How To Get Backlinks Guest Blogging

So you're here wanting to know how to get backlinks guest blogging, this can help your SEO and send you some needed traffic and new readers. Ok so this is how I do it, others may have different approaches to getting their articles posted on sites. So do more research and use the best practices you find. 

Now the mistake I see when I am approached to place articles on my sites, is the articles are written about them, not me, or my readers, or my content. It is normally all about their product, how great it is, yadda yadda. Why would my readers read about how great your vape pens are on a vacation site? If written correctly this could work.

You have to make the articles you want posted, relevant and cater to the site your wanting to post them on… not all about you.

Now if you have a newer website don’t go out and try to get your posts placed on top authority sites like Time or the Wall Street Journal. 

The best approach is for you to be super targeted at niches that are smaller than the Times and others, but still very authoritative. 

In testing, some have seen the smaller niche blogs and websites can drive more “highly qualified” traffic to you that has very high intent on wanting to see your stuff = better ROI. 

Step 1: Find The Niche 

 Start off by figuring out what keyword phrases you want to target and the audience around them. Then try and find the focused niche blogs that would fit that target audience, have a good following on social media, and can be related to my niche. 

I also make sure to check and see how authoritative the sites are, by placing the URLs of them into MOZ Authority checker here. 

Now I browse the blog or site and look at what they write about, look to see what their content is and looks like. Then I ask myself, “Can I write an article that will fit the style of the site? Will it be as good or better than the information they have on it already? Can I get them more traffic, followers, and possibly higher domain rankings with this great article? If I answer yes to ALL of these then I start the next step. 

Step 2: Find what they don’t have

So now you have a good starting point at getting a guest posting on a great site. Now you have to ask yourself these questions.

How can YOU help them get more traffic?  What is it that their visitors/customers want, that the website is not answering?  This is where you can get creative with your thinking and use tools on the web to help answer this. People always have problems that need answering, which is a good way to get your articles placed. Helping them with their problems and getting high-ranking backlinks is a win, win.

Then I go and use the Free MOZ tools available online, check the main domain URL to see what keywords that already rank for, then I go to the keyword explorer tool and start to type the phrases I found and see what pops up in the suggested terms below the search box.  Now I start looking for phrases that get high search terms and I also try to shoot for multiple phrases that could go into the same article if possible, increasing the chance of traffic by ranking the one article for multiple keyword phrases. Once I have about 10 phrases written down, I go to the site and look through the pages and posts to see what they don’t have.

• Example- Let us say you're targeting a snowboard blogging site and you are a travel agent in Colorado. So how will you craft an article that they will post, that gives them something that their people are looking for and will drive your hotel sales in ski season?

So let us see what snowboarders are asking for.  So to keep it simple, I look for “how to find snowboard…” in MOZ and it came up with the following, highly asked terms, relevant to that key phrase. 

Lets go over what we see.  The term phrase “camber board”  gets an average of 500 inquiries per month during the slow months and around 850 inquiries a month in the busiest months.

Then we have “choosing a snowboard” (remember the stop words are removed)  this gets from 200 to 500 inquires as does “best terrain park snowboards”.

So we have a good base for a title and the main keyword phrase to use. Now you can choose any one of these but I go for the high traffic, high relevancy phrases.

So I can do a few things now.  I can write a very long article using all of the keyword phrases in “A”, making sure to wrap them in articulation, knowledge about the subject matter, long tails of the keyword used, diagrams, photos, or infographics with plenty of good, relateable hyperlinks for subject reference, with a few pointing to me.

Now if you're wondering about word count that shouldn’t matter, you want to focus on delivering an excellently written article with great usable information. If you can give someone the answer they need in 400 words…. that’s fine. 

I can also use the keyword phrases from “B” and have a more focused article on using the phrases that are very relatable to each other and more targeted. So in this instance, I would normally go for “B”.

This way I can write a very targeted article about “Choosing the best Camber Board” or “Best Camber Snowboards for terrain parks?”…  working in the “snowboard sizing” key phrases of it, into the body of the article, also using them in the alt tags of photos and in the meta description.

“But then how do you work in the travel agents links?” –  That’s the easy part, so like this… ” so when you decide to go out testing on how your new camber board is performing, be sure to find the best ski resorts for boarders. You can find some of the best Colorado ski resort hotels for snowboarders at…”  See…. easy peasy.

You can also write an article that targets their niche at the same time marketing your project. Example line…  “After you have chosen the right camber board you can visit this great site to plan your next ski trip, visit Coloradotravelagentsforskiers.com ” So we have a niche to target, a well-researched and viable article to pitch, now we need to find the decision-maker to contact.

Step 3: Outreach

Now before you go and write the article, you need to contact the site admin to pitch them on your article idea, letting them know that you have done the research to write them a very good article, answering the questions you found that their readers ask online. I don’t recommend posting on “guest posting sites” as Google knows who they are and most are considered spammy.

Now an expert by the name of  Adam Connell at bloggingwizard.com has a very good article on how to do a proper outreach and I follow this with a few other tricks I use.

You can find the article here. Blogger Outreach Tips: How To Write Outreach Emails That Don’t Suck

Step 5: What's In It For Them?

I focus A LOT on this step. It is undoubtedly the most important aspect for this to work. 

I started doing this when I first researched the topic to write about, to make it easier to pitch to them or other snowboard sites if needed.  I show them how the article has the answers their clients are looking for.  And how the article is written with long tails and keyword phrases, that relates to securing more search terms for them, that in turn drives more “qualified intent traffic” to them.

I always try to send them the article in HTML so all they have to do is drop it in and all the headline tags are done, hyperlinks are done etc. I also include the researched meta description for them to place in as well as 2 title choices.

By this time you should have already got a fish on your hook (the site your targeting) and another contextual link in the world wide web. If you did this twice a month you would have a lot of great high ranking, traffic driving articles with links to your site.

Hope you learned a bit from this, and make sure to look at other tutorials here on the site on “how to write articles for guest posting” and use all the best practices to help you along.

What Do Once I Get The Post What Do I Do?

Once you've snagged a guest post and the link is live. Many people think they have to go and build links to those guest posts. And I would be very careful by doing this because it can upset the Webmaster that let you do the guest post. Especially if you're going to be software like Money Robot. I would treat the guest post as it were your own site. SO don't go building or doing anything that you wouldn't do to your own website.