How to Build a Guest Post Outreach Strategy to Get Links

Intro

Guest post outreach is one of the best ways to build new links to your website and create long-lasting partnerships with companies like yours.

But, the process isn’t easy. You’ll only get results if the people you’re reaching out to are highly relevant to your niche and if your email is personalized to each recipient.

Lastly, you’ll need to create excellent content that your recipient will want to publish on their website.

In this article, I’ll walk you through how to run a guest post outreach campaign that generates replies and lets you consistently build new backlinks for your company.

Let’s dive straight in.

What is Guest Posting?

Guest posting is a link building strategy where you write an article for another company’s website. Most guest posts will include a backlink to the guest poster's own website, either in the blog post or as an author byline.

Guest posting is a popular way for B2B marketing teams to build links and drive traffic to your website, establish yourself as an expert in your field, and help you improve your website’s SEO.

It has a benefit for both the person submitting the guest post in the form of a backlink and a benefit for the company accepting the guest post as they receive high-quality content for their website that can drive traffic and build their website authority.

How Does Guest Post Outreach Work?

Guest post outreach is commonly done in two ways.

The first is that someone reaches out to website owners and asks if they’re open to accepting new article submissions.

The second is by writing an article in the first place, then reaching out to websites that would be a good fit for your article.

Both methods have their benefits, but the first works better in most cases because you can tailor your guest post to the recipient website.

Sourcing Relevant Guest Post Opportunities

The first step in your guest post outreach process is to find the companies you want to reach out to.

The first way you can do this is by using Ranktracker’s SERP Checker. You can look at the top results for relevant keywords in your niche and see websites that are ranking in the SERPs.

For example, if you offer a software tool for salespeople, you can determine which websites rank for relevant sales-related keywords.

You can then note down the biggest sites in your niche and verify if they’ll be a good fit for your guest post outreach. Your close competitors probably won’t accept a guest post from you, so focus on sites that offer complementary but not competing value.

Another tool you can use is the Backlink Checker. This will analyze the SERPs and identify the best backlink opportunities for your site.

You could even analyze your competitor’s backlinks, and if you see that they've secured guest posts on websites in the past, you can reach out to those same websites and have a high chance of your guest post pitch being accepted.

Once you’ve saved a list of target sites into a spreadsheet, it’s time for the next step: finding the right person to reach out to.

Finding Your Prospect’s Email Addresses

Most companies you identify as guest post targets will have a page on their website detailing their guest post requirements.

This will include:

• What kind of content they accept on their website
• Rules and guidelines for submission
• The number of backlinks to your website you can include
• A contact email you can use to get in touch with them

If they’ve included their email address, you’ll be able to reach out to them directly with your pitch.

However, some companies choose not to make their contact information publicly available.

If that’s the case, you’ll need to use an email finder like FindThatEmail or RocketReach to source one. These tools will review their contact databases for matches and tell you if they can verify the email address in question.

(Image source: FindThat.Email)

In most cases, the best person to contact is the CEO, founder, or someone else in a position of authority at the company. Even if they don’t handle the guest posting process themselves, they can refer you to the right person.

When you have your contact, you can reach out with a personalized email to see if they’re interested.

Reaching Out to Prospects with Cold Email

Not every person you reach out to will be accepting guest posts. If you have a large list of guest post prospects, the most effective way to get in touch with multiple prospects at once is using cold email software.

Cold email software like QuickMail will let you send your guest post outreach emails in bulk but without compromising on personalization in your email copy.

This will save you hours of time that would normally be spent manually writing out emails and personalizing each one individually.

So, how does it work?

First, you’ll need your prospect list formatted into clear columns with the unique attributes you want to include in each email, such as:

• First names
• Company names
• The topic of your guest posts

Then, you’ll need to upload your prospect list spreadsheet into your cold email tool.

Now it’s time to write your email template for your guest post outreach.

Here’s an example of what that might look like:

Subject: Guest post for {{company.name}}

Hi {{prospect.first_name}},

Saw that you’ve been publishing awesome content around {{prospect.custom.Guest_post_topic}} on {{company.name}}’s blog, love how actionable it all is.

Our company works with a similar type of customer to {{company.name}} so I think we could contribute a genuinely useful article for your readers.

Are you currently accepting new guest post submissions?

Best,

{{inbox.name}}

When your emails are sent, each one will have the attributes like {{prospect.first_name}} personalized based on what you have in your prospect list.

This personalization is going to increase your reply rates and show your guest post prospects you haven’t just put them on a huge email list.

Every good cold email tool will also let you track your reply rate.

If you know you can get a 20% reply rate for every 100 emails you send, and you can secure a guest post on half of those replies, you can plan ahead and predict that you can land 10 guest posts per month as long as you send 100 personalized guest post outreach emails.

Confirming The Opportunity and Getting Links

Once you’ve received a reply, you’ll need a system to manage your guest post opportunities. It’s unlikely that your recipient will confirm that you can write a guest post for their website after the first email.

There will be some back-and-forth communication required, and if you’re emailing multiple people at once, your inbox will get messy.

The best way to manage this process is to connect your cold email software with a CRM or project management tool like Trello or Asana using Zapier. Using Zapier, you can create a Zap that will start a new Trello card when you have a new Gmail thread.

When you receive a new reply to your outreach campaign, a new contact will be created in your workspace with details on the person and your interaction history. You won’t need to manually create it yourself, and you’ll never risk missing a guest post opportunity in your pipeline.

You can create different stages in your tool and move your guest post opportunities through your pipeline, such as:

1. Conversation started
2. Send guest post ideas to site owner
3. Guest post topic confirmed
4. Article writing in progress
5. Awaiting publishing

The process will vary based on your workflow, but even a simple overview of the process like this is going to help you manage the process.

Writing and Publishing Your Guest Posts

The final step is writing your guest post and getting it published.

There are no shortcuts to writing a great guest post.

First, make sure you've asked your contact at the company you're guest posting for about their blog requirements. For example, some will have word length requirements, image requirements, or ask you to add a certain number of links in the article.

If you get these main requirements right, the person you’re in touch with will be more likely to happily accept your article when you send it through.

You should also run your content through writing tools like Grammarly to ensure they’re free of typos or grammar mistakes. Basic errors can lead to someone thinking you’ve written their article in a rush and make them feel that the quality of the article isn’t up to standard for their company blog.

But, if you get these things right and deliver a guest post packed with value and relevant to their audience, they’ll be happy to publish it.

Wrapping Up

Guest post outreach is an excellent way to build high-quality backlinks in exchange for creating content for other people’s websites and is a commonly used tactic as part of an SEO strategy.

If you follow the steps we’ve outlined here, you’ll quickly be able to start getting in touch with the right people at relevant companies. From there, all you need to do is coordinate the article writing process and deliver them a relevant piece of content that they’ll be proud to publish on their website.

Tools like Ranktracker can help you identify guest post opportunities, and you can use QuickMail to manage the cold outreach process to website owners.