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The $200,000 Outreach Strategy
If you keep doing what everyone else is doing, you’re going to have the same results as everyone else.
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Chapter 9 – Simple Tip & Tricks to Super Charge Your Guest Posts.....71
Chapter 9 is dedicated to getting every last inch of value out of your links. We’ll look at some simple
ways to get more exposure – more comments, more shares & more SEO benefit out of each & every link
you place.
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This is Scrapebox…...................................................................................................................................................17
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This guide is for those of you who are looking for a predictable & reliable method of building high quality
links & have a decent budget to play with. This applies for those of you working in agencies, who are
looking for a scalable link building strategy to sell to your clients each month. It is also suitable for
those of you who are serious about link building.
You either pay with your time or you pay with your wallet, there is no such thing as free traffic.
This guide is going to show you how to use blogger outreach as a predictable & sustainable source of
relevant & high quality links. It’s up to you to decide if this strategy is right for you & your clients.
You need to be realistic & understand that although no one really admits to it, purchasing links is what
drives a huge portion of the professional SEO industry. Real white hat link building is very much hit
& miss. Clients want results, they don’t want to hear “we’re going to spend $5,000 on this idea, we’re
pretty sure it’s going to get a few links…”
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to increase their rankings in Google – not to mention my own personal successes using guest posts,
which I can’t specifically reference for obvious reasons.
In my opinion, guest posts work very well and can be a viable part of any link building campaign, just
don’t make it the only part of your link building campaign, you need to diversify your link building efforts
& build a natural looking backlink profile.
Over the years, he has systematically outlawed nearly every link building tactic in our arsenal. Explaining
that “any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google” are breaking Googles
terms of service & we could potentially be deindexed if we take part in such practices.
Although, even after penguin, panda, pigeon & a whole host of other animals, you can still find recent
case studies of people who are able to spam their way to the top of Google.
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I’m not suggesting they can’t detect paid links, I’m just saying not to the extent that they would have you
believe. This is why they ask the community to report the paid links of their competitors and voluntarily
disavow their own paid links.
Google constantly spreads their propaganda that if you buy links, you’re going to get punished. They
make a large public display of this every few months, making an example of sites like MyBlogGuest.
com, RapGenius.com, JCPenny.com, etc, to put the fear of god into us.
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It’s rare to get a client who is understanding & patient enough to do what it takes to legitimately earn
100% white hat links. Who is honestly interested in linking to a crane hire company or a bank? I’m not
suggesting it can’t be done, but with the budget & time constraints that we’re usually facing, we need a
scalable method of building high quality, relevant links each month.
I work with monthly budgets in the tens of thousands and if you read through this guide, I can show
you how to scale your guest posting to professional levels & compete with the biggest brands in your
industry.
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We want to focus on real blogs who can give us high quality links.
I’ve dealt with most of these services in the past & I can assure you that you’re better off doing your own
outreach. These services don’t have the same quality standards that are required for successful link
building. (Ask to see some sample blogs, keeping in mind that they’re putting their best foot forward.)
Outreach services are usually one small step above a public blog network. Their blogs have no real
audience & their backlink profiles consist of directory submissions & free blogging platforms.
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You can see that the $200 guest post has far more & much better quality links. Even though the $30 link
may have a DA of 30, you’re not going to get any benefit from appearing on that blog. I’ve compared the
same 2 URLs below using ahrefs:
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UPDATE FOR 13th AUGUST 2014: Google recently updated their webmaster guidelines to
mention “low-quality guest blog posts” are considered on par with scraped content. What does this mean
to us? It means that more than ever you need to stop using cheap & easy guest posting opportunities.
Take the time to find quality targets – we want relevant & exceptional blogs. This is exactly what you
will learn in this guide.
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Chapter 2
How to Identify a Google-Safe Link Opportunity
There are thousands of blogs out there that have been created specifically to sell guest posts to
unsuspecting SEO’s & they’re total crap. They have boring content, generic WordPress themes &
abysmal back link profiles.
These sites will not help boost your rankings & are a total waste of your money.
The main factor I look for when I’m guest posting is whether or not the blog is a real site. Do they have
a real audience who are actively engaged in the site? This means I’m looking for COMMENTS and
SOCIAL SIGNALS - Is their audience commenting & sharing the content on that blog?
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Everything else should fall into place if the site has a real audience
Authority blogs have a real audience for a reason, because they have enough real links & social signals
to rank for a lot of phrases. This means Google already trusts them and is sending them a decent
amount of traffic & getting a link from them will help pass some of that authority onto you.
Judging a blogs SEO strength on a metric like page rank or domain authority alone is flawed. These
metrics can be artificially inflated with surprisingly little effort. I do use them as a rough guide, but I
will ultimately make up my own mind as to whether or not a blog is appropriate.
I will sometimes let a lack of comments slip if I see evidence of REAL social sharing. This means that
there is a regular audience & we may be able to coerce a comment out of them with some engaging
content.
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Make sure you read some of them, spotting spammy comments is dead easy.
You need to be aware of fake social engagement. If every post on a blog has exactly the same number of
shares & tweets on each post or an unusually high numbers of shares, tweets, etc. These are both red
flags & would warrant further investigation into a sites legitimacy.
I generally don’t waste my time assessing the backlink profile of every site I deal with, there just aren’t
enough hours in the day. This is the general quality control check list I try to adhere to:
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This is Scrapebox…
Once in a blue moon there comes along an SEO tool that make you wonder what you did before you
discovered it. Scrapebox is that tool. I use Scrapebox almost every day, I’m constantly finding new
ways to use it & functions I didn’t know it had.
It’s a SEO Swiss army knife & should be a part of everyone’s arsenal, if you don’t have a copy of
Scrapebox yet, it’s only $97 for a lifetime license – you need to purchase it right now. It’s the backbone
of everything I am going to teach you in this guide.
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We’re going to use Scrapebox to enter specific queries into Google, make massive amounts of searches
& record the results so that we can identify thousands of relevant blogs to place links on.
I’m not going to make this an introductory course to Scrapebox, many SEOs before me have already
done this. The more you learn about it, the more uses you will find for it, so it’s definitely worth your time
doing some research. At the very least, I recommend Jacob Kings Scrapebox tutorial and you can find
some extra training videos here.
If you’re reading this, I’m assuming you’re at an agency level or at least a serious SEO, so loosen the
purse strings & get some private proxies.
You can get 10 private proxies for $20 a month from buyproxies.org - these guys are great & I can’t
recommend them enough. Their proxies are super-fast & if you manage to kill any of them, they will
usually replace them within a few minutes if you email their help desk.
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We are going to enter a query string into Scrapebox. It will then search Googles index for blogs that
feature these footprints.
Most guest posting guides recommend you enter their massive list of “guest post” variations into
Scrapebox, alongside your main keyword. This approach is far too broad & is generally a waste of your
time. While it will give you a few decent opportunities, 95% of what it will turn up is pure rubbish & 5%
will be the same blogs everyone else is using.
If you keep doing what everyone else is doing, you’re going to have the same results as everyone else
We’re concentrating on generating a laser focused list of real opportunities. To increase our productivity,
we only want to use a very strict set of search modifiers. This will greatly increase the likelihood that we
will find real blogs actively involved in guest posting.
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Your query string will eventually look like this once it has been put together:
This is the footprint on a blog that indicates they’ve already placed a guest posts and would (hopefully)
be open to posting more. Simply using a broad footprint, like “guest post” on its own will return a lot of
irrelevant results, this phrase it far too common to be a reliable footprint.
We’re going to rely on a super strict set of footprints. The trick here to use advanced search modifiers
like “inurl” & “intitle”, which specifically searches the URL & the page title for footprints - instead of the
entire page, which will give us a lot of false positives.
Copy & paste the list below in a notepad file and save it somewhere on your computer.
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You will also need to give Scrapebox a keyword so that you find blogs relevant to your industry.
The trick here is not to use simple head terms. For instance, if you’re looking for finance blogs – a bad
keyword would be “money” or “credit cards”. You are going to scrape up a lot of irrelevant blogs that
feature these words because they’re so common.
You want to enter long tail phrases. Use industry specific terms that only relevant blogs would feature.
The more technical your keyword selection, the more relevant your targets will be – not too specific or
you won’t get any results.
This will omit any of the crappy general interest & mommy blogs that may mention finance related
terms in a post about their kids lunch “money”.
I usually scrape with a list of 20 keywords at a time. Paste them into a notepad document & save it
somewhere on your computer.
Here’s a trick to find a lot of great long tail keywords very easily:
1. Find a top 10 blog in your industry
3. Instead of a entering a keyword, enter the blogs URL into the planner. This will scan that
blog & give you a set of keywords that are relevant to its content.
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4. Use some common sense - scroll down the list, looking for long tail & industry specific
phrases.
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We’re going to include a footprint that will increase the quality of your scrape & ensure you’re finding
blogs with a real audience. We’re going to use the presence of comments as an indication that the blog
has an audience.
When a reader comments on a blog post, most WordPress templates list the number of comments that
the article has accumulated. This is a footprint that we can scrape.
Using this footprint means that we’re only going to scrape up blogs that have comments on their posts.
Create another notepad document listing numbers of comments, like this:
yy 1 comment
yy 2 comments
yy 3 comments
yy 4 comments
yy Etc
Make a list of comment footprints & save it in a notepad document somewhere on your computer.
This means that now your Scrapebox search string will look something like this when we put it all
together:
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Open up your copy of Scrapebox - for now we’ll be working in the top left window – the Harvester. Copy
& paste your long tail keywords in there – I usually work with a list of about 20 at a time. Don’t forget
to wrap each keyword inside quotes.
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You now want to add the guest post footprint variations that I listed earlier. Press the “M” in the top left
on Scrapebox & navigate your way to where you saved this file – this will combine each keyword with
each guest post footprint, giving you hundreds of variations (20 keywords x 41 guest post footprints).
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You can see in the screenshot above, we have now jumped from 20 keyword variations up to 820 keyword
variations.
Now we need to add our comment footprints. You should have already saved these in a notepad document,
once again press the M button & import these.
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You can see that we now have 32,800 keyword variations that we will be scraping with. This is going to
take a while to scrape.
Depending on how many Queries & the type of proxies you have, it could take 12+ hours (I’ve seen
Scrapebox take 36+ hours on a single scape). Because of this, you might want to run Scrapebox on a
spare computer, or perhaps rent a VPS to do all your scraping on.
Scrapebox Settings
There is a lot of debate over the best settings to use here in Scrapebox, but this is what I go with. I only
choose to scrape Google & omit Yahoo & Bing. This will ensure that any blog we scrape up is already
in the Google index. I only scrape the first 500 results – you can choose to scrape up to 1,000, but you
generally get a lot of rubbish after the first 500.
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This means that for each query string, Scrapebox will check the first 500 results in Google – it’s going
to check the first 500 results 32,800 times (this is why we use a bunch of private proxies).
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Now run the option for “Remove Duplicate Domains” – this is much more unforgiving and will often cut
your scrape down by 95% or more.
yy .edu
yy .gov
yy wordpress.com
yy weebly
yy blogspot
yy tumblr
yy Blogger
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yy Typepad
yy SquareSpace
You can either do this via excel, or there is a function in Scrapebox, which is a little more time consuming.
Under “Remove/Filter” choose “Remove URLs Containing…”
These higher quality sites are less likely to be selling guest posts, so we won’t waste our time contacting
them. You could even remove PR 5’s - depending your results, it’s worth seeing how they respond to
your offer & adjust your strategy accordingly.
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I don’t remove any low page rank sites, since PR is such an unreliable metric these days. We will
remove any low DA blogs instead, which still isn’t a perfect solution, but we’ve got to work with what’s
available.
A lack of any social signals is a pretty good indicator that a site is not worth your time. Yes, of course
social signals can be faked, but we’re still going to use this as one more metric to further refine our list.
Go to the “Addons” drop down & click on the “Scrapebox Social Checker” (you will have to install this if
you haven’t already)
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Click on “Check Domain Only”, this will check the homepage of the site & not just the URL.
Let this addon run through every URL in your list. You can now remove any site that doesn’t have any
social signals associated with it.
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I usually remove all sites with only a single like & share as well, this is usually just the blog owner giving
their content a boost & is not an indicator of a real audience.
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I usually delete anything with a DA of less than 15 & higher than 70. This ensures that we are not
wasting our time with any super low quality sites or any sites that are too high quality & are less likely
to respond to us. You can adjust these limits to suit your strategy – I have landed a few DA 80+ sites
before, but these are definitely the exception to the rule.
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You want to check that the homepage is indexed in Google & not the URL that you scraped up. A page
not in the index isn’t an issue, but if an entire site is missing, then that’s a deal breaker.
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Use the “Trim to Root” button & then “Remove Sub Domains”, to give you the top level URL.
Go over to the right hand side of Scrapebox & run the “Check Indexed” function. Remove anything that
isn’t in the Google index.
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What we’re looking for here are relevant blogs that have broad keywords in their URL or title as an
indication of relevance. ie super broad keywords like credit, money & investment would be suitable
for the finance industry.
The following 2 search strings will search the page title & URL for footprints:
yy inurl:
yy intitle:
yy “guest post”
yy “sponsored post”
For instance, if we go with the finance example again & add the word “money” into this search string,
along with our quality indicator footprint:
This will find blogs with the keyword “money” in their URL and who feature the words “guest post”
somewhere on their site:
yy http://allthingsfinance.net/personal-finance-blog-guest-posts/
yy http://www.freemoneyfinance.com/
yy http://myfabfinance.com/guest-post-save-money-workout-clothes/
yy http://mymoneycounselor.com/
yy http://www.frugalhoney.com/2014/07/guest-post-how-to-be-more-money-savvy.html
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yy http://financialmethods.org/2009/05/choosing-a-rewards-card-to-make-money-a-guest-
post-from-ask-mr-credit-card.html
PROTIP:
you can even take this a step further & search for a string like:
Get creative, this approach can be particularly powerful, but is extremely specific. This shouldn’t be
your only strategy to find targets, since not all blogs will use such a Scrapebox friendly URL structure.
Don’t forget to check for social signals, DA, etc to ensure you’re only contacting suitable targets.
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Find a blog offering guest posts in your industry – we’ll call this “Target A”.
Find out what footprint “Target A” uses to label their guest posts, failing that, you can just use the
phrase “guest post”. You can see in the screenshot below, where we found the footprint “this is a guest
post from”
Now we’re going to use Scrapebox to quickly scrape up every guest post on “Target A”.
In our example, “Target A” is the blog Get Rich Slowly so our footprint would be:
This will limit our search to getrichslowly.org & give us every page that the phrase “this is a guest post
from” appears on – every guest post on “Target A”.
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You can see below that we now have 289 guest posts on “Target A” that we can reverse engineer
Export the list to excel so it’s more manageable & start visiting each URL to see who each guest post
belongs to. You can outsource this to a virtual assistant for a few dollars – more on this later.
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We now have a list of your competitors, who have purchased a guest post on “Target A”.
We want to find out where else they’ve purchased guest posts, so we can post there too.
I’m assuming that you all have access to a link analyser: Open Site Explorer, Majestic and ahrefs are the
most popular. Matthew Woodward did a recent comparison of all the major link assessment tools and
ahrefs came out on top, so if you need to purchase one, check them out first.
Grab the URL of one of the sites (we’ll call them “Competitor A”) who purchased a guest post on “Target
A” & enter it into your link checker to reveal every referring URL to “Competitor A”. Export this to excel.
Now grab that that list of “Competitor A’s” backlinks and paste it into Scrapebox & remove duplicate
URLs
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The Scrapebox Page Scanner scans the HTML of a URL looking for any phrase that you specify. In this
case, we’re going to tell it to scan every back link of “Competitor A” & find every URL that mentions the
phrase “guest post”.
This will give us every (identifiable) guest post “Competitor A” has purchased.
I’m not going explain exactly how to use the page scanner, you can watch a quick video here.
I tell the page scanner to search for the following phrases, you can add more variations if you want:
yy guest post
yy sponsored post
yy guest author
yy write for us
yy contribute to our blog
Now Load the URLs from the Scrapebox harvester & hit “Start” (leave it at 25 connections)
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Once the page scanner has finished you will have a list of every backlink that features a guest post
footprint, or every guest post “Competitor A” has purchased.
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Export your results & paste the relevant URLs back into Scrapebox. Now you can run your quality control
factors again – look for social signals, minimum DA, indexed in Google etc.
In our example above, we were left with 93 guest post opportunities that we can now contact.
Repeat this on every site that has purchased a guest post on “Target A” (Get Rich Slowly) & you’ll
soon have a super targeted list of real guest post opportunities. Ie – run down the list & do this for
“Competitor B”, “Competitor C”, “Competitor D”, etc
PROTIP:
Did you just get sent a massive list of URLs from a link broker? You
can also use the page scanner to check massive amounts of URLs for
bad neighbourhoods. Ie – links to payday loans & pharmaceuticals.
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The best place to find cheap labour for a simple task like this is Upwork.com. You want to post a job for
an Email Assistant or a Virtual Assistant. I have found that females from the Philippines make the best
VA’s for email outreach.
You will want to hire multiple assistants & test them out for a few hours of outreach to find yourself a
reliable VA. Remember that you need to hire fast & fire even faster. If someone isn’t working out, it’s
usually not worth your time giving them one on one training, just hire someone else.
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Now sort through the freelancers, inviting any females from the Philippines to apply for the job. After 24
hours, you should have plenty of suitable applicants to choose from.
From my experience, a decent VA will spend an average of 4 minutes to assess & contact each site -
that’s 15 sites per hour.
Cut them some slack if it’s the first week you’re working together. A new VA will generally get better at
a task as they get more experience.
PROTIP:
you can hire a project manager to manage all your VA’s as well as
handle all the responses from your outreach efforts. It extremely
difficult to find someone reliable & train them up to the stage where
they can work completely autonomously, but depending on your
needs, it could be worth the headache in the long run.
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If Google thinks you’re a spammer, a lot of your emails will go directly to the junk folder.
We’re going to be setting up a fake site very soon too, so bite the bullet now & buy some web space.
You can now set up a new email address for each VA. This will let you monitor their performance & the
quality of each scrape.
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PRO TIP –
use a websites contact form instead of your email account whenever
you can. This will ensure you get around as many spam complaints as
possible. I don’t like to send my outreach template out from an email
account more than 30 to 50 times in 24 hours. But you can email via
contact forms all day long.
If this happens, you will have to set up shop with a new host & create all new email accounts.
PRO TIP –
add an unsubscribe option to your outreach template, something like
“reply with the word REMOVE to unsubscribe” – this just might save
you from a few spam complains & every single complaint against you
counts!
yy dave@yourdomain.com
yy bob@yourdomain.com
yy jim@yourdomain.com
The best way to monitor your VA and all of the responses they’re generating, is by setting up a dedicated
email management program to host all of these email accounts in one place. I use thunderbird for this
– Thunderbird is Mozillas answer to Outlook, it’s free & it works great.
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Create a step by step document that shows your VA exactly what they need to do to set up their own
version of Thunderbird. Use screenshots & be very specific, give them copy & paste settings. This way
you can just forward this document onto any new VA’s that you hire.
Even though we scraped up a super targeted list, there is bound to be some rubbish in there, it’s just the
nature of scraping on such a massive scale.
You will want to create an outreach document that you can give to all new VA’s. This doc will explain the
task. It will show them exactly how to perform outreach & what to look for when assessing a blog. It
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will make hiring new VA’s extremely easy as you can just hand them the training doc – bonus points for
creating a video instead of a document & uploading it to YouTube.
I only give my VA’s the most simple of tasks. Their only instructions are:
We have a fair idea of how Google categorises websites. When you set up Google Analytics, you’re asked
which category your site fits into. These are the options you’re given to choose from:
Which is the closest fit for your site? I don’t see any insurance category, but I do see finance.
I don’t tell the VA to keep an eye out for spammy industries – payday loans, Viagra, casino, adult, etc, I
will do this myself in the final assessments of the site, this will keep their task that much more simple.
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It doesn’t have to be fantastic & it doesn’t have to rank. It’s just a shell so that if any curious bloggers
want to find out who they’re dealing with (a good indicator of a genuine blog), you seem like a legitimate
entity.
Here is what I’ve been using recently. It’s deliberately ambiguous & ugly as sin, but it serves its purpose.
You can see I didn’t even bother adding a custom logo or any content whatsoever.
It does give me an excuse to be emailing the blogger though. Keep in mind that 95% of bloggers won’t
even bother checking you out.
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PROTIP:
at the bottom of your outreach template, add a signature that
mentions your title, contact details & URL. This adds that little bit
more authenticity to making you seem like a real person & not a
spammer. You get bonus point for adding an online phone number, but
this is generally unnecessary.
praditha.p111@gmail.com
Ben Benson
Head of Customer Relations
M: Ben.Benson@your-domain.com
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W: www.your-domain.com
Some people will tell you that you should reference their blog, tell them how much you enjoyed reading
it, etc – I’m here to tell you that no one cares.
Think about how many unsolicited emails you receive each day. If someone sends you a wall of text, will
you read it? Of course not. Do you believe it when a complete stranger gives you a complement? Hell no.
The best thing you can do for your prospect is to take up as little of their time as you can & get straight
to the point.
This is the template that I use, feel free to copy it, although you should probably rewrite it & give it your
own spin:
Template:
Hello _______________,
Are you able to let me know the different advertising options you offer? We’re specifically interested in
guest posts.
YOUR NAME
This template accomplishes a few things. From the subject line “Advertising on BLOG NAME”, they can
tell that this is an advertising inquiry & will not ignore our email if this is something they offer. If they
read on we also mention that we’re after guest posts, so they can reply with their pricing & guidelines
if they want to participate.
Personalisation is important when performing outreach. If you can find out the bloggers name, use it. I
instruct the VA that if they can’t find it within 30 seconds, to forget it & skip the name.
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Mention the name of the blog you’re contacting in your template, ensure you capitalise it appropriately.
If you’re not careful, you could potentially open your client up to having their name dragged through the
mud. I’m happy to reveal the industry before I mention the client, but I generally play my cards pretty
PRO TIP –
Some bloggers won’t need to approve the clients site before agreeing
on a post. This is potentially a red flag. It’s not a deal breaker, but a
real blog will want to ensure some form of quality control. This goes
for the article title too, if they don’t want to approve the title they will
be posting on their site, you should be concerned that they will post
any old crap they’re given.
PRO TIP –
Whenever you finish placing a guest post with a new blogger, ask
them if they can recommend any other bloggers they know who
may be interested in a similar agreement. Nothing beats a personal
recommendation & you never know if someone owns numerous blogs
or is in a particular community of bloggers.
your first email, so give them a couple more chances to respond. If I haven’t heard from after the third
attempt, I leave them alone for good.
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My average cost per post, over 1,000 guest posts, is $167 + article cost – keep in mind I have large
clients with massive monthly budgets & I can afford to spend money on quality blogs.
Each blogger will have their own idea of what their site is worth, these guys are generally very
misinformed about SEO & the average cost will vary from industry to industry.
Ask the blogger how much they want to place a post that you provide – some will ask you for a quote.
I usually don’t pay more than $300 USD per link, that’s just my personal rule, although I have broken
this rule occasionally in the past when I’ve come across some fantastic opportunities.
If in doubt, low ball them & gauge their reaction from there. You can negotiate with the blogger & most
will give you some wiggle room to save a few bucks, but keep in mind that this will take up more of your
time.
2. Can we place our links in the body content (not in a resource box)?
not a deal breaker, but you will be very low on my list of preferred targets when I’m
allocating my budget for the month
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not a deal breaker, but it’s preferable that those words don’t appear on the page
6. Are you able to promote this post via your social media platforms?
Some bloggers will do this for free, some won’t do it at all, some will want more money for
this service – ask. Any social media attention is good.
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You’re going to want to add links to 3rd Party Sites in your guest post – leave everything followed, or
else it will raise more of a footprint than if your article only contained your link.
Adding relevant links to your post will help disguise your paid link efforts & also indicate to Google that
you your site is associated with these authority sites, since your link accompanies them so often.
When I say you should be adding links to authority sites, I’m not talking about Google.com or Wikipedia.
org. I’m talking about authoritative in your industry, not to the internet.
For instance, if I was looking for authority sites in the automotive industry, I would include links to car
manufacturers & popular car blogs:
yy www.ford.com
yy www.toyota.com
yy www.autoblog.com
yy cars.ebay.com
The whole idea is to disguise your link & give it authenticity, so we’re surrounding it with industry
heavyweights. You could even add links to other relevant industry websites that aren’t in direct
competition with you.
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ie, if you’re a mechanic, add links to car detailers & car rentals. You will be providing free links for these
guys, so it’s up to you if you want to take this step or work out a deal with a bunch of related businesses
in your industry. Don’t include in the same links in every guest post because this will create a footprint.
Their guest post will feature a link to siteB.com & also link to supporting sites, including a link to their
real site – SiteA.com. This means that if the blogger wants to label the guest poster “this is a guest post
from SiteB.com…” – their client gets off squeaky clean, since they are not actively taking part in a guest
post & only being used as a reference.
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You can use a similar strategy with your guest posts to protect your clients site.
By building paid links to your super white hat links, you will still be passing the lions share of the
authority to your client, but you’ll have the extra layer of protection from the big G.
I’ve used this strategy successfully in markets where I can’t find any decent guest post opportunities.
ie, if a client only wants com.au links, but they don’t exist, we can create a few legitimate links on low
quality comn.au domains, then concentrate our guest posting efforts on these URLs.
It’s not an ideal situation, but sometimes it’s still the best option.
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Coming up with an interesting & engaging article title is another crucial step in guest posting. We want
to write about topics that demand the reader clicks, comments & shares out content.
Do you notice a pattern emerging? That’s right, they’re all deathly boring. Not one of these are going to
get the click, let alone a share or a comment. You can find some inspiration at Ezine, but it’s generally
not the best use of your time.
To come up with predictably engaging content topics, we’re going to reference Brian Deans Skyscraper
Technique to help identify proven linkable assets.
In the Skyscraper Technique, Brian outlines how to identify predictably popular content to create your
own link bait. We’re going to borrow some of these ideas to come up with article titles, since we’re going
to be treating our guest posts as a type of link bait.
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Click the “top pages” tab to reveal the popularity metrics for every page in the site. You can
now sort by number of inbound links, Facebook likes, etc, to determine which page has the
most popular content.
This will show you exactly which topics people like to share & link to. This is a perfect
indicator that people want to read more about that topic & you should create your own
version for a guest post.
2. Topsy
Topsy.com is a site designed to help you find content that has already been shared in your
industry. Start by entering the industry you’re in:
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You’re now able to sort by links, tweets or any other metric you want to use to determine popularity.
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Search for “popular finance infographics” (or whatever industry you’re working in) to reveal
pieces of content that have already proven themselves to be popular.
Alternatively, you can head over to some of the popular infographic directories & check out
their top rated offerings.
I’ve had great success incorporating things like zombies, James Bond, the Kardashians, etc
into my articles. The trick is to actually present a well thought out & professional argument
to go along with the ridiculous title. ie:
- “Calculating a life insurance policy for the crew members on Deadliest Catch”
The trick to coming up with a good title is making sure it’s unique & specific. It should take a particular
stance & evoke a reaction from the reader.
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You usually only have 500 words, so tackle 1 specific idea & say something different or unique.
The reader should actually learn something from reading your article, they should walk away with some
actionable information.
Paddy Moogan gives some great advice in his link building guide, in reference to coming up with link bait
ideas:
“Set a timer for 10 minutes, go & find 10 people who will care about
your content…”
What he’s saying is, Will anyone really want to read your article? Is it genuinely helpful and/or interesting?
If you can’t honestly answer yes to these questions, read through the above paragraphs & start again.
You will have to spend some money here since talented writers are not cheap.
The one trick you must know to find the best writers
The thing you need to realise about finding decent writers is that all the best ones are already working
& most likely not looking for more work – you need to reach out to them.
Both Guru & Upwork.com have a search function where you can look for suitable applicants.
You can find writers from $10 to $100+ per 500 words. You generally get what you pay for, although
there are bound to be a few exceptions. I generally try to pay no more than $60 per 500 words.
Below is a screenshot from Upwork.com. I’ve used the “Find Freelancers” page, specifying the following
options:
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You can now go through this list of writers & invite them to apply for your job. I like to invite 20 to 30 to
begin with. See how many respond, read their samples & take it from there.
An employee who feels apprecaite is more likely to go the extra mile to deliver their best work for you.
I like to keep a team of at least 3 or 4 writers working for me at all times. This ensures that I’m never
left in the lurch without a writer to turn to.
You can create a training document (or video) to give to all new writers, explaining to them exactly what
you’re looking for. Be clear about the voice you want them to take, give plenty of examples, etc. Get them
to link to their research (3rd party links) throughout the article.
Ensure that they always write for humans and not for SEO. We don’t care about keyword use, keyword
density, etc.
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Blog Commenting
I’m not talking about spamming here & I’m definitely not suggesting you blog comment to build links.
We want to leverage the traffic other popular blogs are already receiving. Check out recent posts on
other high traffic blogs in your industry.
Read the post, if it’s suitable, add a genuine comment & link to your guest post as a reference. This
should send some highly targeted traffic your way. Not only that, but the people who will follow those
links are commenters, so they’re more likely to comment on your post.
You can see all the comments below link to other financial blogs, notice that they’re not spam, but
actual insights on what they’ve read:
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Buzz Bundle
Buzz Bundle is a great piece of software that tracks mentions of your keywords across social platforms
like forums, Q&A sites (yahoo answers), blogs, social media, etc. It’s a very convenient way to track &
answer relevant conversations in your niche. I’m not going to do a full review, you can watch Matthew
Woodwards review here.
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Plug a few relevant keywords & find relevant opportunities to very easily drive traffic to your guest post
for free. It can be a great source of traffic, comments & likes once you have it up & running. There is a
free review copy available with limited capability, but the full version costs $199.
Secondary linking is building links to your guest posts to make them stronger & boost your rankings
even further. You obviously can’t spend a lot of time & effort to build links to your links, so a lot of SEOs
choose to use paid link services & software – check out the Warrior Forum, Black Hat World & GSA
Search Engine Ranker.
You can run into a lot of trouble with automated links, which I’m sure you’re all aware of. Let alone
upsetting the owner of the blog you’re smashing with spam.
That’s a Wrap
So there you have it, that’s my entire blogger outreach system. You have hopefully seen the benefit in a
strategy like this & have the ability to include parts of it in your upcoming outreach.
I’m sure there are some people out there who won’t like what I’m teaching. Like a mentioned at the
beginning of this guide, I’m not teaching a white hat approach here. I’m just teaching you what has been
working for me very successfully for a couple of years now.
I’ve successfully used guest posts to increase my position in Google across many websites, in many
different industries. Time & time again, I’ve seen this strategy work extremely well.
Guest posting with the intent of increasing your rankings is against Googles TOS. In my experience, as
long as you only guest post on quality sites, you’re not going to raise any suspicion.
Don’t rub Googles face in it - Lazy SEO’s will take part in advertised guest post schemes like My Blog
Guest or purchase 10 guest posts for $100 & see no results or maybe even a drop in their rankings. If
you take the time to find your own targets, you will have a lot more control over what gets posted &
what kind of links you receive.
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