Guest post campaigns are a great way to boost your SEO results. As more and more SEO specialists are trying to get into White Hat skills, it is obvious that you need methods like guest post campaigns to bring results on to the table.
In this article, we are going to look at how to setup a campaign for guest posts like a pro. Let’s begin.
Fix Your Website
Before you go ahead and look for guest post opportunities, make sure that you are fixing your website first. There are a lot of us out there who go ahead looking for opportunities without fixing all the flaws of the website first and that’s a big mistake. When you go ahead and ask for opportunities, they will immediately come back to look at your website and if the result are something that they don’t like, you are not likely to get a guest post opportunity.
So, what are the things that you should fix? You should immediately focus on having quality content on site, fixing the website speed, the user interaction and engagement and mobile readability. Obviously, there are a lot more of things that you can fix but these are some of the common ones that you need to work on right away before starting any campaign.
Prospect
The first task in your campaign should be prospecting. When you are prospecting opportunities, do not leave any stones unturned. For example, if you run a cat blog and there’s a travel website that you know accept guest posts, you should try to find an angle that goes for that website. For example, it can be an article like “How to travel with your cat” and it will meet the requirement of both niches.
This way, you will be able to generate a lot of prospects and as you are focusing on niches or categories that are not your competitors, you can easily get links from them too.
Make sure that you list all the websites that accept guest posts. Don’t bother trying websites that do not accept guest posts as it is less likely that they will reply to your queries.
Contact
It is time to contact the prospects that you found in the previous step. Now here’s the catch. They get contacted by people like you all the time so you have to make sure that you are different. How to do that?
The first strategy can be contacting them in another place other than email. As they get thousands of emails on their web email address, it will be a wise option if you can track their Facebook page, Twitter profile or Linkedin profile and send a message there. This will immediately create a better connection between you and the prospect which will possibly lead to a guest post opportunity.
Also, when you contact them in another place other than email, you allow them to take a look at your profile which gives them a better idea about your genuine self. This also matters as there’s too many spams and scams around guest posting.
Propose
After you are done prospecting and contacting your opportunity, it is time to propose your offer. This is where most digital marketers suffer. You should never mention that the only reason that you want to guest post on their website is to get a backlink or some visitors. It should be a lot more than that.
One good strategy is to take a very good look at the prospect’s website and come up with solutions to their problems. If you see that they do not have articles on a certain topic on the website or if you see that the content that they have on the webpage is of very poor quality, make sure that you mention that and propose some improvements.
We all would love to have better content on our website. Put yourself in the shoes of your prospect and you will immediately know what to ask for.
Prepare
It is time to prepare the content that you have proposed in the previous step and got approval for. Do not be lazy when it comes to preparing content. Always remember that there are competitors out there who are trying to do exactly what you are trying to do and it is all about relationship building at the end of the day.
A big mistake that most people make is hiring cheap writers from marketplaces like iwriter to take care of these content. Many think that as the content will not be on their website, that it can be of poor quality and that is a big no.
Publish
The last part is publishing your piece of content on the website. In almost all scenarios, you will not have to do it on your own. The owner or the webmaster of that website will do it for you. However, you should always ask to do it for them so that you can place links the way you want to.
If they ask a word document from you then make sure that you are hyperlinking the backlinks on the word file too. Again, even if they don’t ask for it, always include photos with your article.
Nurturing Relationship
Do not think that you are done whenever you get that one backlink. It is a lot more than that. Try to maintain the relationship by sharing their content on your website and on social media pages if you have any. This way, they will know that it hasn’t been a mistake to allow you to do a guest post on their website. Many websites remove guest posts after a few months and this way, you can make sure that it doesn’t happen.
These are all the steps that you need to maintain to run a great guest post campaign. Continue from the first step every time you want to run your next guest post campaign and make it as big as possible from the very first step. This way, you will get more exposure and the chance of getting more posts approved will broaden too.
