How to Write the Perfect Guest Post Pitch
This article was originally published as a part of the Smash Digital Inner Circle.
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Finding Guest Posting Sites Is Half of the Battle
Last week I showed you how to find guest posts that haven’t been spammed to death so you can get high authority links that don’t get you penalized in the long-term.
Finding the right sites is only one half of the equation.
We also need them to say yes to our pitch and actually publish our content.
That’s what you’re going to learn today.
Time to learn: 5-10 minutes
Impact (1-10): 10
Tools required: None
Tools suggested: None
Now, let’s get to it…
Crafting a Converting Guest Post Pitch
A quick disclaimer before we proceed…
While the quality of your pitch will make or break your campaigns, guest posting outreach is still very much a numbers game.
There are website owners who never read their emails, have zero interest in any guest posts no matter how good the quality is, and people who get upset at any type of unsolicited emails.
Don’t take it personally and follow the process.
As mentioned in the previous lesson, there’s two main approaches to guest posting:
- Targeting Authority Sites
- Going for Link Volume
We’ll cover pitching strategies for both of these.
How to Pitch High Authority Sites
Higher authority sites (DR60+) tend to be more picky for a variety of reasons:
- There’s a lot more people reaching out to them (most of whom are spammers)
- They’re likely to understand SEO and value quality content
Because of this, you’ll want to ditch any kind of automated processes and write a unique, personalized email for each prospect.
Here are some rules to follow:
- Use their name – if at all possible, include the name of the person you’re reaching out to.
- Introduce yourself – use your full name, mention your website and the role you have, and have a professional looking email signature
- Focus on them – instead of talking about what you want to write about, focus on how they or their audience can benefit from this.
- Avoid sleazy praise – we all get hundreds of outreach emails talking about “how much I love your blog/recent article/website design”. This is not personalization and just screams spam.
- Include social proof – the majority of guest posts are garbage in quality. Include a guest post you’ve done on another high-authority site as social proof and to show that you’re a good writer.
- Prepare topics – make it easy for them to say yes. Include 3-4 article titles that are not clickbaity/too generic. Ensure the website doesn’t already have an article on it.
- Give a reason – why would they want your content? Is it something that they haven’t discussed before? Something that can get them search traffic? An expansion on an article they already have?
Let’s pretend I wanted to reach out to another SEO agency for a guest post on behalf of Smash Digital.
I might write something like this:
“Hey Jonathan,
This is Travis from Smash Digital.
I just saw in the SEO Signals Facebook group that you’ve launched a service for writing SurferSEO optimized content – we’d love to give it a shot on some of our upcoming projects!
On that note, I figured you’d probably benefit from having some supporting content around Surfer for your existing audience – would you be up to collaborate on some content?
Here’s a few post ideas I have after doing some keyword research:
- Surfer SEO Review – Does Correlational SEO Really Work?
- How to Use Surfer SEO to Create Content That Ranks
- Ultimate Guide to TF*IDF Optimization [Step-by-Step]
We’ve created a ton of SEO content on our own blog that has gotten great feedback, you can check out a few examples here:
Let me know what you think and I can have a draft over to you by next week.
Best regards,
Travis Jamison (Smash Digital)
P.S. How did you enjoy TieCON? Our team got invited but couldn’t make it this year”
Now, I’m not actually going to reach out to them but this is meant to illustrate the level of detail and research I’d put into it before sending off an email.
Take a look at their most recent content, try and identify things they could actually benefit from, stalk them on Twitter, and make them feel like you’re at least in the same circles.
If you want to take it a step further, you can try and put yourself on their radar before reaching out by:
- Engaging with them in some form on social media (Twitter follow, Linkedin request, Facebook comment)
- Send an email a week or two before (something to improve on their site, a real compliment on something they’ve done, etc)
- Leave a thoughtful comment on their blog
The point of this is to make sure they recognize your name when you actually reach out.
Pitching to the Masses
Lower authority sites (DR30-50) are a dime a dozen and in most cases don’t have super high standards. Many of them are just excited to get some free content in the first place or to make a new connection that may benefit them down the road.
While the rules from the previous section still apply, you’ll likely want to automate these emails with a template that you can send to hundreds of people at once with a tool such as MailShake.
This is largely a numbers game so focus on the amount of emails sent (as long as they are relevant websites) and keep it short.
Let’s say we have a site about the keto lifestyle, reaching out to sites that have
“Hey NAME,
My name is Travis and I’m the Co-Founder of Ketobook.
I was doing some research on keto recipes and a few of your articles kept popping up.
Dug around the site a little bit and noticed you don’t have much other keto related content on your site. I’d love to share some of my experiences and recipes with your audience.
Here’s a few quick ideas:
- Topic 1
- Topic 2
- Topic 3
Let me know if you’d be interested in collaborating on some of these, we’ve seen similar topics get a bunch of traffic on our own site.
Looking forward to hearing back.
Best regards,
Travis (Ketobook)”
It’s simple, straightforward, and will be a fit for the vast majority of prospects we’d find using the Content Explorer approach covered in the last newsletter.
Depending on your industry, you may want to play around with it a little more and add some personality.
For example, in digital marketing and business, we’ve seen that short and straight to the point templates work the best.
On the other hand, working with mommy bloggers for example, you may want to add a lengthier introduction and create a narrative for your outreach profile.
That’s all from me for this week.
Next week, I’m going to show you who you should be reaching out to and how to find their email address.
Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll see you next week with yet another actionable SEO strategy.
Meanwhile… Let’s Smash it!
