Guest Blogging: Lessons Learned After Sending 5K Emails

Guest blogging is one of the oldest tricks in the link building book, and despite numerous Google updates aimed to reduce “link spam”, backlinks from high-quality, relevant resources remain one of the strongest SEO ranking factors in 2024 and beyond.

In this blog post, we will be covering:

• What is guest blogging and what are its benefits
• How to easily find numerous guest blogging opportunities
• What are link schemes and how to avoid them

Without any further hesitation, let’s dive straight into it.

Link building cheat sheet

Gain access to the 3-step strategy we use to earn over 86 high-quality backlinks each month.

Download for free

What is Guest Blogging?

Guest blogging (or guest posting) is a very familiar term for most of you reading this. 

If you’re just dipping your toes into link building and SEO, guest blogging is the process of writing and publishing articles on other websites with the goal of acquiring inbound links to your own website, spreading the word about your business, and, of course, increasing referral traffic to your resource.

It is one of the most popular and effective white-hat link building methods, even to this day.

This is because, as long as your content creation is of outstanding quality, your prospect has zero reasons to turn down your pitch.

You get exposure to a new audience along with a nice link or two, while the other person receives a piece of quality content that has the potential of closing a keyword gap for them and generating traffic.

Some websites only allow nofollow links in their guest posts – but that doesn’t mean that they’re useless.

“Nofollow” links are backlinks that do not pass PageRank, also known as “link juice”. 

This means that they do not contribute to your website’s rankings, and are effectively excluded from Google’s algorithm. 

But, as we mentioned, these links are far from useless, as they help with bringing referral traffic to your website and contribute to overall brand awareness.

Benefits of Guest Blogging

Now, let’s take a look at the specific benefits you can expect to reap by becoming a regular guest blogger.

Links and Referral Traffic

The number one reason for guest blogging is, of course, the backlinks that come in the content and the referral traffic that they drive.

Most websites allow only one link back to your website – usually in the author’s bio.

However, some sites allow more external links in the content – as long as they’re contextual. 

This makes guest posts a great way to not only earn links to your own website but also to secure link placements for your partners and set up 3-way, (A-B-C) exchanges.

This doesn’t mean that you must jam-pack your guest posts with dozens of external, exact keyword-match links.
This actually qualifies as a “link scheme” by Google, which we’ll take a closer look at in the next section.

Higher DR/DA

We already mentioned links and PageRank, or “link juice” that they pass on. 

This “link juice” has a direct effect on your website’s Domain Rating/Domain Authority. 

These are metrics developed by Ahrefs and Moz respectively and are used to measure a website’s backlink profile strength. 

While not being official Google metrics, there is a clear correlation between a website’s DR/DA and its rankings on search engines results pages.

In Layman’s terms, more links = higher DR = higher rankings on Google. 

A link or guest post on a high authority site is also more valuable than one from a lower DR resource.

Increased Brand Awareness

While the number one reason why people still publish guest posts is to get high-quality links, the power of guest posts for increasing brand awareness can not be underestimated.

Publishing guest posts in your niche (especially in the top echelon of websites), will slowly gain you more and more articles with your name attached to them. 

If people see dozens of guest posts that are actually helpful and informative written by one person, they will start thinking “Hey, they know what they’re talking about!”. 

Thought leadership – regardless of the niche your business is in, displaying expertise in your niche and helping people with your content is the best way to win them over.

Builds a Network of Connections

Backlinks and traffic are great. 

What’s even greater is the fact that by collaborating with other websites in your niche and writing awesome content for them, you will be slowly building up your connections and relationships, which can be even more valuable.

In the future, these connections can be leveraged for other types of collaborations – not just in terms of publishing content, but co-marketing, running podcasts, co-hosting webinars, and so on. 

Guest blogging is a white-hat link building strategy, but it can also be turned into a shady “link scheme” under certain circumstances. 

Let’s take a look at what they are and how you can avoid them to stay on Google’s good side.

What are Link Schemes and How to Avoid Them?

According to Google, a “link scheme” is any type of collaboration with the goal of manipulating search rankings through acquiring or providing links.

In relation to guest posts, this includes:

• Unmarked paid guest posts
• Guest posts with too many links (also exact-match anchor text links)
• Reciprocal link exchanges

Sites that Ask for an “Editorial Fee”

Paid links are very much a black-hat SEO tactic. 

This, of course, includes paid guest posts.

Whenever you reach out to someone and they ask for an “editorial fee” to publish your content, don’t pay.

The same goes for using low-quality guest posting services such as the following:

This isn’t just because it’s against Google’s guidelines. 

Backlinks from such websites actually hold very little SEO value as they’re typically packed with other links to irrelevant content, and show clear signs of an unnatural outgoing link profile.

However, not all paid links are against the guidelines. 

If you acquire a link or a guest article as part of a sponsored collaboration, and it’s marked with the “rel=sponsored” tag, it’s not in violation of any guest post guidelines.

However, one thing that you should know about sponsored links is that function much like “nofollow” links and don’t pass on any ranking signals. 

To check which rel tags your link has, open the linking page, right-click anywhere, then click on “Inspect”, and then “Console”.

Start typing in your link’s URL, and all of its attributes will be right next to it. 

Guest Posts With Too Many Links

A few links are good. 

Two dozen is too many. 

There is no set-in-stone rule as to how many links are too many, so use your best judgment.

Bigger guest posts can house more links in a contextual and non-cluttered way. 

Another important aspect of outgoing links in your guest posts is their anchor texts. 

You should avoid over-optimizing them to include the exact target keywords of their target pages.

Instead, strive for partial-match and semantic keywords.

Sites That Ask For a Link Back

Reciprocal exchanges (link to me and I’ll link to you) are also considered a “link scheme”.

It is also one of the easiest link scheme types for Google to identify.

When the algorithm sees two mutual links appearing on previously unrelated websites in a short time, it’s a tell-tale sign of a reciprocal link exchange. 

Next, these links are likely completely devalued by the algorithm. 

This means that, most likely, neither site gets any benefits from the link. 

So, while mutual exchanges are a black-hat tactic when done on a small scale, they can’t hurt you either.

They can only become a detriment to your SEO when done excessively. 

A better way to go about this is to do a 3-way, or an A-B-C exchange.

Guest posts are perfect for this, as you can provide your link building partners with links from your content on third-party sites, helping you stay away from reciprocal links.

Step-By-Step Guest Blogging Strategy for 2024 and Beyond

Now, let’s take a look at the exact step-by-step process for securing guest blogging sites for this year.

The first step, is, of course, prospecting – or finding the actual guest blogging website that you want to write for.

Step 1: Prospecting

The next benefit of guest blogging that we want to talk about is just how easy it is to actually find a guest blogging site to submit your content to.

There are three ways to do so:

• Google search “write for us” + your keyword
• Pitch any website that you like through email, even if they don’t have a “write for us” page
• If you’re doing link building outreach for other strategies, pitch a guest post idea after each successful collaboration

All of these methods can be performed with Respona – we will be looking at the exact step-by-step process further down.

The first strategy is pretty self-explanatory. 

The second and third might be surprising – but the reality is that, even if a website does not have an explicit “Write for Us” page, chances are that they are open to receiving a guest contribution anyway.

To avoid spamming, first, look around your target blog and see if there is any content published by a guest author. If there is, jackpot!

Let’s focus on the first one, or finding websites that have an explicit “write for us” page.

We will be doing so with the help of Respona – it comes with all of the necessary functionality to prepare and launch a guest blogging outreach campaign. 

For prospecting, it comes with a search engine that’s powered by both Google and Bing.

To use it, first, you will need to create a new guest blogging campaign.

Once it’s created, the search engine will be at Step 1 – Find Content.

The default mode is an automatic “Web Search” – its results are pulled directly from Google. 

It can run multiple queries at the same time, and supports all of Google’s advanced search operators, which, as you can see, we have used in our example search:

Intext:”digital marketing” intitle:”write for us”

Intext:”digital marketing” intitle:”contribute to”

This tells the tool to only return results that have “write for us” or “contribute to”in the page title and mention digital marketing somewhere in the content. 

This is only one variation of a search. For more useful search operators, feel free to refer to our infographic:

After you hit search, the tool will automatically scrape the web for relevant results, and add them to your outreach campaign.

Of course, you can also review the added pages as well as their Ahrefs Rank and Domain Rating, and remove any opportunities that you deem irrelevant.

Once you have double-checked your prospects, it’s time to move on to the next step.

Step 2: Preparing Your Email Sequence

Your email sequence is the set of emails that will be sent out to each host blogger in your campaign. 

For guest blogging (and any other type of link building campaign), we recommend including two emails in your sequence: the initial pitch and one follow-up.

A common mistake made by junior link builders is sending too many follow-up emails, too often.

One follow-up after 3-5 business days is enough. If you still get no reply after two emails, chances are the person is not interested and any further follow-ups only increase your chances of getting flagged as spam.

Here’s the template we’ve used in our example:

Feel free to use it as inspiration for your own campaigns but make sure to personalize it to fit your own style, and for each prospect in the campaign.

We will show you the exact strategy for hyper-personalizing your guest blogging pitches in Step 4 of this guide.

Notice the words in curly brackets? These are called variables. 

If you insert them into your sequence through the variables button (not just typing them out), they will automatically populate for every single one of your messages on personalization.

Round brackets, on the other hand, indicate areas where manual input is required, as there is no way for Respona to know that information (unless you create custom variables, of course). 

See the yellow button in the top right corner of the text editor? 

Click it, and the tool will estimate your chances of getting a response with your pitch based on the subject and body length, question count, and, of course, spam words.

To add a follow-up email to your sequence, simply click on the “Create new step” button in the bottom left corner of the email editor.

Once you’re satisfied with your sequence, feel free to move to the next step – finding contacts.

Step 3: Finding Contacts

Respona comes with a built-in email finder as well as the ability to connect an account you have with another email finding tool like Hunter, Snov.io, or RocketReach.

Let’s use Respona as our search source.

The contact finder has three search modes:

• Find the writer if they work for the company OR another team member(s)
• Ignore the writer and only find the desired team members
• Only find the writer and ignore other employees at the company

For guest blogging purposes, the first option is recommended. 

For the position fields, let’s enter anything that can be related to content and SEO, including:

• Content marketing
• Partnerships
• Brand
• SEO 
• Blog or site owner

And for seniority, we can do everything from junior personnel all the way up to directors.

At the bottom, you will notice two additional settings: assign catch-all and generic emails if no personal address is found for a prospect.

Catch-all emails are essentially addresses that have not been completely verified, so we recommend keeping that option off.

However, we advise enabling assigning generic company emails like “[email protected]” to increase the success rate of the contact automation.

Once everything is ready, hit the Find Contacts button in the bottom right corner. 

Depending on the size of your campaign, it may take Respona a few minutes to perform the contact search automation. 

All of it is done entirely in the cloud, so you may close the campaign, and start prospecting for another one, for example.

In addition to contact emails, Respona also finds your prospects’ social media profiles, such as LinkedIn. 

When the contact search is finished, you may review its results or even run additional manual searches by domain, name, job title, or even LinkedIn ID.

Once all contacts are assigned, it’s time to move on to the final step of preparing your guest blogger outreach campaign – personalization.

Step 4: Personalization

In this section, we will share a trick that will allow you to hyper-personalize every single one of your guest blogging pitches and make sure what you’re offering to your prospects is enticing.

You can do so by identifying your prospect’s keyword gap and offering to write up a post that will help them cover it.

For this, you’re going to need Ahrefs (or another tool that offers similar functionality).

Open Ahrefs in two tabs and insert your prospect’s domain into both.

In the first tab, click over to Overview > Organic Search (not Overview 2.0), and scroll down until you see the top 10 competitors of your prospect.

Choose two competitors. They can be random.

In the second Ahrefs tab, click over to Content Gap and paste the URLs of the two competitors you’ve chosen.

After you click Show keywords (and set the Intersect filter to two instead of all intersections), you will see all of the keywords that your prospect’s competitors are ranking for but they aren’t. 

The ideal keyword should have a low density (KD) and high search volume. 

Select a couple of keywords and come up with guest blog post ideas around them.

In your pitch, make sure to include the screenshot from Ahrefs to show your prospect that you have actually taken the time to research their website and can help them by covering their keyword gap. 

After all of the personalizations are done, all that’s left is to verify & launch your campaign, wait for replies, and actually start writing your guest posts once replies start coming in!

Link building cheat sheet

Gain access to the 3-step strategy we use to earn over 86 high-quality backlinks each month.

Download for free

Wrapping Up

So, now you know why guest blogging is still going strong in 2024 and what makes it such an effective strategy.

By following the steps outlined in this guide, you will be able to start spreading awareness about your business, establishing thought leadership, and, of course, generating high-quality links.
If you need help with your guest blogging outreach campaigns, don’t hesitate to start your 7-day free trial with Respona and see for yourself just how much easier the entire process becomes with it.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Is guest blogging dead in 2024? 

Guest blogging is far from dead and remains one of the most popular and effective white-hat link building strategies. 

Are nofollow links useless for SEO?

Nofollow links don’t pass ranking signals, so, in terms of SEO, they hold little value.

However, they still work for spreading awareness about your business and attracting new audiences.

Is guest blogging scalable?

Writing great content all the time to get links can get pretty time-consuming, but if you have the capacity (one or more dedicated team members) to manage the guest blogging process from start to finish, it is easily scalable – especially with the help of a tool like Respona.

If you need help actually writing the content, you can hire a guest writer, but make sure that they’re actually knowledgeable about what you want them to write. 

What’s the best way to get guest post opportunities?

In our experience, the best way to secure guest blogging opportunities is actually to not do any separate outreach at all – and take advantage of connections that you have already built while doing link building outreach for other strategies.

Should You Avoid Sponsored Posts?

Sponsored posts will not affect your SEO in any way, but strategic placements on the top sites within your niche can be an amazing way to expose your brand to a new target audience and establish thought leadership.