We discussed finding guest blogging opportunities in our previous post.

At the end the article, I left a hanging question about how you can determine the quality of sites you’ve found.

“Quality,” in this case, is a very vague term. In the case of finding out the value of a website, quality is determined by different metrics that I will discuss in this post.

Why is it important to determine the quality of sites for guest blogging?

To increase your reach to your audience and build relationships with influencers, you need to post on a site that is visited by people interested in your niche. 

In other words:

Guest blogging is a social activity, not for the purpose of acquiring a backlink.

This is achieved with a high SEO score.

A site that optimized by following the best on-page and link building practices will have better chances of getting on top of search results for their keyword.

As a guest blogger, you want a site that is easily found in search results so you can reap the benefits of high readership.

Aside from site traffic, the site needs to have a strong social influence.

This is determined by the number of followers and interactions they have on their social media accounts.

Unfortunately, some of these factors are not made public to users, site traffic most especially.

This is why we need to rely on site metrics to help us get a better idea of how a website is performing.

The higher the metrics of a site is, the more you should pursue guest blogging on said site!

The site parameters that will be discussed here are made up of different algorithms to help you figure out the quality of the site.

Since not all metrics are created equal, all of them will provide different results and data about the target site for your guest post.

This is a good thing – the more data you will use to compute the site’s value, the more accurate your returns will be.

How to evaluate website quality using these metrics

Below are the different factors you need to use in determining the site’s quality.

Alexa Ranking

Alexa is a popular analytics tool that ranks websites on a global and local scale.

The figures shown on Alexa results are far from accurate, but it nonetheless provides you an idea of how a site or blog is viewed.

Not to mention, it is the only tool that provides public rankings for all web pages.

Go to the site and type the URL of the blog to show its ranking.

For this exercise, I will be using Social Media Examiner as an example.

Moz’s Page and Domain Authority

Moz is a digital marketing agency led by Rand Fishkin.

It has developed an algorithm that uses aggregated ranking factors to come up with metrics to determine the value of a site.

These are called Page Authority and Domain Authority.

Page Authority refers to the value of a particular page in a domain, while Domain Authority relates to the value of the domain as a whole (including subdomains).

The higher both metrics are (on the scale of 100), the more chances that the page and domain will rank in search results.

Go to the Open Site Explorer (also a property of Moz) and enter the URL to see both metrics in the results.

Social Proof

This refers to the number of shares each post on the blog receives and the number of followers the blog has.

You’d want to write for blogs with lots of fans and shares so you can increase your reach by having tens and hundreds of users tweeting and posting your articles on their social accounts.

Most blogs feature the number of followers they have on the sidebar.

Same goes with the social shares for each post in the blog.

If the shares are not shown, go to LinkTally.com and enter the URL of the blog post to demonstrate the number of tweets and likes.

Blog Comments

You don’t have to use a tool to find out if the blog has lots of comment.

Just visit the blog and choose a random article from the pile.

Scroll down the comments and see how many users have chimed in the article.

Do this on multiple posts to gauge the participation of readers on each.

You would want at least one comment on each post so that you can expect at least one person to share their opinion on yours.

Netpeak Checker: An easier way to find blog factors!

To find the Alexa Ranking, Moz PA and DA, and social proof much faster, I suggest you download the Netpeak Checker.

It’s a free tool that finds these metrics for you.

To use this tool, enter the site when you plan on submitting your guest posts and uncheck the parameters not mentioned above to filter the results to the relevant factors.

Once the tool is done finding the metrics for you, download the sheet and save it for future reference.

Order the sites from highest to lowest based on the factors so you can start with the best-performing sites and filter out the bad ones.

Now that you have the data in hand, you can find out which sites to target for your guest blogging campaign.

The next problem we are going to tackle on my next post is crafting your guest blogging pitch to compel site owners to publish your content.

Until then, organize your list of sites to send your guest posts by referring to the metrics featured above and using Netpeak Checker.

A guest posting strategy is crucial to the success of your online brand.

As mentioned in my previous post, guest blogging is an effective tactic to build trust to your brand and increase site traffic, as well as indirectly hike up your SEO score.

If this tactic is new to you and is interested in trying it out to reap its benefits, then you need to understand how a well-planned guest blogging strategy work to help maximize your campaign of writing for different online publications to build your online brand.

How important is a strategy for your guest posting?

The process of writing and sending your blog posts to a list of guest posting sites for review seems simple enough.

However:

Guest blogging as a marketing strategy is never a one-and-done thing.

To fully receive the benefits that guest blogging can provide for your online business, you need to form a sustainable plan that allows you to reach out to an endless stream of sites to submit your posts.

By developing a guest blogging strategy that does exactly this, you will be able to continuously reach out to different sites related to your niche and tap its target audience through the high-quality content you have written.

This way, you can further build your online reputation as a prolific and trustworthy blogger and drive more interests to the products and services offered in your sites! Ready to create your guest blogging strategy?

Let’s first lay down the framework on how this strategy is implemented and set out:

Steps to Launching a Successful Guest Posting Strategy

• Find websites related to your niche where you can send out guest posts
• Send out your topic proposal
• Once your plan is approved, write your blog post like a BOSS
• Once post is published, promote to different online channels
• Repeat process!

Let’s drill down each point into how you can implement these about your blog.

Finding websites related to your niche to send your guest posts

Much has been said about this tactic from Backlinko’s Brian Dean to QuickSprout’s Kristi Hines about finding sites where to focus on sending out your guest posts.

In fact, both resources are so good that I won’t have to add my two cents regarding this step! Instead, I’ll synthesize all the suggestions they mentioned into a list.

• For your preliminary list of sites to send your guest posts, go to Alltop.com and search for blogs under the category of your niche.
• Use Google search queries to filter the search results to the sites where you can send your posts to.

• Search Twitter for the latest and most recent sites where you can perform your guest blogging strategy on.

Collect the sites you’ve found in your research and place them in a spreadsheet for easy reference.

Edit them according to different metrics you’re using (Moz’s Domain Authority, Page Authority, social proof, etc.) as you wish.

Sending out your topic proposal

Once you have sifted through your list of websites to guest post on, you need to send an email pitch about your intention of sending a guest post to their site.

As much as I’m tempted to send over a template so you can just fill out the blanks with your details, I’ll take a different route and write down the elements that you should include in the email instead.

• Compelling email headline – Write a headline encouraging the site owner to open your email. One way to approach writing your headline is to stroke the site owner’s ego, i.e., “Thanks for posting that awesome article in your blog.” Writing about how much their site is helping you is something that you would want to hear, so there’s a high chance that they’ll open the email to read more about what you have to say.
• Break down your article topic/s – Don’t just send over a title proposal for your blog post. List down the headings that you will mention on the posts (should they be accepted for review). This way, you’re not just sending them content based on a topic proposal. Also, providing an outline gives the site owners insight into how much they know about the topic.
• Give an incentive – Site owners are much likelier to accept your guest post if it’s guaranteed to bring more traffic to your site. In this case, say that you will promote the content to your social media followers, email list, and other channels to maximize the post’s exposure to new visitors. This tactic will be effective, especially if you have thousands of followers on social media.

Write your blog post like a BOSS

Writing blog content takes a long time to finish.

In fact, an excellent job takes days, if not weeks, to get done and submit for review.

The devil is in the detail – bloggers will have to brainstorm for topics, resources to include in the post, and the actual process of writing the words to communicate your ideas effectively.

When running a guest blogging strategy, time is of the essence.

Therefore, if there’s anything that could make the writing process much faster, then the better your life will be.

While there are no shortcuts to writing great content, there is a simple step-by-step guide to writing like a boss, something that Will Blunt of Blogger Sidekick has developed over time.

Reading his post will give you insight on how to maximize your time in writing much more useful blog posts to submit to different publications.

Follow the tips in the post and download the checklist to supercharge your writing process of your guest blogging strategy.

Promote to different online channels

To gain traction with your guest post, you need to promote it to your online network.

Doing this will help you tap into a different segment of online users who aren’t readers of the blog, to begin with.

Also, take this as an opportunity to promote yourself as an authoritative and trustworthy blogger about your topic of expertise.

Aside from promoting your posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites, you can gain referral traffic and comments from social bookmarking sites like Inbound.org, BizSugar, Blog Engage, and Kingged.com, to name a few.

Submitting your post to these sites will bring more eyeballs to the site or blog and drive more traffic this way.

Related: 18 Sites Where You Can Promote Your Blog Post

Other ways of promoting your post include submitting them to different online groups and communities (Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups, Google Communities) and sending an email blast to people mentioned in the post (to get them to tweet or link back to your newly written post).

Repeat! (and Final Words)

Once you have gotten your content published on your target site, you need to move on to the next one in your list and do the same procedure.

If you have exhausted the list of sites to write guest posts for, conduct the same process of researching for websites using Google search queries and other techniques to find new sources.

You can’t go wrong with a guest blogging strategy if you follow the tips and advice mentioned above.

A lot has been said about what is guest posting. However, we can track it back to a couple of yars ago.

In January of 2014, then-head of web spam team in Google Matt Cutts denounced guest blogging as a way to build backlinks for your site.

Below is the quote that sticks out like a sore thumb in his original post:

So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy. In general I wouldn’t recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well. Likewise, I wouldn’t recommend relying on guest posting, guest blogging sites, or guest blogging SEO as a linkbuilding strategy.

Due to the influx of thin and poor-quality content published on different online publications by guest bloggers, Google penalized MyBlogGuest, a site that connects guest bloggers to publishers, to send those who pursue this tactic a stern message.

So what is guest posting? And is it “dead?”

If someone with clout and authority says something to be fact (in this case, it’s Matt Cutts), it’s never always true.

While his announcement did sway people from using this tactic as part of their SEO strategy, marketers who knew better rejoiced at this statement and continued on their quest to use guest blogging to help promote their websites.

Sounds strange, doesn’t it?

But there’s actual proof that guest blogging is still a legitimate technique. Below are links to case studies as evidence:

• How to Generate Hundreds of Leads from Guest Blogging [case studies] by JSMarketing
• Case Study: An Inside Look into My Most Successful Guest Posts at Writers in Charge
• How To Generate 20,000 Monthly Visitors Through Long-Tail Search by Neil Patel (he indicates guest blogging as one of the most efficient ways to gain natural links from trusted sites)

These articles are just the tip of the iceberg.

You can search Google and find equally relevant links to more case studies from successful bloggers who have grown their traffic and increased leads using this very strategy.

So, here’s the truth about guest blogging: it still works!

Didn’t see that coming from a mile away, did you?

Regardless of what Matt Cutts said, guest blogging is still a very powerful tactic that you must integrate into your overall marketing strategy to help achieve your online goals.

In fact, if you read the pullout quote from Matt Cutts carefully, you should have caught on that guest blogging was never to be killed at all. In the quote, he mentioned guest blogging as a “link building strategy.”

As a link building strategy, the aim of guest blogging is to gain a link back to your website or blog.

Because of this, the only thing that matters is to get a link placement within the body of the content, regardless of the post’s quality.

As a result, your guest blogging strategy consists of poorly written content with conspicuous use of anchor texts linking back to your site.

With Google on the move in ranking informative and helpful content higher over anything else, using guest blogging in this context was never a sustainable strategy, to begin with!

Not only is it blatantly unnatural link building, but it’s also proliferating thin content online, both of which are frown upon by search engines.

So what is the secret to successful guest blogging?

The real purpose of guest blogging is this:

Make real connections with your audience and attract them to your website through content!

That’s it.

It was never meant for SEO.

Imagine this: you can nab a guest blogging opportunity to a trusted sites visited by thousands of your target audience.

You write the best possible blog post to be published on the site, with loads of great ideas, stats to back up your claims, and a writing style that resonates with your readers.

Once published and promoted to the right channels, expect not only to drive more traffic to your site but also — gasp — gain backlinks from that post you wrote, which can indirectly affect your search rankings!

By guest blogging not for the purpose of raising your SEO score, but by providing informative content to your readers, you can inadvertently increase your brand and site’s trust rating in the most natural means possible!

This sounds awesome! How do I get started with this?

Personally, you can’t go wrong with any of the resources featured below:

• Advanced Guest Posting from The Advanced Guide to Link Building at QuickSprout
• The Ultimate Guide to Advanced Guest Blogging by Pratik Dholakiya at Moz
• 12 Essential Elements of Guest Blogging Proposals That Get Accepted by Neil Patel at Hubspot

Take your time to read these to get a better feel and understanding on how to approach guest blogging not as something that can help you, but something that can help your audience!