Transcript
Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is the best way to acquire and manage guest post opportunities. This is an extremely important conversation. It is a heavy hitter of our own agency's work. And I wanted to distill and share the best practices we do when we do our own work. And hopefully that will benefit you guys, as you guys try your own guest posts, you know, campaigns and everything.
But of course, we've got to introduce our tea today, cause this is Zupo SEO Talk & Tea. We have our green tea in many of our videos. This is not like your classic green tea. It has a little bit more depth to the flavor. I wish I was a better tea flavor describer. I there's probably people way better, but all I can say is your typical green tea is a little bit more mellow. This one's just a little bit more, let me say bold, but I don't think bold is the right word either. It just has a little more, a bit more oomph, that's the best way I can explain it.
But anyways, let's go ahead and start brewing and talking about this. So the best way to acquire and manage guest post opportunities. So this is an important conversation, especially from my own agency, because we help a lot of companies with trying to acquire as many links as possible. And one of the ways we do that is by building thought leadership. So the way we build thought leadership is we go to a lot of blogs that are relevant, we pitch them topics that we can write about. And then we write for them and they'll link back to us. That's pretty simple, but there's a lot of delusion, a lot of nitty gritty when it comes to this kind of stuff, because a lot of websites have unique editorial guidelines. A lot of websites have unique rules that they have to post on their site. And a lot of websites have different topics they want to talk about.
So what I want to help you avoid, and I think that's the best way for me to start is, a lot of companies, I think, what they do, and I can speak for myself on this as well, is what they'll do is they will over-obsess about one or two publications and then highly customize a pitch for those one or two. Well, I do believe in custom, customizing email drafts, what I would say, or outreach emails to these publications. What I would say is you need to scale back a bit. I don't think a little bit wider. Find a short list who initially have 10, 15, or 20 publications that you know. Write about topics that you write about, but that you could add a different angle and then write an email draft or outreach email that is slightly customized to each one of them, and then send them out.
Don't overemphasize to one or two, because one, I think that people overspend too much time on that. And second, you're hedging way too much on only two applications. We generally like to send out 10 to 20. And then from that, we send out sort of customized email address with the topics that we wanted to talk about for each publication. And then what we do is we, wait, we wait to see who has accepted. Based on who has accepted, we then don't get started just yet. We wait for all the acceptances to come back and then we prioritize. And how we prioritize is based one, the domain authority of the site that we're working with. If they have a high domain authority or domain rating, that generally will be the number one priority.
Second though, and this can affect it, do they allow links back to the site? And what I mean by that is the best scenario for us is if they allow links in the author bio, and also they allow links to your own website from the body of the guest post you are writing. So, generally what we understand is we're not going to link back to product or service pages on our site or sales pages, but we can link back to blog posts. And that's what our goal is. What we want from a publication is high domain of rating or high domain authority. And then second that they allow us to link back to our site, not only to the homepage, but to other blog posts. Those are the top two. If we work with a site that has a high domain rating, but they do not allow in-text links back to our site, we generally will slot that lower. What we want is the internal links that can, I mean, the links that be driven back to our blog post.
So the little bit of combination of the two, and then third also is just the level of work that they need. If a certain blog, a blog is very picky and they need a lot of edits, we might slot that a little bit later and then because it's going to take a lot of time, so we kind of parse it out. And then last is what we also will do is, some publications do not accept pitches. They just accept finalized drafts. If they want finalized drafts, what we'll do is we'll usually save that for last. Because what I can kind of recommend for you is there's many publications who accept pitches first before drafts. And I would say there's way more publications that do that. Then they accept five finished written drafts. So there's no need to write drafts. It wastes a lot of time and resources just to head on one publication.
So what I would encourage you to do is pitch out your topics first and then write, and then you can pitch to ones that accept drafts, but even then, they may not respond. So what I like to do is if you wrote a draft for someone that you ultimately were like, "Yeah, you know what, this isn't working out.", you can send that draft to another publication and then it might work out. And I've actually done that with very much success before where we've written for a publication. They ended up telling us that they need to push us back to the editorial calendar a quarter. So we decided, "Hey, can we rewrite another one? But you use the one we wrote for you and send it somewhere else?" And it was very successful for us. So again, in summary though, the most important factors is one, the domain rating, domain authority of the publication you're working with, second, do they allow, what kind of links do they allow back? Ones we really want to avoid are the ones that just don't allow any links at all.
Third is the level of work. How long does the piece have to be? How many edits do they really see? How much work do we have to put into it? And then lastly, of course, is if they only accept finally finished written drafts. If that's the case, I really hedge those to the lowest priority because like I just mentioned, we don't want to spend too much time for something that they may not accept. So those are tips on digital PR and link building for contributor-ship stuff that we generally use. I think they're very helpful to keep you organized, to keep you making sure that your resources are optimized well for what we're doing. And I would encourage you, if you're doing it yourself, kind of use that same model so that you're not wasting time and resources. And hopefully you guys will find that valuable. If you liked the video, please like, and subscribe, I'm going to go ahead and pour out my tea now. And I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks everybody.