I built my backlink strategy on guest blogging — here’s exactly how it drove results

If I were looking for the best way to divide a room full of marketers, I’d bring up the topic of guest blogging and link building.

Without a doubt, I’d start a heated debate. Some will argue that digital PR is the best way to earn backlinks. Others will call purposeful link building a waste of time. But in the end, every marketer out there will agree there’s no way to rank in SERPs without quality backlinks — and guest blogging.

However, I must warn you that only a well-crafted guest blogging strategy will effectively fuel your site’s growth. Here’s how you can create one.

Table of Contents

What is guest blogging?

Guest blogging is a content marketing tactic that involves writing and publishing articles on other websites to secure a backlink. Nearly 65% of link builders call guest blogging the most popular tactic.

These articles include your byline and, oftentimes, are highlighted by the editor of that website (or publication) as being written by a “guest author” or a “contributor”.

Depending on the publication, you might pay compensation to publish your guest post. However, that’s not always the case. Some high-quality publications on notable resources are free of charge, and you will get a link back to your personal website or social media accounts for the sake of quality content.

In rare cases, guest bloggers may receive a monetary reward for their efforts. (Although, I’ve only heard of that happening twice.)

But guest blogging isn’t solely about link building.

Benefits of Guest Blogging

Here are some of the biggest benefits people get from guest blogging:

• Build a profile as an industry expert/thought leader.
• Grow your personal brand.

• Grow an audience (social followers, subscribers, etc.)

• Build authoritative backlinks.

• Build relationships and drive new partnerships (e.g., co-marketing partnerships, job offers).

• Drive referral traffic.
• Improve a company’s brand awareness.
• Get more leads, users, and even customers.

Actually, you receive most of these with a single guest post if you’re strategic about media outlets and the topic of your article.

How to Become a Successful Guest Blogger

First, let’s define success. I measured it by the number of guest posts published per month per person, the domain rating (DR) of a site, and the amount spent on guest posts.

I was proud to have my small team publish 168 articles with $0 spend on SEJ, SEW, WordStream, SingleGrain, MOZ, OrbitMedia, and other notable blogs. The total number of guest posts exceeded 200+ in one year.

I also measured the number of leads, referral traffic, and shares to understand how guest posts impact business growth, too.

Benchmarks show that 13-15 links per month is the average for link builders with 1-5 years of experience, using different tactics. I reached that number through guest blogging alone.

Source

With that, let’s map out your strategy to become a successful guest blogger.

1. Set specific, achievable goals, like the number of guest posts.

The first step to start a successful guest blogging process is to set attainable, measurable goals. And you know where to hit now — you can start from 7 posts per month and grow the number along the way.

Seven will work if you’re both a writer and an outreach specialist. If someone else writes articles, set the bar higher and target 10-12 posts per month.

You can also set goals related to your business performance (like getting more leads or clients) or your website performance (like improving your search visibility or your referral traffic), or blend these goals with the number of posts.

Whatever your goal is, make it SMART. Make sure you have the capacity to write and outreach to attain those targets.

If you’re just getting started, here are five examples of measurable goals you can set:

• Get X referral visits from your guest posts, or increase referral traffic by X% from your guest posts. But be cautious, even Forbes won’t guarantee referral traffic. Track it, but don’t get obsessed with it.
• Get X leads from referral traffic from your guest posts, or increase the number of leads from your guest posts by X%.
• Get X clients from your guest posts, or increase clients from your guest posts by X%.
• Improve your SEO performance or SERP visibility by X%.
• Get X number of high-quality backlinks to relevant content from your guest posts.

My personal preference is to set goals around SERP visibility, increased SEO traffic, and the number of backlinks. A change in these metrics can be somewhat easily traced back to guest posts. Clients and leads are obviously more important for the business and can be influenced by guest blogging, but correct attribution is a challenge.

2. Choose topics that will benefit both your own business goals and the publisher’s.

Many times, guest bloggers fail because they pitch irrelevant or weak submissions, or, conversely, overlook their topical relevance.

What I advise you to do is pick topics that serve your ultimate goal first — whether that’s referral traffic, SEO performance, leads, or clients. Secondly, you’ll need to find theme-aligned media outlets.

Start by making a short list of your top website pages that you want to promote and include in your future guest blogs. You can also select underperforming pages, those lingering in the top-20, top-30, but with high traffic and lead potential. Plus, you can link to your pillar content and distribute link juice through internal linking.

For each page, analyze your current status, like your monthly SEO traffic, SERP positions, conversion rates, etc., and set a goal that you want to achieve in a certain timeframe of guest blogging. You can have both an overall website goal and page-specific goals.

For each target page, pick an overarching topic that is relevant to your expertise and would be useful for readers. Then you can start using keyword research tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs (just to name a couple) to fuel your bank of ideas for future guest posts.

Example:

Let’s take a meta-example and say I build a guest blogging strategy around the overarching topic of “guest blogging.” I can create different types of content under the umbrella of this topic: how-to articles, thought leadership, case studies, and ultimate guides. For each type of content, I can find relevant article ideas using keyword research tools.

Here, I used Topic Research (Semrush) and found relevant content clusters and topic themes to build your pitch around. I’d opt for thought leadership since it’s relevant to my niche, and I can easily incorporate guest blogging mentions.

If you use Ahrefs, I recommend running competitor analysis and finding content gaps to build your pitch around. At the end of the day, a blog where you want to publish your guest post also aims to attract organic traffic.

There are actually more ways to find guest post ideas that will get buy-in:

• Evaluate the informational traffic potential for a keyword.
• Use Google Trends to find niche-relevant trends.
• Offer blog post updates that have declined in search traffic.
• Analyze the most shareable content across a domain in the last 30-90 days and ask ChatGPT to find a pattern.

3. Find reputable guest blogging sites.

Now that you have your content ideas mapped out, it’s time to find relevant publications and guest blogging sites.

Start by putting together a list of target websites, as in the example below:

Here’s how I discover guest blogging opportunities to populate the list:

• Advanced Search Operators — where I use advanced search operators like “intext:submit a guest post/write for us” OR “guest post”, “guest author”, “become a contributor” AND your keyword.

• Google Reverse Image Search — take the headshot of a popular guest blogger or a thought leader, and use it to find places where they’ve published in the past. Those publications most likely accept guest posts.
• Look for lists of top websites that accept guest posts, but verify their DR before pitching.
• Check your competitors’ backlinks with tools like Semrush or Ahrefs.

Next, make sure you prioritize your list and only pitch blogs that have:

• Domain Authority of 40 or higher (or Domain Rating if you’re using Ahrefs)
• Spam Score of 3% or lower
• Thorough editorial process

Ultimately, you will build a spreadsheet with hundreds of potential blogs for guest posting with the editor’s contact, guidelines, etc.

4. Prepare for guest blogging outreach.

At this point, it’s time to start thinking about how to pitch your guest post ideas.

Read editorial guidelines and tailor your pitch.

As I mentioned in the previous step, the publications you want to target have a thorough editorial process. So first, look for the website’s guest blogging guidelines, then prepare your pitch idea.

For example, Zapier outlines their ICP, word count, and even topics.

My suggestion would be to approach your blogger outreach process very strategically, starting from the keywords you previously found and your target publication. Check if your target website already ranks for the topic you chose.

Sara McGuire, Content Marketing Lead at Venngage, says that “before pitching an idea to a site, it‘s fundamental that you do your research. Go through their posts and see if there’s a topic that hasn’t been covered or an angle you could take to complement their existing posts. Then, craft your pitch with their publishing guidelines in mind.”

“Doing the groundwork first will show editors that you are willing to put in the work to produce good content for them and that you want to contribute value to their site — something most editors will find irresistible. ”

While there are many tactics you can use to get a response, a good heuristic to follow is asking yourself, “Does my pitch offer real value?”

Don‘t beat around the bush. If you’ve done your research, and especially if you’ve already built up a portfolio of visibly great content, then a straightforward pitch should do the trick.

Check out guest posting outreach templates for inspiration.

Once your pitch is ready, it’s time to find your contact person and reach out to them.

Find relevant people to send out your guest posting ideas.

Different people can accept your pitch:

• Head of Content
• Editor-in-Chief
• Content Marketer
• Editorial Assistant
• Editor, Contributor Content
• Website owner
• Journalist

It all starts with an outlet. For example, HubSpot evaluates guest blogging pitches only via the guest blogging form. But it doesn’t limit you to trying out and pitching editors. With one caveat: you first have to build strong relationships with them through X or LinkedIn.

Here’s how I find those people:

1. Look up LinkedIn for selected job titles at a company. Go to Company → People → Keywords “content/editor”, and look through the list of employees. I usually connect with a warm connection request and don’t pitch them right away.

2. Try Hunter.io to find relevant people and get their verified emails. Find Company → Departments (Marketing, Writing & Communications) → Reveal. Alternatively, you can use Hunter to find the email address of a specific person.

I prefer writing cold emails for guest blogging and use LinkedIn outreach only if I’ve built rapport with a person.

Emails give me more space to talk about the guest post idea, why I think it’s useful, unique, etc. LinkedIn primarily allows for a brief pitch and an email address to send details.

Note: Some publications, including HubSpot, require a full draft to be included in the initial pitch. Make sure you always read the guest blogging guidelines of the site to ensure your pitch includes all necessary elements.

5. Choose your all-in-one guest post platform.

Lots of marketers still use Google Sheets or Excel to track their contacts and responses. It’s not bad, but it means you’re missing out on tracking a lot of valuable information.

By using HubSpot’s email tracking tool, you can gain insights into email opens, clicks, and other engagement metrics, allowing you to refine your outreach strategy with actionable data.

A powerful CRM can help you track all of the relevant information you need — emails, meeting notes, and projects. Plus, you can go back and refresh your memory anytime.

In my case, I’m using our own HubSpot CRM, but any CRM you‘re using would work for this task. If you’re looking for one now, HubSpot CRM is 100% free forever, no matter how many contacts you’re adding.

For the outreach part, I also suggest trying Respona, an all-in-one search, outreach, and engagement platform. Using AI, it helps you with your content and keyword research, lets you find contact information for your target publications, and enables you to send dynamic emails (Yes, it includes email templates for almost any type of campaign).

However, I’ve listed more outreach tools at the end of the article so you can find one that suits your budget.

6. Write the post.

This should be the easiest step of the process, as long as you’ve picked a topic that you feel passionate about and you have expertise in. You just need to set time aside and start typing.

If you‘re not comfortable with your writing, it’s perfectly fine to hire an editor to review your draft. I‘d actually highly recommend it, even for experienced writers. It’s always good to have a fresh pair of eyes pick your article apart and make suggestions. Feedback is the breakfast of champions!

But I can’t leave you empty-handed with “just write,” so check out my 12 essential recommendations for writing guest posts (and any type of post, for that matter):

1. Write long-form, compelling content (at least 1,500-2,000 words).
2. Break the text into small, digestible paragraphs.
3. Structure your post with logic. Every heading (e.g., H2, H3, H4) serves a clear idea.
4. Optimize for on-page SEO using Clearscope or SurferSEO.
5. Use only original images and graphs to make the content more linkable (Canva is a great tool for novice designers).
6. Add quotes from subject-matter experts and influencers.
7. Link to your other published guest posts.
8. Link to your own, relevant content.
9. Link to other publications: studies, data, thought leadership, etc.
10. Link internally to other articles from your publisher.
11. Add your byline and explain what makes you an expert on that topic.
12. Make sure your article has a unique angle, offers practical value, inspiration, etc.

How do I know if I’ve done a great job? I read the post out loud and think, “Would I read this article till the end? Anything is missing here?”

When you send your final draft to the editor, don’t forget to include your author details: your full name, a short bio, your social media links so readers can connect with you, a headshot, and your website.

Now you’re all set to hit “send” and deliver your guest post to the editor.

There’s just one more step before you call this project done: measuring the results.

7. Track your posts’ results over time.

This is the final, yet arguably most crucial, step in the process.

You’ll want to ensure you always compare your results to where you were at the beginning of the process.

Depending on your goals, you can have different SEO tools to track different metrics. For example, Ahrefs to check everything from changes in the number of backlinks, referring domains, organic traffic performance, or even the number of keywords for which the website ranks in Google (see the example below):

Guest Blogging SEO

Since I mentioned how to prioritize your opportunities based on Domain Authority and Spam score, I think it’s important to discuss the SEO aspect of guest blogging.

First of all, you SEO optimize a guest post because you want it to rank high and receive a high URL Rating. It’s like Domain Rating but for a single URL.

If a page performs well in the SERP, it passes on quality link juice to the pages you link back to.

Secondly, a great post can garner lots of shares and social media signals. It matters because Google analyzes the author, so your own website will gain topical authority in Google’s eyes, too. Remember the E-E-A-T algorithm, here.

Lastly, if your guest post shows great SEO performance, you’ll become a likable guest author who can deliver value to readers and organic traffic to another website. So, you’ll get more publications in the future.

Oftentimes, blog editors place a no-follow tag on links from guest authors. In the past, that was seen as a “lower-value” backlink because it didn’t carry any authority. With relatively recent updates, Google has made it public that even “no-follow” backlinks are seen as signals by their ranking algorithm.

Important: Don‘t try to overdo it with guest blogging for the sake of building backlinks. If you ignore content quality and user experience, you’ll most likely end up hurting your SEO performance and ultimately your reputation.

Top Tools for Guest Blogging

I hope you now feel better equipped to start crafting your own guest blogging strategy.

The best strategy for your business and your context is always going to be the one you craft, after trial and error. So don’t be afraid to just get started and learn along the way.