Getting started with your blog is an easy step. But, as a blogger, gaining readership and developing a following is a tougher job, this will always be one of your main priorities. In order to do so, you must find ways to successfully market and promote your blog and its content.
When starting a blog, your initial strategy for marketing should revolve around optimizing your SEO. But while search engine optimization is necessary and important in the long run, it takes time to rank at the top of search engines.
So, what else can you do to bring in blog visitors fast? Well, one of the best options is to start a guest posting campaign.
(Related read – Start your blog in 20 mins and $20)
What is Guest Posting?
Guest posting is a fairly simple concept. It generally involves writing content for another website or blog, which enables you to gain an audience that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to. The website your guest posting for, on the other hand, gains the advantage of free, high-quality content for their site.
The problem with guest posting, however, is that it can be extremely difficult to get accepted by top blogs that have the type of audience that you’re looking to target. While getting accepted by these high traffic blogs is not impossible, it will take time, persistence, and even a little luck.
To help you with this process, here are a few useful tips that will help you get your guest posts accepted by top blogs.
3 Ways to get your guest post accepted
It All Comes Down to Proving You Can Provide Value
While guest posting has changed quite a bit over the years, the one thing that has always remained the same is that getting accepted comes down to being able to provide value. If your content is irrelevant, uninformative, or full of grammar mistakes, there’s no reason for the blog you are attempting to contact to accept it.
In the end, you need to prove that you can provide value to their readers. This is non-negotiable. If you cannot prove that your content will provide value, then it plain and simply won’t be accepted.
Be Relatable
When you’re pitching to an editor or blog owner about a guest post, it’s important to understand that you’re speaking to another human being. While you hopefully already knew that, far too many bloggers make the mistake of sending cold, business-like pitches.
Put yourself in the shoes of the person who is reading your pitch. If you were receiving hundreds of pitches per week, would you go with the blogger that proved their creativity through their pitch or the one that sounded more like he was writing up a contract for a lawsuit?
Include Links to Your Best Work
In most cases, top blogs will require that you provide writing samples along with your guest posting inquiry. When this happens, it’s best to include links instead of documents that need to be opened.
By sending links, you show the editor or blog owner that you already have high-quality content published online. You also make it easier for them to quickly scan your work, as they can click on the link and browse the opening paragraph in just a few seconds.
Even when utilizing the tips listed above, getting accepted by top blogs for guest posting opportunities will not be easy. Remember to be creative, personable, and make it clear that you can provide value to their readers. When combined with persistence, doing these things will significantly raise the likelihood that your pitch gets accepted.
Bloggers, what are your special tricks to get guest posts accepted at top blogs?
In the world in which we now work as SEOs, this in awesome post with some great sources of potential guest posting opportunities. Thank you so much for sharing this with us and I agree with the earlier comment – I’m going to be pretty busy for the foreseeable future . . .
Thanks for sharing this, it’s extremely helpful to a novice blogger like myself. I’m still a bit nervous about approaching anyone yet!
Thanks for sharing! I have done a couple guest posts and they didn’t generate as much buzz to my blog as I would have liked. I want to work on having a guest post on a “top blog” or those that get more traffic.
Great Post! I’m just getting started again so I couldn’t agree more!
For all new blog owners this is some awesome advice as we all know we need backlinks for our websites to rank and one of the best ways to get backlinks is with guest posting, so advice to get your guest posts accepted is valuable advice.
Very cool tips for beginners bloggers. It should help each other and build blogs, which contribute something smart to blogosphere.