added to their website.

Remember, they don't have to accept your blog post at all, it's not all about you.

With that being said, here's how to go about preparing to pitch your guest blog post...

Step #1: Ensure You Know Your Guest Blog's Content

Do you actually know the content that the guest blog website actually posts?

Do you know the brand?

If not, it's probably something that you're going to need to look up on, and do some research into, don't just dive straight in and pitch a guest blog post to them if you don't even know their content.

• What kind of audience do they have?
• What content has already been written on the guest blog website?
• Is their audience B2B or B2C?

By understanding the basics here, it will go a long way ready for your pitch!

Step #2: What Posts Do The Best?

Content is king right?

Some content will do better than others, and other content will literally bomb and won't draw any kind of success any time soon.

If you're reaching out for a guest blogging opportunity, you're going to need to first figure out what content does really well, and what content that doesn't.

Look for clues such as:

• Number of social shares through a social sharing widget
• How many comments do the posts have?
• What about whether the post is a featured post?
• Was the blog post created recently and did it generate a lot of shares quickly?

If you've done your homework, and know exactly what kind of content will do really well on a guest blog, then your pitch will go really well, and you're more likely to be granted permission to guest blog post on there.

Step #3: Prepare Your Pitch

Okay, I know this one sounds a little obvious, but you actually want to prepare your pitch, preparation is key to success and will set you up with greater chances to be accepted to post on the guest blog.

By preparation, I mean preparing your mind, and focussing on what you want to achieve from this guest blog post, don't just go at it with the goal of generating money, because if you do that, you're likely not going to get the chance to guest blog post at all.

Now, It's Time For The Guest Blog Post Pitch

You've chosen the guest blog that you want to write for, and you've done your homework for pitching right?

Now it's time for the actual pitch, and this is where it gets pretty real, you're actually taking that step to communicate, but there are some pointers that you're going to want to follow, you can't just run head first into this without knowing the secrets behind what will work.

Pitching your blog post isn't as simple as writing an email saying that you want to guest post on their blog, here's what you actually need to do...

Check Up On The Guidelines

Most websites and blogs will have pitching guidelines and posting guidelines, typically, you'll find that there's going to be guidelines on:

• Submitting the whole idea or the whole blog post
• What format the blog post should be in
• If their website is a WordPress site, you might need to create an account

Guidelines are so important, and if you haven't read these, you shouldn't really be pitching a post at all to them.

Read up on these first, and then submit your pitch.

Email Personalisation

How many times have you read an email only to find that it's incredibly generic and sometimes even feels like it's been generated by a bot and mass sent to many different people.

Blogs typically have people attached to them, and somewhere, there's likely to be a name of the author of a blog post, or even the blog itself.

Find this and personalise the email that you're going to send.

Don't just start off with a generic:

• Hi
• Dear Webmaster

These are likely to be thrown in the bin straight away.

Why Should You Guest Blog?

You're pitching for a chance to guest blog on someone's website, why should they even care?

What makes you so different to all of the authors currently posting high quality content that's been written and optimised for SEO?

Do you see where I'm coming from with this, you're going to need to explain and really sell yourself since there's likely to be others pitching for a change to guest blog as well, go and really sell yourself!

Finally, Writing Your Blog Post

Congratulations, you've been accepted to write and guest blog! Now what do you need to do?

Well, the effort doesn't stop there because now you've got to go and write that blog post that will end up being published on the guest blog, and it isn't about writing a few hundred words and calling it a wrap...

You're going to need to carefully plan and write your post in the mindset of being an author for the guest blog.

Remember, it's not your blog that you're writing for, it's a blog that has chosen to agree to allow you to guest blog there, so you'll need to respect that.

Here are some tips for writing your blog post:

• Links - include internal and external links that are relevant
• Images - use appropriate images, it might be worth sticking to a particular theme of images rather than many different types
• Sources - always credit sources that you link to, and don't ever advertise either
• Formatting - always format your blog posts in a way that is consistent with other posts on the blog

Conclusion

Guest blogging can be a great way to boost your own brand's success online through the competition.

Blogging, overall though, is an extremely powerful way that allows you to drive more website traffic to your brand, and ultimately, blogging on another website can improve credibility for your brand as well.

I hope that you've found this article useful and helpful, if you did, sharing this would be much appreciated and it only takes a few minutes, and until the next blog post, have a fantastic day.