Landing guest posts is one of your better options, but here is one method that I use which is tedious, but effective. It's a lot better than cold asking for guest posts:
- Write a great article.
- Link to other bloggers in that article.
- Publish the article.
- Go to each blog post you mentioned and leave a comment letting them know you've linked to them, and include a link to the article.
- Grab their Twitter handles while you're on the site.
- Follow the bloggers on Twitter, do a shoutout mentioning them and linking to your post.
This won't guarantee anything but nofollow links (from the comments), but you may get lucky and get a link back from one of the bloggers. What this does do, though, is creates goodwill with these bloggers so asking for a guest post in the future will be a lot more likely to succeed. I usually will do this a few times and comment a few times on other posts before asking. If I have more time and I'm planning my content for the site better, I'll do a slightly modified version that follows these steps:
- Find the articles you want to link to first.
- Follow the authors on Twitter.
- Comment on the article with a good comment.
- Tweet the article (making sure to mention the author)
- Write your article and include your links.
- Comment on the article again letting them know you liked it so much you've linked to them (drop link to article in the comment)
- Tweet out your article making sure to mention the blogger you linked to. (I do one tweet per blogger mentioned. I used to include multiple mentions per tweet, but it didn't engage as well).
This method is very similar to the other one, but it gives you more contact with the authors so asking for a guest post in the future is that much easier. They'll hopefully recognize your name and all of the free promo/interaction you gave before asking. Cold asking for guest posts is hit or miss. This will definitely increase your odds of landing a guest post.
I don't do this for everyone
One important takeaway: this is a lot of effort. Only do it for sites that you actually want guest posts from. I don't ordinarily go for top-tier influencers just because they are inundated with requests and may even have multiple employees handling different areas of their interactions. So, if one employee is handling comments and another is handling social media and another is handling emails from the contact form, then all of my efforts will have been wasted because the person who gets my guest post email will have no idea who I am.
Mid-tier influencers are often handling everything themselves or may only have one employee or a spouse helping out. You are much more likely to land a guest post from someone like this. I'm not saying you can't go for a top-tier influencer, but be prepared to spend a lot more time building up your goodwill with them.
Here is a great eBook about that particular style of outreach:
https://www.yourseosquad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/link-building-debunked.pdf