2 Secret Guest Posting Tactics Your Competitors Don’t Know About (Templates Included)

Guest posts are all the rage right now thanks to google’s wrath on PBNs. Everyone and their Mom is doing it. Even the Black Hatters are sending Poorly written emails to “dear webmaster” every day.

But the problem is Bloggers have had enough of it. They can’t stand these poor emails and the poor content that often follows.

Plus everyone is fighting for the attention of the same people who get a dozen pitches every day.

I rather like to pitch people who rarely get pitched: The blogs of Businesses in your niche.

Thanks to the increasing popularity of content marketing, many businesses with sites have a blog section on it because they have heard if they publish content regularly, customers will come to their site.

However, most businesses are not able to make producing content their top priority and fail to produce it regularly. When you make an offer to give them free content, they can’t refuse as someone else is doing the hard work for them.

Before we see how to use this loophole to rank higher on google.

Let’s go through the advantages of pitching businesses for Guest posts:

• Way easier to secure a guest post on
• More open to the Anchor texts you want to use
• No dearth of sites with great metrics
• You don’t need to spend a lot of content as there are no editors to “review” the content
• Scalable
• You can’t always find blogs that blog about your niche but there will always be businesses like yours that have a blog.

Before we discuss the specific strategies, please do the following 3 things :

1. Google scraping
2. Enable 100 search results per page by clicking on settings -> Search settings -> increase the number from 10 to 100.
3. Ginfinity chrome plugin from here – Download this chrome plugin. It keeps loading the search results as you keep scrolling down.

Let’s move on to specific strategies for finding the targets:

1. Look for similar Businesses in other cities

In most industries, Similar businesses in different cities are not competing with each other. Getting links from such sites is like hitting the SEO jackpot because google gives a lot of importance to niche relevancy & this is as niche relevant as it can get.

You can use this search query to find these sites: Allintitle: Business type + City

So if you have a chiropractic clinic in Houston, You should look for chiropractic clinics in other cities using this search query.

Alllintitle: Chiropractic clinic + Miami (or any other city for that matter)

After the results show up, start scrolling down. Ginfinity will load up another 100 results and on and on till it does not load up results anymore.

Just replace the city name one by one and scrape the results with google SERP extractor each time. Sure, there will be duplicates as businesses can have a presence in multiple cities but you can deduplicate them in google sheets/excel later.

Another tip I wanna give which will increase your reply rates is to note down the city name next to the sites. So when you are done scraping sites from the Miami search query and done pasting it in a sheet, make another column called “city” and put Miami next to all of those sites

Moving on to the second tactic….

Also Read: 5 Best Channels To Promote B2B Content

2. Think Horizontally and vertically

Every business is part of an industry where some businesses lie above it and some below it on the supply chain.

Similarly, some businesses lie adjacent to it.

To put it simply, think of vertical businesses like the ones that serve the customer before or after the customer does business with you

And horizontal businesses are the ones that are similar to yours but serve a different market.

All these businesses are not your competitors and will be happy to accept a guest post from you!

Let’s take the example of a travel agency

What businesses lie vertically below it? Well, I can think of Visa services, Forex businesses, resorts, hotels.

If we think horizontally, we can target corporate travel agencies, adventure travel agencies, pilgrimage travel agencies, etc.

All it takes is a bit of brainstorming and you will have a big list of businesses to get guest posts at.

Now if we marry these two concepts, Unlimited targets are born.

Allintitle: city + one of the many businesses we just brainstormed

It is sure as hell painful for Google to give you all these targets, but it can’t keep them inside its database forever (Stupid childbearing joke I know)

Here is an email I sent for one of my clients recently ( Personally identifiable information has been changed for the privacy of the client )

Subject: Let’s collaborate!

Hey Mike

My name is Joe Richards and I am the founder of Together Coworking, a coworking community-based in Houston.

One of my friends, Lisa, who lives in Miami, was raving about you so I thought I should reach out!

We as coworking space owners are enabling others to collaborate and create cool stuff, don’t you think we should do a little collaboration too!

Would you be interested in having me contribute an amazeballs Guest article to your site for free, geared towards freelancers and startups (I am a serial entrepreneur and I grew my previous startup Digital Daily to an 8 figure business)?

Btw, here is a guest article I wrote for coworkingmag.com

I have some not-so-bad topic ideas for your site.  

Would you like to hear them?

Cheers

Joe

Key Takeaways that will Increase your Success rate

1. Make sure to mention that the article will be free: If you don’t, oftentimes businesses think you are pitching them about your writing service so they don’t even reply. So make sure you bold that fact it is for free
2. Personalize with the city tag: Remember that city column next to the sites. Well use that as a merge tag to say something along the lines of: I really like what you guys are doing in [[city]] or something like My friend Anna who lives in [[city]] told me about you guys so I thought I should reach out with a collaboration proposal. This helps to personalize the emails a bit so that they think it’s written specifically to them.
3. Don’t pitch ideas in the first email: Just ask if they would be interested in listening to some ideas so that you don’t waste your time coming up with ideas for sites that won’t even respond to your email. Once they reply with a yes, check if they even have a blog or not. If they do, send them 3 ideas to choose from. Make sure to topics that touch upon their business too.
4. Don’t confuse them with marketing Jargon: Many businesses don’t understand the concept of guest posting, so use the word collaboration in the subject line to pique their interest.
5. Reach out as a senior executive of the firm: If you are doing a guest posting for your client, then reach out like him or some senior executive from his firm. People give way more attention to emails from important-looking people.
6. Always consider their point of view: A website Owner’s point of view regarding Guest posts must be taken into account. Just because you are offering free content does not mean they will accept it. You have proved your subject matter expertise to them for them to take you seriously

Template for you to steal

Hey {First Name}

My name is {Your Name) and I am the founder of {Your Company}, a {Your Business} based in {Your City}.

One of my friends, {any made up name} who lives in {their city}, was raving about you so I thought I should reach out and ask you about the collaboration idea I had in mind!

Would you be interested in having me contribute an amazeballs Guest article to your site, geared towards {their target customers} ({Show yourself as an authority by mentioning one of your big achievements here} ).

Btw, here is a guest article I wrote for {Site where you had previously contributed a post, the more well known the site, the better}

I have some not-so-bad topic ideas for your site.  

Would you like to hear them?

Cheers

{Your Name}

{Your Signature}

If you want to check out another way to find guest post opportunities that very less people are doing, read this guide from the peeps at Linkbuilder.io.