Guest Post Blogging: Pitch Like a Pro With These 5 Easy Steps

Guest post blogging is an excellent way to promote your business. It comes with a ton of benefits and is the perfect way for a site owner or blogger to increase the visibility of their business.

In this article, we're going to talk about how guest post blogging works. 

Learn about:

• The 5 steps to pitch your guest article
• How to find guest posting opportunities
• Pros and cons of guest posting blogging.

Let's get into it!

What Is Guest Post Blogging?

Guest post blogging or guest blogging is when you publish a blog post on another website. People do this to:

• Increase brand awareness
• Brand themselves as an expert in their industry
• Promote their blog organically
• Drive traffic to their website.

Before you start pouring your efforts into guest blogging, it's important to begin by defining your goals.

Think about what you want to accomplish from guest blogging opportunities and create a strategy for yourself to reach those goals.

Some examples of goals you might have are:

• Increasing the visibility of your brand
• Branding yourself as an authority in your industry
• Building backlinks to your website.

Guest blogging can help you accomplish all these goals!

Defining your goals and setting a strategy from the start can help you choose the right blogs to partner with on guest posts.

With a strategy in place, you can start pitching your guest article. Here's how you do it…

5 Steps to Pitching a Guest Article

This is a simple, 5-step process to help you find the right guest blogging opportunities, pitch them confidently, and land guest blog placements.

1. Find Guest Post Blogging Opportunities

The first step in the process is to search and find guest post blogging opportunities.

In this process, you'll:

• Find relevant blogs to pitch
• Research blogs
• Review guest post guidelines.

To find relevant blogs to pitch, this is as simple as performing a thorough Google search.

Social media is another way to find guest post opportunities. Find companies you want to partner with and send them a DM (direct message) on social media to ask about guest posting.

Attend networking events, have conversations, and exchange contact details so you can explore potential guest post opportunities with individuals or organizations you meet.

You can also search databases or directories that show lists of blogs that accept guest posts. My Blog Guest is an example.

2. Research Your Guest Blog Post

Next, you'll choose a topic and research your guest article. You will want to choose a topic that aligns with your niche and is a fit for the website you're pitching. 

This is about brainstorming a topic for your guest post. 

You want to ensure that your topic is:

• Relevant to the niche
• Understood by the audience
• A natural fit for the blog you're pitching
• Aligned with your guest post blogging goals.

Spend some time on the website you're going to be pitching. Get to know the content, including the audience you're writing for and what kind of content is published.

For example, if the blog you want to pitch has a mostly consumer-centered audience that consumes detailed tutorials, that might not be a fit for your B2B niche with listicle-style blog posts.

You can save a lot of time by doing thorough research before you prepare your pitch.

After your research is done and with your guest article in mind, it's time to prepare your pitch.

3. Create Your Pitch

Custom-tailor your pitch to the specific blog you're targeting. It may seem like a time saver to create a template email to use for every pitch, but a tailored pitch email always performs better, even though it takes more time.

You could use a basic template and then customize specific parts of the email for the blog you're pitching.

For example, make a template where the introduction sharing your company is the same for every email, but then customize this part of the pitch:

• Why you want to work with the organization
• What your post is about, and
• How it would benefit the brand.

Address the editor or blog owner by name.

Next, demonstrate the research you've conducted by referencing specific articles or topics covered on their blog. 

Personalize your pitch to show why you're a good fit for their audience, and talk about why your guest post idea is valuable.

4. Email Your Pitch

Find the right person to contact, get their email address, and send your pitch. Many times, if the blog or website has a Guest Post page with instructions, there's an email shared, which makes it easy.

If not, dig back into your research skills to find the right person to contact.

This tends to be:

• The blog owner
• A PR company, or
• The blog's operations manager.

The outreach process can feel like a headache sometimes, honestly.

It can be really challenging to find contact information for blogs, sometimes. Many blogs don't have a contact page published. If they do, there's no email address shared, but instead, they use a contact form.

Contact forms should be used as a last resort.

Often, messages sent to these forms may be lost or never responded to, and there's no easy way to follow up other than sending another message through the contact form.

I have personally had much better results sending an email to an email address for the blog rather than contacting through the contact form.

To make outreach easy on yourself, use a tool!

Here are my favorites:

• Hunter: This is a Chrome extension that can be activated on nearly every webpage. Just click the extension, and it'll show the email address and contact names for the website. You get 25 free searches a month. For more searches, you'll need to get a paid plan.
• Ninja Outreach: This is outreach software to help you with your lead generation efforts. You use their tools to find contact details for publishers you're trying to contact. It integrates with social media to discover prospects. There are additional built-in tools you can benefit from, like campaign tracking, relationship management, and SEO tools.
• Mailshake: This is a B2B lead platform. They offer a host of different tools and services to improve your email campaigns, like email outreach, sequences, email tracking, CRM integration, and other tools.

5. Follow Up

After your pitch is sent, if you don't hear back within a few days, follow up. You'd be surprised how many times I got a response on the follow-up email, as opposed to the original email.

Because sometimes emails can get lost in the inbox.

A friendly reminder follow-up email will push the email to the top of the inbox and hopefully get you a timely response following that.

Your follow-up email should be short, sweet, and to the point.

• The subject line should be clear and concise
• Use a friendly greeting
• Reference your previous email outreach effort
• Express gratitude for any previous communication
• Talk about why you're following up
• End with a clear, polite call-to-action and closing.

Make sure to proofread your email then send it!

How to Find Guest Posting Opportunities

There are many ways to find guest blogging opportunities:

• Google search
• Networking events
• Directories
• Guest blogging sites.

Google Search

Perform a thorough Google search. Using keywords like “write for us” or “guest post” is extremely effective, surprisingly.

Make sure to include your niche in your search so you find relevant blogs to pitch.

Create a list or spreadsheet and track your results:

• The name of the publication
• When you emailed and when you followed up
• Who you emailed
• What topic you proposed.

Tracking your efforts will keep you organized.

Directories

Directories are a great place to find guest post opportunities. Directories are huge collections of data, like a list of websites or blogs that accept guest posts.

My Blog Guest is a great resource to check out about guest blogging.

Our list of 100 blogs with guest posting opportunities is another amazing resource to check out!

Guest Blogging Sites

Guest blogging sites are platforms where you can guest blog for free.

• Medium
• LinkedIn Articles
• Hubpages.

Medium is a free platform where writers can join and publish their content. You have a lot of control over your content on Medium.

Medium is a great platform for guest blogging without having to go through the pitch process. You just publish your guest posts to your Medium page. Medium is also a place to monetize your blog content, along with these Medium alternatives.

LinkedIn articles are an untapped gem I don't see enough bloggers take advantage of! I started posting LinkedIn articles more and my following grew more than 50% in a few weeks. I also got approached by multiple companies for partnerships!

LinkedIn is another opportunity to guest post on their platform without having to pitch. You just click Write an Article on your LinkedIn feed, create your article, and publish!

Hubpages is an online publishing platform where users can write and publish articles, known as "Hubs," on a variety of topics.  Writers, bloggers, and content creators can use Hubpages to share their knowledge and insights with a global audience.

It's another awesome place to write guest posts without having to pitch the publication! You just open a Hubpages account and start writing and publishing your posts on the platform!

Pros and Cons of Guest Posting Blogging

Let's break down the pros and cons of the guest post blogging process so you know what to expect.

Guest Post Blogging: Bottom Line

Guest post blogging is a valuable content marketing strategy to help you increase your brand's visibility, link building, and a host of other benefits.

If you're looking for organic ways to market your brand, writing a guest blog for other sites is a smart way to achieve it.

It's not perfect by any means, though. You'll get to know quickly how time-intensive the guest posting process is, from finding the right website to pitch to researching topics and then crafting your pitch to finally writing the guest post.

It's an entire process through and through but I think the benefits make it worth it.

To improve your chances of getting your pitches accepted, make sure your outreach emails are engaging and tailored to each publication you pitch.

This is one of many ways to organically market your organization.

Is guest post blogging a marketing strategy you'd do for your business?

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