How To Get Upwards of 10 Backlinks From a Single Guest Post?
Guest posting is an ancient link-building technique that’s as ancient as the idea of building links itself.
And it’s still one of the most commonly used link building techniques, for a very good reason. It works!
If your writing is solid and your prospect website is accepting guest posts, there are practically zero reasons for them to reject your offer.
However, guest posting has one major drawback: most sites only allow you to have one or two backlinks pointing back to your site. And writing a whole guest post for just one link can seem like too much work.
But what if I told you that you can get many more backlinks with just a single post? In this article, I’ll walk you through the process of finding guest posting opportunities, pitching topics, and earning upwards of 10 backlinks with just a single post.
Prospecting
The first step, of course, is to find prospects who you’re going to be writing for. There are three main ways in which you can do it.
1. Find sites in your niche that have a ‘write for us” page
A ton of websites have a “write for us” page. They are practically asking for you to send them your guest post. Finding them is very easy, all you need to do is type in your keyword + “write for us” in search.
However, the fact that they explicitly look for guest post writers does not necessarily mean that they are prime opportunities for guest posting.
These sites usually have a submission form that you need to fill out. And, since so many people are writing for them, it can take months until you get any feedback on your pitch, if at all.
It’s much better to get in touch with an actual content manager than try to get through these forms.
2. Simply pick the websites you like and pitch them
In reality, most websites accept guest posts, even if they don’t openly advertise it with a “write for us” page.
So, a completely valid strategy would be to simply pick the websites that you want to post on, find the contact information of the people behind it, and pitch them with an email. More often than not, you will receive a positive reply, provided that your pitch is good.
3. Don’t do any separate prospecting for guest posts at all
What? Don’t do prospecting for guest posts at all? What do you mean?
This is actually how I secure my guest posts. I don’t run any separate outreach for it. And, if you already build links through some other strategies, you can do the same.
I run a lot of competitor backlinks and skyscraper campaigns. I simply do a link exchange first, and then ask the person if they accept guest posts, and send over some topics.
That’s it – just by doing this, on average, I secure 3 guest posts every single week, which is as much as I can physically write while working on other tasks too anyway.
The Pitch
Most bloggers, content managers, and website owners get tons of pitches for either a guest post or a link exchange.
So, to get yours answered, it needs to be valuable to your prospect. How do you make a guest post valuable? For example, by pitching a topic that covers a keyword that your prospect’s competitors are ranking for but they aren’t.
In your pitch, mention that you were doing a little bit of digging in Ahrefs and found some keywords that your prospect’s competitors are ranking for but they aren’t.
This will make it seem like you actually spent some time to research their site and offer something that’s actually helpful – which is to cover their content gap.
Most guest post pitches that I receive are just random people telling me how awesome our site is and how much they would love to write for us. But why should we care? With the approach that I described above, your chances of landing that guest post are much higher.
Write your post and include links to your partners in it
While most websites only allow you to include a single backlink to your own site, this doesn’t always apply to links to other resources.
So, just include links to your partners along with yours, and after the post is published, let them know about it. They will return the favor for you by giving you backlinks from their site or their own guest posts for other resources.
But how do you get these partners? It’s very easy. If you’re already doing link building, don’t cut ties with your prospects as soon as they give you that sweet backlink. You can set up a number of long-term collaborations and give each other links on a regular basis.
There are also tons of link builder communities on Slack, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If you don’t already have a few partners from your link-building efforts, a good place to start looking for them would be in these communities.
Bigger posts = more links
Even though the whole point of guest posting is to build as many links as you possibly can, you shouldn’t compromise the content and overly stuff it with backlinks.
The sweet spot is around 2000 words – in a large post like this, it’s possible to organically place upwards of 15 backlinks and not have it feel spammy.
Of course, it’s time-consuming to write such articles, but if you’re good at writing (or if you’re adept at using some AI writing assistant), why not have that time converted into 15 inbound backlinks?
Further reading