Part #3. How to build links via guest blogging
I'm about to teach you a few guest blogging tactics
that someone might even call "advanced."
But let's not forget about the very basics.
The quality of your content always comes first.
I actually think we should start calling it "the fundamental rule of content marketing."
If your content is weak, even the smartest tactics and strategies won't work for you.
But if your content is top notch, you'll get astounding results with little to no effort.
So that aside, let's address two of the most common challenges in guest blogging.
How to never run out of blogs to guest post for.
And how to create more quality guest articles in less time.
Without further ado, challenge #1.
How to never run out of blogs to guest post for.
Most guides to guest blogging will suggest you to use advanced Google search operators
for finding blogs to guest post for.
Like your_topic "guest post," your_topic "guest article," your_topic "write for us,"
your_topic inurl:submit, etc.
And then you're supposed to somehow scrape Google search results for all these search queries,
save them into a spreadsheet, run de-duplication and maybe even pull some SEO metrics
which would help you vet them.
If you ask me - that is too troublesome.
So here's how you get a huge list of guest blogging prospects in five minutes or less.
Go to Content Explorer and put your topic there.
In fact, you can use any keyword that you know blogs in your industry are likely to mention.
For example, blogs in the SEO industry will often talk about things like link building, keyword research,
SEO audit, anchor text, etc.
So let's take the keyword "link building" and put it into Content Explorer.
And I get over 120,000 pages that mention this keyword somewhere in their content.
But I don't need a list of pages, I need a list of blogs to guest post for.
So I put a checkbox next to "One article per domain" setting.
And from 120,000 results I go down to 39,000 pages that belong to unique websites and mention
my target keyword.
Next, I need to use the Language filter, because I'm only going to write my guest articles in English.
And finally, if I don't feel confident writing articles for top blogs in my industry, I can
use Domain Rating filter from 30 to 50, so that I only see results from mildly popular
blogs, where I have a much higher chance of getting published.
And we're down to slightly over 5,000 unique websites that mention my target keyword in
one of their articles.
And because their Domain Rating is not too strong, I know they're likely to accept my guest article.
5,000 is more blogs than you'll be able to write for in your lifetime.
But should you need more guest blogging prospects, you can always loosen up the Domain Rating filter
and you'll get vastly more results.
And of course you can always start fresh with some other seed keyword.
For example, you could try searching for keywords that are not so closely related to what you do.
I started with keywords like "link building," "keyword research," "seo audit," "anchor text," etc
because they're highly related to what we do at Ahrefs.
But I could actually go much broader than that:
"startup marketing," "growth hacking," "website promotion," "online business," etc.
As you can tell, by playing with different seed keywords you will end up with an almost
never ending supply of blogs to guest post for.
And this time we have 2 elephants in one room.
Elephant #1. How do you know these blogs allow guest posts?
I don't. But is that even an issue?
If a blog doesn't have a "Write for Us" page, or any other signs of guest posts being accepted,
why not just email them and ask about it?
Here at Ahrefs we don't have a "Write for Us" page and we never advertise an opportunity
to publish your guest articles.
But we do publish guest posts from time to time.
It all goes back to "the fundamental rule of content marketing" that I mentioned earlier.
If you have a compelling idea and your writing is of an exceptional quality, you might get accepted
even by the blogs that don't normally allow guest writers.
Let's face it, the vast majority of people who pitch guest articles are only willing
to invest 30 minutes-or-so to crank out something barely readable
and hope it will land them a backlink.
But most bloggers are too polite to say "Your content is awful," so instead they say "Sorry,
but we don't publish articles on our blog."
And even if your content is top notch and you still get a "no," well, it didn't hurt to ask, right?
Next time that might be a "yes".
And besides, even if you were turned down, you still put yourself on the radar
of a prominent person in your industry.
By the way, remember what I said earlier about the side benefits of leaving blog comments:?
If you really want to publish your guest article on some popular blog in your niche, try to get
the attention of the blog owner via smart insightful comments first, and only then
reach out offering to write a post for them.
Works almost every time.
Elephant #2. Why should I publish articles at low-DR blogs?
Doesn't low-DR mean that a link from them has little value?
Technically, from Google's own perspective, you're not getting a backlink from a domain.
You're getting a backlink from a specific page.
That is just how their PageRank formula works.
That said, a highly popular website can have a ton of weak pages, while a small new website
can have a few very strong ones.
And besides, some of the small websites will eventually grow into big and popular ones, right?
So you shouldn't shy away from guest writing for a blog, just because their DR is low.
A better question to ask would be "Do I think this blog will still be around in 3 years from now?"
If the answer is "yes," go for it.
If it's "no," leave it, because you clearly don't want to spend time writing quality
guest articles that will eventually disappear without a trace.
Obviously, you should aim to publish guest articles on the very best blogs in your industry.
But if you pitched them a few times and got rejected, you'll have to work your way up,
writing for low-DR blogs in order to build your skill and portfolio of published articles.
Up until the big guys will start to recognize you and let you write for them.
So that was the challenge #1: how to find the blogs to guest post for.
And here goes challenge #2.
How to create more quality guest articles in less time.
I'm sure you can easily come up with a great topic for a guest article.
Maybe two, or three.
But try to brainstorm at least 20 unique article ideas.
I bet you'll start to struggle somewhere after #7.
Which is why I'm happy to share two awesome techniques that will solve this headache for you.
#1. The Splintering Technique
In the previous lessons of this course I was advising you to create epic in-depth articles
which would cover a certain topic better than anyone else.
Well, why don't you think of this big awesome article as a collection of smaller ones, like
a piece of wood that can be broken into many splinters?
Here's an example.
Take a look at this guide to link building at Ahrefs blog.
Right away you can see that it consists of 6 chapters.
Well, this means that we can easily write six unique articles, each talking about a separate
chapter from this link building guide.
When creating this guide we had to make these chapters fairly short, because we didn't want to
overwhelm our readers with unnecessary details.
But if we were to create a dedicated article for each of these chapters, we could go as
deep as we wanted without the fear of making them too long.
I think this is a perfect way to come up with ideas for guest articles.
You create a single awesome resource that would target a general topic, and then you
break it into smaller "splinters" and submit each of them as a guest article on a different blog.
Which would link back to that big awesome resource and help it rank in Google.
And the thing that I like the most about this technique, is that you can produce these splinters
in little to no time, because you did all the hard work educating yourself on that topic
and all it's aspects while writing that big awesome article for your own blog.
Go look at your past articles and see if you can find any potential splintering opportunities in them.
#2. The Perspective technique
Let's say we used the Splintering technique to turn chapter #6 of our link building guide
into an awesome guest article about the future of link building.
Does that mean that we cannot use this same topic again for writing another guest article?
Of course we can!
All we need to do is change the perspective slightly.
We could talk about the future of link building for startups, ecommerce sites, small businesses,
local businesses, non-profits, etc.
I know these topics sound a bit clumsy, but you get the idea of how "The Perspective
technique" works, right?
For every unique guest article idea that you have in your list it is possible to create
a few nice variations, by changing the perspective slightly.
That said, by applying the Splintering technique and the Perspective technique just to our
single guide to link building, we could easily come up with nearly 20 unique guest article
ideas in less than 20 minutes.
So these are two of my favourite ways to easily come up with unique guest article ideas.
But don't limit yourself to these two only, google around a bit and you'll find quite
a few more great techniques that will help you brainstorm cool ideas for your guest articles.