Growing your business through guest posting on popular blogs is a great strategy. Yet many people are unable to obtain guest blog posts because they do not know the secrets to the perfect pitch. The right pitch will land guest blog posts that can skyrocket your business over night.

Pitching Your Guest Post

You’ve made a business and built an online presence for it. Now, you’re ready to start driving traffic.

After all – if nobody sees your offer and nobody knows it exists, who’s going to buy from you?

That’s right: nobody.

And Guest Blogging is a great way to get traffic, raise brand awareness and position yourself as an authority in exchange for helping established sites get quality content.

In the past, countless people have used this method to get instant results for their business and explode their sales. One example is Danny Iny, who wrote 80+ guest posts to get his Firepole Marketing brand from 0 to 23,000 monthly page views in the space of 4 weeks.

Another example is Jon Morrow, who started with no paid traffic and no existing list… And generated a lead list of 13,000+ people through guest posting alone.

What cases like these demonstrate is that you can create a successful business on a shoestring budget – or boost an existing business’s results dramatically – by guest blogging effectively.

And while knowing how to write for the internet is key, there’s another overlooked aspect to this game that most people don’t think about: pitching your guest posts.

After all, finding the optimal places to post and creating articles that have a high chance of being published there is key to your success as a guest blogger. If you don’t do these 2 things, your work will either be ineffective or outright rejected.

So in the infographic below, we illustrate the exact, specific, researched steps that will make your guest blogging as effective as possible.

You’ll find the image below – but first, we’ll elaborate on its main steps in writing.

Look For Guest Blogging Opportunities

There are plenty of ways to find guest blogging opportunities. writersincharge.com has multiple lists of niche-specific websites that will accept your articles. shoutmeloud.com has a list of 50+ high-quality blogs that will do the same.

But if you want to be thorough and get the best results possible, you’re best off finding opportunities for yourself. Fortunately, Google makes this easy; all you have to do is look up queries like…

• “Submit a guest post”
• “Accepting guest posts”
• “Guest posts [niche]”
• “Guest post guidelines” 

This will give you plenty of websites to work with – especially if you add your industry/niche to the search.

Once you find some blogs to write for, estimate how many of them you can realistically apply to in the next month… And make an appropriately-sized list, prioritizing the websites that are the best fit for your knowledge and talents.

Once you do, move on to…

Writing Your Pitch

Most blogs will ask you to write a short pitch or introduction before you submit a guest post.

They do this to separate spammers from people who actually read their guidelines – so priority #1 is familiarizing yourself with 2 things:

• The blog’s format. This will help you make your pitch more effective.
• Guest post guidelines. Following these will maximize your chances of getting published.

This way, you’ll set yourself up to be viewed as a serious, respectful applicant.

Aside from doing that, there are several handy hacks you can use to maximize your e-mails chances of getting opened and read.

For starters, mention the recipient’s name in the subject line where possible. This has been shown to increase click-through rates by a whopping 17.36%.

Second, try to offer some added value to sweeten the deal. For example, if your website already has a fair amount of traffic, offer to share a backlink to the recipient’s blog in your next post there.

Even if it doesn’t make a huge difference, it’s a nice gesture – and everyone likes people who offer value instead of just taking it.

Having said that, don’t just make your pitch about the person reading it. It’s important to…

Position Yourself Correctly

A lot of guest posts get shot down because they fail to understand the psychology of their pitches’ recipients.

At the end of the day, your post is only valuable if it’s useful or entertaining to someone’s followers. This means, first and foremost, understanding the readership of the blog you’re pitching to.

Fail to do so, and you can have the best ideas in the world and still get rejected. Remember, a blog author’s main objective is to serve their readers! And that’s why step #1 is always understanding them. Ask yourself: what does your target blog’s readership like and dislike? What drives them? What do they enjoy reading?

You’ll find the answers to these questions, and many others, by simply analyzing what’s been popular on a blog in the past.

Once you’ve understood the people reading the blog you’re trying to guest for, you need to position yourself as someone qualified to talk to them. This means being realistic and asking yourself:

• Am I qualified to guest post on this blog?
• What qualities do I have that will appeal to the target audience?
• What knowledge and experience do I have that will be useful to the readers?

This isn’t just good practice for getting your pitch approved. This will help ensure that people read your post all the way through and click on the links in your bio, driving traffic to your own website – which is the ultimate goal of this whole process.

So let’s Recap.

The key elements of a home-run guest blog pitch are:

• Finding opportunities
• Writing your pitch
• Understanding the audience
• Positioning yourself correctly

You can do these in any order – but it is imperative you give each point some thought, even if you’re an experienced guest blogger.

And remember: there’s no shame in getting inspiration from competing blogs. For example, if you want to write for Forbes, looking at Business Insider’s most successful articles will give you some fresh content ideas. You should be ethical and avoid copying content outright – but inspiration and borrowing are effective and safe.

Now save and print out this infographic below to get even more information on crafting great blog post pitches!