Guest Post Suffering

Hello everyone,

I've been doing blogger outreach for the last couple of months, I've sent around 100 emails and got 2% response rate, the problem I'm facing is that it is either you send generic emails or one single email can take you 30 - 60 minutes of research to figure out a compelling way to approach the website owner.

I haven't been able to land any guest posts from my attempts though I got close, I don't know what to do, how do you get accepted to write guest posts, and is two months of working and not so fascinating results the norm? how to increase my acceptance? should I go with personalization or generic emails? I'm confused and overwhelmed and don't know if I'm going in the right direction or not?

I don't know if I'm wasting time doing outreach but I noticed that my latest emails are better now than the older ones, so what is your advice for me? and is 100 emails within two months a good thing or am I doing something wrong? should I invest this time in building my own castle or am I going in the right direction?

How well tageted is your outreach?

Are these all sites that are known to accept guest posts? If they are just random relevant sites then your success rate will be low..

And how good is your site? Is the content top quality? If not, people won't want you guest posting on their site.

When you reach out, are you offering a payment for posting or asking for a free guest post? I should imagine that will have a big effect on your success. For me personally, when ever I receive outreach emails, if I know they're trying to get it for free or in exchange for the content, then I dont even reply. If it sounds like they might be open to paying a small fee, then I reply and try to negotiate.

As for how you do it, I would say that starting manually is better - like you said, tailor the emails to suit the individual site. That will definitely increase your chance of a response, and also you will learn more about what does and doesnt work this way. Once you get one successfully published post, then you can think about automating it based on what you have learned.

Also, think about the value here - when you do get these posts, assuming they are niche relevant and sites with decent metrics and traffic, each individual link is going to be very valuable to you, so keep that in mind and consider that its going to be worth the effort.

A lot of people are aware of guest posting so I will say it's a total waste of time, if you're not with extra cash to make things work, you would only be beating around the bush.

Try as much as possible to reach a targeted niche and always address with their first name when pitching.

Except you have a topic of real importance. Which mostly work for free in Tech Niche.

Emergence said:

How well targeted is your outreach?

Are these all sites that are known to accept guest posts? If they are just random relevant sites then your success rate will be low..

And how good is your site? Is the content top quality? If not, people won't want you guest posting on their site.

Click to expand...

Tips on doing outreach vary, I've tried blog commenting as a relationship building method at the beginning but found that it even takes longer periods of time, then I've tried cold emailing, it gave me a sense of achieving progress but the results were not so awesome.

I've reached out to a few websites that have a "write for us" page but they all requested money and reached out to other websites that had guest posts but necessarily a write for us.

I haven't reached to my direct competitors on my niche but reached to websites that are related to my niche, I don't know how targeted my outreach attempts were, so what do you mean by that and how can I make my outreach more targeted than what I've done?

davids355 said:

When you reach out, are you offering a payment for posting or asking for a free guest post? I should imagine that will have a big effect on your success. For me personally, when ever I receive outreach emails, if I know they're trying to get it for free or in exchange for the content, then I dont even reply. If it sounds like they might be open to paying a small fee, then I reply and try to negotiate.

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^^ exactly this.

davids355 said:

When you reach out, are you offering a payment for posting or asking for a free guest post? I should imagine that will have a big effect on your success. For me personally, when ever I receive outreach emails, if I know they're trying to get it for free or in exchange for the content, then I dont even reply. If it sounds like they might be open to paying a small fee, then I reply and try to negotiate.

Click to expand...

davids355 said:

As for how you do it, I would say that starting manually is better - like you said, tailor the emails to suit the individual site. That will definitely increase your chance of a response, and also you will learn more about what does and doesnt work this way. Once you get one successfully published post, then you can think about automating it based on what you have learned.

Also, think about the value here - when you do get these posts, assuming they are niche relevant and sites with decent metrics and traffic, each individual link is going to be very valuable to you, so keep that in mind and consider that its going to be worth the effort.

Click to expand...

Kindly merge your posts to one @davids355

In my experience, it's alot about the content and the prospects targeting.

If you will outreach to blogs asking to link to your vaccuum cleaners buying guide, even if they are vaccuum related websites, most chances they will refuse without offering them cash.
You need to find interesting angle, something that is related and that people would want to link to, you can't even imagine the different.

For me, after changing my outreach strategy and working on really high quality content and smart targeting, I'm getting so much better results - some sites even ask to link to the article or to share it on their social media channels before I mention anything about it.

You need to think outside of the box and find interesting angles related to your niche, it doesn't have to take too much work from you. Some of my recent campaign is not so long article, where I didn't even need to do too much research, but it generated more than 20 links (Free only, from real websites with traffic and 10-40 DA) in 1-2 months just because it was really really interesting.

Here is a way to make good use of those 2 % mails. You can sell them as a list or start more blogs in same niche and then use them for each.

davids355 said:

As for how you do it, I would say that starting manually is better - like you said, tailor the emails to suit the individual site. That will definitely increase your chance of a response, and also you will learn more about what does and doesnt work this way. Once you get one successfully published post, then you can think about automating it based on what you have learned.

Also, think about the value here - when you do get these posts, assuming they are niche relevant and sites with decent metrics and traffic, each individual link is going to be very valuable to you, so keep that in mind and consider that its going to be worth the effort.

Click to expand...

So am I going in the right direction? is 100 emails in two months a good progress or should be doing better than that? I've been doing other activites in that period also so it wasn't dedicated only for outreach.

Topiano said:

Kindly merge your posts to one @davids355

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You got me

nodyguy said:

In my experience, it's alot about the content and the prospects targeting.

If you will outreach to blogs asking to link to your vaccuum cleaners buying guide, even if they are vaccuum related websites, most chances they will refuse without offering them cash.
You need to find interesting angle, something that is related and that people would want to link to, you can't even imagine the different.

For me, after changing my outreach strategy and working on really high quality content and smart targeting, I'm getting so much better results - some sites even ask to link to the article or to share it on their social media channels before I mention anything about it.

You need to think outside of the box and find interesting angles related to your niche, it doesn't have to take too much work from you. Some of my recent campaign is not so long article, where I didn't even need to do too much research, but it generated more than 20 links (Free only) in 1-2 months just because it was really really interesting.

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Agree with this as well. Once again, for some of my niche sites I get outreach emails coming in, and it stands out like a saw thumb when they haven't bothered to look at my site, and they're asking if they can post about something that might be in the same broad niche, but clearly isn't targeted towards my site. Once again, with these emails I don't even reply.

nodyguy said:

In my experience, it's alot about the content and the prospects targeting.

Click to expand...

How to get better at targeting?

karimmo96 said:

So am I going in the right direction? is 100 emails in two months a good progress or should be doing better than that? I've been doing other activites in that period also so it wasn't dedicated only for outreach.

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Its OK. I wouldn't worry too much about that number. I would focus on the highest quality. As you can read from the other replies, the key is really in how well you are targeting these prospects. Do the next 100 and think more about each one; try suggesting some article ideas that are very well targeted to their sites, test out some different subject lines and first sentences (Thats about as much as anyone will read before they decide whether its junk or not) and hopefully you can double your response rate for the next 100.

Also, think about the value of these links, and the value of the time it takes you to send out those 100 mails. If you got 1 link out of that 100, would that be value for money for you?

davids355 said:

If you got 1 link out of that 100, would that be value for money for you?

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I don't really know, I need people coming into my website so it's either this or social media I guess. I don't know if I only kept writing for my website -after doing proper keyword research- will it ever work or not?

karimmo96 said:

How to get better at targeting?

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You just really need to think who will be interested in your content.

For instance, lets say you have a website about mattresses and want to get some outreach links.
Now, just oureaching to related websites and asking to link to you cool mattresses buying guide, won't do well.

What I would do is getting an interesting article related to sleep or maybe sleep problems (just quick idea from my head), then outreach to sleep-related/improvement websites.

I will run tons of related KW on SB, and then filter the list something similar to this:
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/t...guest-posting-crazy-ranking-for-free.1043635/

And walla, you got an interesting article and interested prospects

karimmo96 said:

I don't really know, I need people coming into my website so it's either this or social media I guess. I don't know if I only kept writing for my website -after doing proper keyword research- will it ever work or not?

Click to expand...

Keep doing exactly what you are doing then, in that case. The outreach is definitely a good thing. Like I said, when you do get those links, they're going to be invaluable. Especially if you are looking for sites with traffic as well. Its going to have benefits for you in terms of SEO and also in terms of driving traffic.

Keep doing the social as well, and keep doing the keyword research + building content. You know this stuff takes time and dedication, but it will work.

Write a 2000+ word post before you contact them. Then they can check what you have to offer. A stranger asking them to post something on their site feels risky to them. So by writing the post beforehand and putting it in an attachment, they know EXACTLY what they are getting into. In other words, this allows you to take 95% of the risk out of the equation for them.

I think it might help if you offer money, and be more honest about why you want to guest post / have a link included on their website.

I am a blogger and professional writer, but for the first few years after starting my blog, I knew almost nothing about SEO. I understood including keywords you want to rank for, and obviously I wanted other people to link to my website for the traffic, but I didn’t know that Google cared about backlinks for ranking purposes.

After my blog was going for a couple of years, I started getting emails from people asking to guest post or place a link to their website. I didn’t understand why they wanted to do this, since it’s a personal blog about my life experiences as a person from a minority group with a popular hobby/interest. Finally, I ended up asking about the strange emails in a Facebook group for bloggers from my group, and someone explained it to me. But they didn’t explain that I could get paid by these people, so I didn’t start monetizing in that way until much later. Many people in my minority community don’t monetize their blogs, and even fewer know about selling backlinks.

Also, check your niche to see if the blogs you're contacting would actually want your content. Most of the link and guest post requests I receive relate to my interest, because there’s a lot of money in that particular industry. However, a lot of their content isn’t really usable by people from my group, which frankly is why my blog is popular -- people like me won’t find what they need on mainstream sites. I don't promote things my readers can’t use just for the money. I would be much more likely to accept links and guest posts from businesses relevant to my minority community but unrelated to my interest.

Once you get into SEO world, I think it’s easy to assume that everybody knows about this stuff, but honestly, many people don’t. But cash is the universal language, so offering money and explaining why guest posts help you might be the best way to go.