Part #4. Simple guest blogging "hacks" for better results in less time
Here at Ahrefs our content marketing team has published a rather solid number of guest
articles in the last few years.
And we have discovered a few simple "hacks" that I'll be glad to share with you.
Some of them might seem obvious, but I still think that they deserve a mention.
Hack #1. Pitch more blogs than you can handle.
Negotiations take time.
Blog owners might not reply to your emails for days, or even weeks.
You shouldn't worry about this but you should factor that in.
Your guest blogging should not suffer from these long wait times.
And hence the first hack: send more guest post pitches than you can handle.
There's a great book, called "Oversubscribed" by Daniel Priestley.
It teaches you that It's always good to have more demand than supply.
Imagine dozens of bloggers queueing to get a guest article from you.
This way you actually get to pick and choose which blogs you want to write for and which
ones can wait.
So come up with two or three awesome article ideas and pitch them to 10-15 blogs.
Just don't send all your pitches in one day.
Send the first few and give them a few days to respond.
Then send the next batch.
This way, if one blogger is slow to respond, just reply them with something like
"Sorry, you weren't responding for a few days, so this article idea was taken by another blog.
But don't worry, I'm sure I'll be able to suggest something else for you that would be just as good.
I'll be in touch with more article ideas shortly."
This is how you create a queue of bloggers waiting for your guest articles.
Hack #2. Link to multiple articles from your guest post.
This sounds like a no-brainer, but many people simply forget that they can do that.
And no, I'm not talking about filling your guest article with links to your own stuff
top to bottom.
Make it relevant and make it natural.
If the link doesn't quite belong there - don't try to squeeze it in.
These days most bloggers are very sensitive to any self-promotional links, so quite often
they will only allow a single link to the homepage of your website coming from your author bio.
So if you send them an article full of links to your website - this might get them pissed
and they won't publish anything at all.
From my experience, you shouldn't put more than two self promotional links in your guest article.
But that largely depends on the blog owner.
Hack #3. Link to other guest posts of yours.
This is a nice loophole for when the blog owner is hyper-sensitive to having you link
to your own website.
Linking to your other guest articles is good for two reasons:
Reason #1: According to Google's PageRank formula, by linking to a page that links to
your website you're increasing the power of that link.
Reason #2: You can reach out to this other blog owner and let them know you just landed
them a quality backlink.
They will be super happy about this and they might return this favor sometime in future.
This is a simple but very powerful hack.
Make sure you put it to action.
And finally...
Hack #4. Write guest articles for blogs that have never linked to you before.
It is a well known fact that the number of unique domains that link to a page correlates
well with the ranking position of that page in Google.
Correlation is not causation but the experience of many thousands of SEO professionals confirms
that the more unique websites you have linking to your page - the higher it usually ranks in Google.
So when building links via guest blogging it's in your best interest to pitch blogs that
have never linked to your website before.
In Ahrefs' Content Explorer we have a cool feature just for that.
Remember we had a list of 5,000 potential guest blogging targets?
Well, we can click a button called Highlight unlinked domains and see which of these websites
have never linked to our own website.
Then we can go ahead and export them using the Export only highlighted checkbox.
As easy as that!
And if you're looking at a random blog and you want to know if they have linked to you before,
just go to the Referring Domains report for your own website and search for that domain there.
That's it!
But how strict should you be about this rule?
Should you say "no" to every blog owner who gives you the opportunity to write another
guest post for them?
Well, as we just discussed, Google's PageRank formula counts backlinks between pages,
not websites.
But clearly every subsequent link from the same website will have less value.
Otherwise it would be too easy to manipulate Google by creating just one website with a million
pages that link to you.
So here's what I think.
You should only write a second or third guest article if it's a really good blog.
Or if you don't have any better guest post opportunities at the moment
but have a few finished articles that you need to publish somewhere.
And that was my final guest blogging tip.
We have one last link building strategy left to discuss.
That is outreach, and I'm going to share everything I know about it in the last lesson of this course.
Sounds good? Then I'll see you there!