It’s time to get driving traffic to your site and you’ve decided that guest blogging is a good way forward. You’re amongst good company, guest blogging is a hugely effective and successful way of sending links and traffic to your site. Launching your first campaign to win guest posts can be daunting, and it is a lot of work, this guide will set you on the right path.
How To Design A Guest Blog Outreach Campaign
Building and launching a campaign will take work if it’s to be successful. It turns out there’s more to it than just blog writing. Putting in the effort will reap rewards down the line, plus it sets the foundations for many future campaigns to build on.
Define Your Goal
Setting goals is a fundamental part of building your guest blog outreach campaign. Without goals to track you’ll be lost, adrift in a sea of confusion over whether your campaign has actually been successful or not.
A great number of business leaders swear by the use of SMART goals. These are goals that are: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. A goal that is all of the above will ensure that it isn’t set just for the purpose of setting a goal, but is actually useful for your business.
A great example of a SMART goal for your guest blog outreach might be to increase quality backlinks to a specific page on your site by the end of Q4. It needs to be a goal that drives and motivates your campaign, and that also has clearly measurable success criteria.
Craft A Strategy
Sending out emails here and there to any blog without a real focus is a surefire way to achieve nothing. You need a strategy. Draw up lists of your target blogs, get to know their audience, and explain how you can drive value to this readership. Don’t be afraid to get niche on this. Focusing on individual niches not only makes it easier to segment and understand your campaign but also allows you to tailor your message accordingly.
Create A Targeted List
Once you’re sure of your target audience, it’s time to focus on specific blogs that you want your campaign to feature. It’s time to get organized. Build a spreadsheet that has all of the core information on it; site title, site URL, contact details, niche, style, and anything else you can think of that’s pertinent to the campaign. Additional information could include a domain’s authority, current backlink profiles, and a link to their guest blog policy, there are endless options, tailor it to your needs.
Being organized like this will not only help you to track the progress of your outreach but also lead to a greater level of success.
Begin Outreach
This is where personalization is king. Blog and agency owners will be receiving endless emails related to guest blogging, and it gets old. If you want to avoid the trash before even being read there are a number of steps to work on.
- Make sure that your subject line is tested and well-written, this is your chance to grab attention.
- Get personal – people want to feel like they’re having a conversation with a real human and aren’t just part of another mail merge (even if they are…)
- Be clear and concise – don’t waste people’s time or they’ll switch off, make it clear what you want from the start of the email
- Getting into details on your guest blog can help give insight and might seal the deal sooner.
Promote Your Campaign
You’ve been successful and now your guest blogs are live on multiple domains. Congrats! But the work doesn’t stop there. Now you want to get as many eyes as possible onto those blogs. Hopefully, the blog owner will be sharing your content and naturally driving traffic towards it, but you should also be sharing it within your own network and via social media.
Track Results
By looking into the analytics of your own site you’ll be able to see where you’ve acquired traffic, including via guest blog posts. This allows you to understand which blogs have been successful against your targets and helps you to plan your strategy moving forward.
Key Takeaways
Guest blogging is an effective and powerful strategy, getting the outreach right will depend on your audience and the blogs in that network. Tailor your message, build relationships, and over time your campaigns will deliver.
- Personalization is the king of outreach, don’t opt for the quicker mass email, tempting as it might be.
- Always ensure your campaigns are measurable with tangible metrics.
- Once you’ve run a campaign, analyze it, and adapt it for next time.