If you want to start guest posting but don’t know where to begin, this is the guide for you. Learn how guest posting can benefit your brand, plus eight important steps for setting up a plan that supports your marketing initiatives, expands your brand reach, and connects with new customers.

The post covers:

  • What guest posting is
  • The benefits of guest posting
  • Eight steps for executing a guest posting strategy

What Is Guest Posting?

Guest posting is the act of contributing content to another person or brand’s website or blog.

This tactic is also known as guest blogging.

In guest posting, a writer acts as a contributor or guest author and submits content to a publisher. The writer provides content to a site that doesn’t belong to them or any of their organizations in an attempt to support their marketing, PR, and SEO initiatives.

Here is a guest blog post example on the Alexa blog. Will Chou, the writer, submitted a guest post to us, the publisher.

What Are the Benefits of Guest Blogging?

Guest blogging works well as a marketing tactic because it’s symbiotic. It benefits both publishers and writers.

Guest blogging works well as a marketing tactic because it’s symbiotic. It benefits both publishers and writers.CLICK TO TWEET

When the content is relevant, valuable, and high-quality, publishers get fresh content that their audience can enjoy and appreciate.

There are many potential benefits of guest blogging for writers:

  • Builds brand awareness
  • Builds relationships
  • Boosts authority
  • Reaches new audiences
  • Drives traffic to their website
  • Builds backlinks that boost site SEO
  • Grows their email list
  • Grows social media following

How to Execute a Guest Posting Strategy in Eight Steps

Building a successful guest posting strategy includes several important steps. These steps help you set a good foundation for your plan, setting clear goals, expectations, and standards for deciding which opportunities are best for you.

The rest of this post will teach you how to:

  1. Determine your guest posting goals
  2. Find guest post opportunities
  3. Qualify guest posting sites
  4. Develop blog post topics
  5. Create the perfect pitch
  6. Write a post worth publishing
  7. Follow up on your work
  8. Track your results

Step 1: Determine Your Guest Posting Goals

As with all good marketing strategies, a smart guest posting strategy starts with outlining your goals. Knowing what results you want to see from your work will help you create a clear road map for getting there.

Knowing what results you want to see from your work will help you create a clear road map for getting there.CLICK TO TWEET

Consider what can be accomplished through guest blogging and determine which two or three goals align best with your marketing objectives.

  • Increase brand awareness. Get more people to know about you and your brand.
  • Introduce your projects and services. Get more people to know about what you offer.
  • Show audiences how you can help. Get more people to see how your expertise, products, or services can solve problems.
  • Improve visibility on social media. Get more people to follow and engage with you or your brand on social media.
  • Boost SEO. Get high-quality backlinks to support your off-page SEO strategy.
  • Build industry authority. Share your expertise to get people to see you as an expert in your industry.
  • Increase traffic. Drive more traffic to your website through referral traffic.
  • Increase leads. Generate more leads by reaching new audiences.

When you know what you want your guest posting to accomplish, it will be easier to identify the best guest blogging opportunities. Always prioritize sites that will help you get closer to your goals.

For example, if your goal were to increase traffic, you wouldn’t want to spend time guest posting on a small, niche site that has very low traffic. But if your goal is to build industry authority, you may benefit from writing for the small, industry-specific blog.

Step 2: Find Guest Post Opportunities

If you aren’t sure how to find guest posting sites, use these three tactics.

Find sites that interest your audience.

Start by looking for sites that attract and interest your audience. If you aren’t sure what your audience is interested in, use a buyer persona template to create a profile of your ideal customer. Also, use Alexa’s Audience Interest Tool to discover what topics your audience cares about and what sites they visit most.

Enter your site or a site you already know your audience uses. The tool generates a list of categories that interest that site’s audience.

guest posting sites tool

The report also includes details like the percentage of the audience who cares about the category, sites that relate to the category, and popular topics within the category. You can use this information to narrow down potential guest posting sites and brainstorm content ideas you could submit to them.