The Give and Go Guest Post Outreach Method: 25% Conversion Rate

Quick post today to update on a tactic, actually it’s more of a philosophy than a tactic, to successfully jag guest posts on popular blogs.

I’m going to cover;

1. A particular approach we are taking that is getting fantastic results in terms of guest post approval
2. A process for “warming up” your guest post targets prior to asking
3. A specific template that one of our Internship participants used that got a 25% guest post approval rate

Our Approach to Guest Posting

A handful of guest post links gives your site a nice injection of SEO value and they’re a perfect addition to an overall link profile. They’re particularly valuable if you can get them efficiently, which is exactly what we’ve been working on > We’ve largely been testing three ways to get guest posts and we’ve been looking to find (and then refine) the most effective method from;

1. Submitting pre-written guest posts to a sites that accept them. These are sites we have no relationship with. We’re still collating data, but it seems like the approval rate has actually been pretty decent.
2. Done mass guest post outreach campaigns via email where we ask for the opportunity to provide a guest post. Fairly average results to date, but we have more experimenting with templates to do.
3. Building relationships with a bloggers, GIVING something of value to them and then asking for a guest post when the time is right.

No prizes for working out which of 1, 2 or 3 achieves the higher success rate. Option 1 is a bit of a grind (you’re producing content with no guarantee of success, having to wait for approvals, tracking approvals etc) and 2 just feels spammy as hell. Option 3 works better and fells better. It’s genuine.

I struck out the word “tactic” above because this post is not to outline a tactic per se, but actually just a guiding principle for how you can maximize your success when going after guest posts.

And it’s not only a useful approach to maximize the chances of getting your guest posts approved, but anything where you are looking to extract value from another website owner.

The guiding principle is to GIVE first. Then ask.

Frankly, it’s not rocket science, but it is damn effective.

I call it the Give and GO Method.

Give > Give something of value to the target and then do GO, which stands for Guest post Outreach.

It’s the Law of Reciprocity in full swing. When you RECEIVE something form another person you are a heck of a lot more likely to GIVE something of value back.

So what can you “give” to a blogger?

1. A few mentions on social media help. Gael Breton covers this in his free 4 week authority SEO course (follow the link there and you should be able to signup from the right sidebar).
2. Mention your targets in blog posts and link to them. Matthew Woodward covered this in a recent post too. You can create a recommended resource list on your site too.
3. You can comment on their posts.
4. We’ve been doing Content Round-Ups lately to draw attention from bloggers (and also for quick, easy, high-quality content).
5. We’re also doing multiple Expert Round-Up Articles for our new sites as soon as we have 10 blog posts up. They take some time to carry out, but they give a big bang when it comes to traffic, links and connections.

There’s nothing too complex there, it’s just genuine relationship building.

Now for the GO

How to ask for a guest post?

This really depends on how much you’ve given and how warm the relationship is.

We’re using Expert Round-Ups to target all the key bloggers we want a relationship with and our process is to put the ERA together, promote it, and a few days after the post has been flooded with traffic, we thank the contributors and ask at that point for a guest post.

It’s a perfect GIVE:

• They’ve got a link from us so they’re happy (if they understand the value of it)
• They will have had some visits referred to them via the article in addition
• They feel like you value them because you asked for their contribution

The perfect time to ask for the guest post is right now, while they’re pumped with all the YOU have given to THEM. Put the law of reciprocity to use > It’s time to GO!

Two successful guest post request templates:

Below is a guest post request from an Intern, Abel, who was working on one of our sites during the recent January Internship. It’s a sweet template > natural, to the point, very genuine!

Here’s some of the responses (approx 25% success rate so far):

Template for a different site that worked very well:

This approach was a bit of a one-two punch. Amir, our partner in the site, put the ERA together and any bloggers that gave a detailed response were also featured in an individual post. In the end, the Expert Round-Up Article was actually a feature section on the site consisting of the main article + 6 other posts on the topic, all contributed by the bloggers we outreached to.

In this case, Amir went GIVE, GIVE and then further to that, he didn’t ask for a guest post right away.

As you can see in the two emails below, he simply thanks them for their participation and then waited a week before asking for the guest post (by this time he was already hearing back from contributors that they’d received some great traffic).

So rather than GIVE and GO, Amir ultimately went GIVE, GIVE, GIVE and THEN GO.

Amir is still following up, but looks like we’ll get 5-8 guest posts from it in addition to a handful of natural links. Close to 10 niche-relevant links from a single ERA in the end!

There you go, if you’re looking to GET more, start by GIVING more and the results will flow.

Feel free to add any thoughts, comments or questions below > I’d love to hear from YOU.

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