Honing in on Great Guest Post Opportunties
Posted on January 7th, 2010, in Blogging | No Comments »
Recently, a co-worker asked me how he could get blogs to allow him to post guest posts. And while it isn’t all that difficult, since most blogs are looking to have others write for them, it can take a bit of effort to figure out which blogs you should ask, and the process you should take before asking.
Here is my pretty simple formula for maximum guest post approval on the “right” sites. *The right ones being the type of sites you are most interested in.
1.) Go to AllTop.com or Technorati and find sites listed under the niche/topics/tags you are interested in. List them all out in a text editor or a spreadsheet application.
2.) Go to each site and check to see if it shows off its subscriber count. If it uses Feedburner and doesn’t have the subscriber count, add ~fc to the url before their feed name, and if Feedcount is active, it will show you their count. (http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed becomes http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/myfeed)
3.) Do a quick scan to see how many comments its articles get. This can also be a great way of judging popularity, if feed count is not available. Sites with more comments can be more popular and thus usually gets more inbound links.
4.) Remove sites from your list that don’t fit what you are looking for or filter them away to be done later when you have more time.
5.) Take the sites that are left and check their Google PageRank, Alexa, and Compete rankings. While not a perfect judge, this too can help you determine the size or popularity of a site, especially in the USA and even more so when creating a measuring stick for sites in the same niche.
6.) Next, take the ones you’d like to target and run their sites through PostRank. Look at their more popular posts over the last month or two, and start leaving comments. Don’t spam! These comments, because they are popular posts, give you the best chance of creating conversations, and gaining a little traffic through the link in your comment associated with your name.
7.) Once you’ve left comments for about a week or two, (might only be three or four, but fewer great comments are better than many forgettable comments) contact the author and ask if they’d be willing to publish a guest post from you on their blog. Be completely honest about what’s in it for you, and make sure to give them a good idea of your skill, expertise, and potential topic choices.
8.) If they say that they are interested, make sure to have the guest post ready quickly. I sometimes write guest posts before hand, and then fine-tune them for the site that it will be published on, thus saving time, and making it easier for me to get things published on sites willing to run my content.
The great thing about guest posts is that both people get something from the content. Guest posters get a platform that might be larger than their own, access to a community, and even a chance to get a natural looking link back to their blog. The blog owners get free content and hopefully a boatload of traffic and links.
While everything I’ve listed might not always be a factor in your guest posting work, I suggest making each guest post count for as much as possible towards your marketing and community growth efforts. In my experience, the acceptance rate is usually around 75% and up, and so for every ten sites you ask, make sure you have around eight posts or post ideas ready to go.
