How to Get Backlinks With Guest Posting to Help Boost Your SEO For Your Website

Thesis: You can get massive traffic increases for any website using guest posting. These big traffic increases will come from organic searches rather than referrals.

A couple of years ago I got an email. It’s one of the most dreaded emails you can get if you are an internet marketer, SEO, or website owner…

I received a notice that my one of my niche websites received a penalty for “thin content.”

It was devastating!

This particular website was making significant revenue so this was a big hit.

The risk is real, even for public companies.

There seems to be some resistance among some internet marketers to go out and get white hat backlinks, especially when it comes to guest posting. I resisted too.

I used to think that it just makes more sense to control my own backlinks using a Private Blog Network. (I still like PBNs for certain areas of link building.)

When you are working with clients as an SEO agency, you can’t afford gamble with your client’s name brand. It’s not ethical.

The fact is that white hat outreach, specifically guest posting, is ridiculously effective and almost completely avoids the risk of shady, old school backlinking tactics. (And I will be sharing my exact templates, plus my tracking spreadsheet to make it even easier.)

Results of Guest Posting

Let’s take a look at how effective guest posting can be in a few different scenarios. You may think that guest posting can only work for certain kinds of websites.

But if you take the approach seriously and are dedicated to the process, then guest posting can work for almost any kind of website.

Example of an Amazon Niche Site

These are the kind of sites that I have the most experience with. And while niche sites are smaller in scope than authority sites, they can still have strong earning potential. A niche site is a website with a narrow focus and usually without the depth of an authority site. They are typically monetized with ads or affiliate offers.

I ran a campaign for my own niche site starting in August and it is still ongoing. The traffic to the site is up about 70% overall.

The real story is around the pages and topics that I linked to from the guest posts. The traffic to those pages is up 200% to almost 300%.

Example for an Authority Site

An authority site is generally considered to be a step up from a niche site. Let’s look at a definition from Gael and Mark from Authority Hacker:

Lewis and I have been working on an authority site since January 2015, and it hasn’t been widely revealed until now as we wanted to have a white hat site as part of each of our portfolios.

We eventually ranked #1 for a massive keyword phrase – the search volume is 18,100.

The increase in organic traffic amounted to 470%.

That’s huge and we even took over the #1 spot from instructables.com. The surprising part is that it took less than 10 guest posts.

Myths about guest posting

Guest posting has been around for a long time so the landscape has changed over time. Let’s review some of the common myths.

Google doesn’t like guest posting anymore

Guest posting was a strategy that was so effective for so many early bloggers that it was eventually abused by spammers. Many guest posting networks whose sole purpose was providing links were penalized over time.

It got so bad that Google’s Matt Cutts called out guest posting in January 2014:

Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.

–Matt Cutts

Many people called out this broad statement as inaccurate or at least out of context. Here are two:

• Neil Patel at Quicksprout: Guest Blogging and SEO: Still a Match Made in Heaven
• Mark Daoust at Search Engine Journal: Why Matt Cutts Can’t Kill Guest Blogging

Later Matt Cutts amended this to his stance:

There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there. I changed the title of this post to make it more clear that I’m talking about guest blogging for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

–Matt Cutts

The point being is that bad/spammy guest posting is not good. If you are paying to have a guest post published, i.e. a sponsored post, then you are on thin ice.

Take Away: Guest posting isn’t bad, but shady links from shady sites are bad.

You will get a flood of traffic from guest posting

The amount of referral traffic you get from a guest post depends on the blog that you post on. Some blogs get a lot of traffic each month and have a highly engaged readership.

If your guest post is relevant for the audience, then you should get referral traffic.

Getting referral traffic is icing on the cake, but there are other great reasons to guest post:

• Get contextual backlinks – Backlinks are still the primary way that Google assesses search engine rankings.
• Become better known in the community – Publishing your ideas on a blog, even one that doesn’t get a massive amount of traffic, still establishes you at a thought leader in your space.

Take Away: The backlinks and publicity are more important than referral traffic.

It takes forever to execute a guest posting campaign

Guest posting sounds like a lot of work. There are several steps, and if you haven’t guest-blogged before, the whole process sounds complicated. Like many seemingly complex processes, guest posting is just a series of simple steps. (We’ll get to the steps soon!)

I executed a campaign for my own niche site in one month and published 11 guest posts. I didn’t write all of the guest posts, but hired some college educated writers from the US and edited them as needed.

The average Domain Authority was 32 so these were great websites to get links from.

Joseph describes how he published 30 guest posts in about 6 weeks and that tripled his traffic. It is no small feat to publish that many guest posts, but you can’t argue with the results.

Take Away: It doesn’t take long if you follow a plan.

No one will accept my guest post idea

You have to think of several headlines that will be relevant to the topic. It only has to be a little bit related, just enough so that you can fit in a backlink to your own site in a relevant way.

Be creative and you can normally figure out a way to fit your topic into a broad niche. It will take some practice to generate topics. We will look at a specific example later.

If you do your homework by researching the niche, then you will be able to come up with some great ideas some of which are legitimately great. Not all of your ideas will be accepted so come up with few extra headlines.

Take Away: If you pitch a good idea, then it will be accepted.

No one will link to my affiliate site

If you have a shitty, thin affiliate site that has subpar content, you’re right – No one will link to you. However, if you have a nice looking site with high-quality information, then you will be able to get links.

The key will be to link to your site’s content when it provides the reader with relevant information. You can definitely add backlinks to your content if you truly help the reader.

If your client has a basic site without a great deal of content or blog posts, you should improve that aspect. It’s your job to convince the business owner that high-quality content is needed to get these backlinks. Show them some of the top ranking competitors – you’ll undoubtedly find great content.

Take Away: You can get backlinks to your site if it helps the reader.

How to Effectively Run a Guest Post Campaign

Each of the 7 steps for a guest blogging campaign are very simple. But you have to do them all and in the right order.

Never fear, though. I will tell you all the steps and what order you need to do them. My background is in project management and process optimization. Basically, I like setting up systems, especially when they make positive results repeatable.

I’m giving away the farm here and sharing my process, templates, and everything with you… It’s the exact process that I use for my Guest Posting service.

I’ve sent 1,000s of emails and published dozens of guest posts. Across industries and for big and small SEO agencies.

Figure out where you want to drive traffic

This is a no-brainer. Where do you want to send organic, search engine traffic? Or referral traffic if that’s your goal?

Generally, I like to have a specific page, i.e. 1 URL, that receives the backlink. It makes it laser-focused and very clear about the goal. This focus also makes it very easy to see the results to measure your ROI.

Take Away: Pick a URL.

Figure out some interesting topics

You need to have headline ideas that will get people’s attention, so much so, that they want to host your guest post. You have 2 options:

1. Think of your topics and headlines first, then figure out the niche of blogs to target.
2. Figure out the niche of blogs to target, then come up with ideas for headlines

I prefer the 2nd method.

Let’s look at an example to see this in action.

• You have a client in the finance industry that needs backlinks.
• You decide that personal finance blogs will be a great fit.
• Research and read some of the prominent blogs to get ideas about evergreen-type content or very popular topics that come up all the time. You can use Buzz Sumo to see the most shared pieces for a particular topic.
• Come up with a few unique spins on the old, reliable topics.
  • 5 Ways Paying Off Your Student Loans Will Change Your Life
  • 5 Unusual Ways To Pay Off Debt
  • 7 Ways To Eat Out Less (and Not Spend All Day In The Kitchen)
  • 10 Ways Recycling Will Save You Money

Not all of your topic ideas will work, but as you come up with more ideas you will get better at it.

Take Away: Generate several headlines based on researching top blogs

Find blogs that may publish your guest post

This is a matter of running some Google searches with a couple of advanced operators. Brian Dean mentions many, many footprints to use in his guest posting guide, so check out some more if you are interested.

Here are a few of my favorites:

1. Keyword “write for us”
2. allintitle: Your Keyword + guest post
3. Your Keyword “this is a guest post by”

What should you use for the keyword? This is what gave me some trouble in the past. I was using my keyword in the search, instead, use some of the topic ideas. In our example, you search for this:

1. Ways To Pay Off Debt “write for us”
2. allintitle: Ways To Pay Off Debt + guest post
3. Ways To Pay Off Debt “this is a guest post by”

You also want to target active blogs, not ones that haven’t been updated in years. That is simple – you can just filter out the older results by setting the time parameters within your Google search.

Click on Search tools under the search bar.

Then, click on the Anytime drop-down menu.

And you can set the range of dates to ensure you are looking at active blogs.