In 2014, Matt Cutts, Google’s former Head of Web Spam, announced the death of guest blogging as a white-hat link building tactic.
Can’t remember what he said? Let me refresh your memory:
Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop.
Matt Cutts
Matt Cutts, Formerly Head of Web Spam, Google
But it’s been more than four years since Matt’s prophecy, so where do we stand now? Did guest blogging die?
Not at all. Thousands of people still use this strategy to build links to their site. It’s just that low-quality guest posting—think submitting spun articles to places like EzineArticles—is well and truly dead.
High-quality guest blogging, on the other hand, is not only alive and well, but also remains highly effective.
It works so well, in fact, that we use this tactic to build top-quality links to ahrefs.com at scale. It took us a while, but we’ve now perfected and polished our guest blogging process.
In this post, I’ll share our first-hand experience with you. I’ll also explain how we overcame three common guest blogging challenges:
How to find (and never run out of) blogs to guest post for;
How to write more high-quality guest articles in less time;
How to get backlinks when all the odds are against you
But first, let’s address the elephant in the room.
Beginner's guide to link building
New to link building? Check out our
Beginner’s guide to link building
Do you want to drive referral traffic from your guest posts?
Sorry, but this guide won’t help you with that.
Generating referral traffic from guest posts is not as straightforward as it seems.
How do I know? Because two years ago, I asked 500+ bloggers how much traffic they got from their guest articles. The results were disappointing.
guest blogging study
The average referral traffic across 239 guest articles was only 50 visits.
Here at Ahrefs, we pay around $0.30 per click when running Facebook ads for our blog articles. So 50 visits costs us roughly $15 (50 * $0.30 = $15).
Now consider all the steps required to get a guest post published:
Find a decent blog to guest post for;
Locate the owner’s email address;
Reach out to them;
Brainstorm article ideas;
Write the article;
Liaise back and forth with the blogger until published.
How long do you think all that would take? 5 hours, maybe more? Even if we value our time at a very modest rate of $8/hour, that’s at least $40-$50 worth of work right there.
Now, you could argue that the average numbers from just five hundred bloggers don’t mean much, as the results are dependant on so many factors. (e.g., blog size, traffic quality, the resource that you want to send referral traffic to, etc.)
It’s true, the results do vary a lot, and you can get a ton of referral traffic from your guest articles. However, as there are so many variables at play, this is a topic best left for another post (let me know if you want me to write it).
That aside, let me show you how to build tons of high-quality links via guest blogging.
1. How to easily find (and never run out of) guest blogging opportunities
Every guest blogging guide gives the same advice - use search operators like these to find opportunities:
[your_topic] “write for us”
[your_topic] “become an author”
[your_topic] “guest post”
[your_topic] “guest article”
[your_topic] inurl:contribute
etc..
And then you’re somehow supposed to scrape the search results for these search queries.
And then you need to merge them and remove duplicates.
And then you need to somehow pull SEO metrics for each of these blogs.
Plus, if everyone follows this same process, then everyone finds the same opportunities. Your pitch will be one of the many these bloggers receive every single day. And, chances are, they’ve started to ignore them.
So let me show you a better way to find thousands of unique and untapped guest blogging opportunities (in less than 60 seconds).
Enter: Content Explorer.
If you haven’t used this tool before, it’s like a mini telemarketing list search engine for web content. It runs on a vast database of almost one billion pages (updated daily).
Enter any word or phrase, and Content Explorer will kick back a huge list of web pages that mention the keyword.
Let’s try it for “parenting” and see how telemarketing list many results we get.
Parenting Best Articles
Roughly 90K! And these are only the pages with the word “parenting” in their title tag. (If we open up the search to include pages with the word “parenting” anywhere on the page, we get 800K+ results!)
But anyhow, we’re not looking for a list of articles that mention “parenting” in their title. We need a list of individual blogs which write about that topic.
To do this, we’ll select the “one article per domain” checkbox.
Parenting Best Articles 1
Now we’re down from 90,195 to 26,248 pages, which belong to individual blogs.
Hit “Export,” and we now have a list of 26K+ websites where we can pitch guest articles (if we wrote about “parenting”).
It’