[CASE STUDY] How I Scaled My Guest Posting Campaigns To 60+ Guest Posts a Month

Disclaimer: All methods used in this case study are genuine white hat from manual email outreach. Which means no PBNs, Web 2.0s, spinning software, expired domains, or any other black hat shit.  My methods are derived from Dan Ray’s Link Building ideology and methods as well as Eric Ward. 

Guest Posting, Guest Blogging, Blogger Outreach, or whatever you want to call it is a tried and true legitimate method for building high-quality links back to your website. The benefits of guest posting at scale are it grows your organic search rankings, increases referral traffic, establishes you as the authoritative figure in your niche, and builds awesome relationships with webmasters. 

Now that we know guest posting is a real legitimate method for building powerful relevant white hat links to your website. 

Why do so many people believe Guest Posting is dead?

Just take a look at what the masses have to say… 

The truth about Guest Posting is that it is not as simple as people make it out to be. 

However, if you have a refined process that rakes in the blogger link juice at scale then it is 100% effective.

For the sake of “Proof”, “Evidence”, or whatever else to show you that I know my stuff, here are photos of guest posts that I have recently done.

This screenshot of a guest post below is for one of my sites in the real estate investing niche

Check out this screenshot of an email inbox for replies accepting guest posts, posting guest posts, and offering for me to guest post on their site. All of these sites were in the health niche and we finished this campaign with 200 or so free and paid guest posts.

Alright I am sure you guys have got the point but just in case there is still any doubt, here is a screenshot of my opens and replies for a campaign I did for a startup company. 

Now that we got past the “proof”, “evidence”, or whatever else you want to call it to show you that I indeed do what I say and say as I do.

Let’s jump right into the steps to show you how I scaled my guest posting campaign to 60+ guest posts per month! 

Step 1: Set Your Goals

Every successful marketing campaign begins with setting clear goals and expectations for what the individual or business wants to get out of the campaign. Here are some useful questions I always ask myself before starting any link building campaign:

“What Kind of Impact Will This Have on My Website or Business?”

“What Do I Expect From The Results of This Campaign?”

Typically, the answers are always the same to these questions and here are mine:

• Growing Organic Rankings In The SERPs
• Driving Targeted Referral Traffic That Buys 
• Grow Myself or a Clients Brand and Authority 
• Increase Email Optins and Build Email Lists

Having a goal in mind forces you to mentally commit to achieving that goal. More so, setting goals assists you when you are creating your Bio to be placed in the guest posts.

Step 2: Build Your Prospect List

Every guest posting or link building campaign I use begins with setting up a project tracker which is basically the project planning tool that allows me to effectively record and manage the campaign.

Check it out: 

Now that we have an effective way to manage the campaign at scale and track our progress we need to begin finding relevant prospects. 

There are many different ways that you can find relevant prospects but my method of choice is using Google Search Operators. From my point of view, Google Search Operators are hands down the absolute most efficient and beneficial way of building relevant prospects on demand.

Here are some of my favorites:

For example, you can use intitle:”write for us” to find sites that have a write for us page with guidelines for submitting a guest post.

The most important aspect of a guest posting campaign is finding relevant guest posts from sites that are bridge content to your site. What this means is if you have a site that sells healthcare your bridge content would be doctors, business sites, holistic healing sites, and anything else that involves health but is not directly related to healthcare. 

At this point, most people jump straight to metrics or only DA of “x” sites that have “x” amount of traffic and “x” amount of inbound links.

The truth is metrics are pointless in Googles eyes just ask John Mueller, 

source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/domain-authority/246515/#close 

Now, I am about to give you the two single most important metric signals that you will ever need to determine if a site is worthy of your glorious guest post or not…

Are you ready for this?!?

… 

…

• Relevancy
• Site Traffic

In Googles eyes, these two are the single most important signals to determine if one of your inbound links from a guest post is authoritative and worthy of boosting your organic rankings. 

Of course, these are not the only factors for determining if a site is worthy of your guest post you want to check the quality of the site, the inbound links to the site, signs the site may be in a PBN, check for link farms, and content farms. 

Once you have 200 or so of these highly relevant guest post prospects it is time to move on to the next step.

Step 3: Create an Email Template That Can Be Modified at Scale

To recap we have the project tracker, we have 200 or so relevant targets, and now the next step is to create an email template that we can use at scale.

When you are creating an efficient email template that brings results at scale I like to break down the email template into sections.

Here is an outline:

Hi (First Name),

My name is [Your Name] and I am contacting you from [name of website] the [insert important aspect of your site] (keep this part to 1 sentence no more)

Our [insert business or site name] knows [insert something your site is a master of that is relevant to the site you are pitching]

For this reason, we want to pitch our guest post entitled [insert title] because your website visitors are [insert aspect that is relevant to your title] this article would be beneficial to your readers.

[more topic suggestions if applicable]

Kind Regards,

[insert your name]

[insert title]

[insert phone number]

Now I know what you are thinking this is a lot but the beginning first sentence can be filled out personally by you to apply broadly to all of the prospects you just gathered up. So, this would leave only the second half of the email template to be filled out by you or a team member for each individual prospect, excluding the email sign off/signature. 

Before moving on I want to say DO NOT I repeat DO NOT copy this template word by word unless you want to ruin this for everyone. Instead, rewrite this template in your own words when pitching new prospects. 

The golden rule when creating an email template at scale for a guest post is keeping it short and getting straight to the point while personalizing. This does not mean being funny in your email template although some people may enjoy that. However, if you want to do this at scale, avoid coming off spammy, and do not waste peoples time. You need to keep it short and straight to the point. 

Step 4: Come Up With Title Ideas

The final step in a successful guest posting campaign is coming up with title ideas for guest posts that webmasters actually accept. To find titles that stick simply look through the blog and find what the website does not have. For example, if a site is about online marketing and they cover everything from SEO to Facebook Ads. Go through and look at the section that you have expertise in, if you look in the SEO section perhaps they do not have an article about link building. In cases where they do have an article about link building go deeper into a specific type of link building that they have not covered on their site. 

Once we have established an angle that they are missing we want to look at the types of articles they are posting. Are they posting “How Tos”, Listicles, Case Studies, Guides, or something else? When crafting your title mimic the style of headlines that you see across their blog to ensure they pick up your title. 

Step 5: Implement The System At Scale

At this point, I know what you are thinking this is so much work! “How Am I Supposed To Implement This at Scale Without It Taking Up 40 Hours a Week?” 

The truth is you simply cannot implement this system by yourself you need to hire team members or VAs to run an effective guest posting campaign. This is what I did and actively do to scale my guest posting campaigns to 60+ guest posts per month. 

Here are some hiring tips:

• Use Upwork or Onlinejobs.ph
• Prequalify
• Record Your Process Step By Step In Detail
• Provide Detailed Specific Video Training
• Provided Detailed Specific Written Training
• If They Ask Questions At First This Is Normal and Shows They Care
• Treat People Like People, Be Understanding that they may need time off sometimes and explain they need to give you a notice ahead of time.
• Lay down your expectations beforehand

These are just some of the suggestions to make, I would go into more specific detail but I would have to write an entirely new article because hiring is an entirely different beast. 

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