In my previous article on growing a blog, I have emphasised the importance of guest blogging to expanding your reach and a blog’s audience. Whether you are just getting started with blog promotion or already scoring guest blogging opportunities, these essential tips will ensure that you get your guest posts published:
Blog Promotion & Marketing
First about the basics. Before you start looking for guest blogging opportunities, you need to make sure that you have a strong online presence. Your blog needs to be active, with great content published consistently. Maintain your social media presence — your content might get picked up by bloggers there too! Also, make sure that you cross-promote your blog and reaching your target audience effectively. There is nothing more attractive than a blogger with a strong profile and a loyal audience.
Media Kit
Media kit is a quick overview of your own blog. While it is not necessary for guest blogging, it is a great way to demonstrate your blog and will make you appear professional. It is especially important if you are looking for a mutual guest blogging opportunities or a long-term partnership.
Identify Opportunities
There are several ways you can find guest blogging opportunities. The typical way is to identify blogs relevant to you through search: put together a list of blogs that might be relevant and start contacting the best ones. You should be focusing on blogs that have previously published guest posts or have a section on the website about guest blogging submissions. Yet, that doesn’t mean that you can’t contact the ones that are not actively looking for guest bloggers — you actually should, although it might be harder.
Many Medium publications publish guest posts too. I’d recommend to start with a list of top publications and submit to the most appropriate ones: some have a link to submit articles, and other look for writers on their own. This comes back to the promotion: blogs often pick up top content to republish.
Some other places you can find guest blogging opportunities are social media, forums and blog directories. However, those are found to be less controlled and harder to navigate.
Pitch
Once you have identified guest blogging opportunities, you can start getting in touch with them. Write your pitch for each blog individually — never send generic requests to bloggers. You should be able to offer a few article ideas suitable for the blog or have a completed article ready to be published. The pitch should also include your biography and what makes you an expert to write about the topic that you are proposing. If only sending article ideas, include the links to your best pieces of content in your pitch to give a publication an idea of the type of content you produce.
I can go on about this part for ages and this is a topic for another blog post.