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yeah I'm sure all of you have had the feeling where there's the knock at the door and you're not expecting anybody at home and maybe you're welcome in your bathroom like this gentleman or maybe you're just sitting on the couch perfectly dressed in like who is it right and let's think about the days before video doorbells from that before you could check and see and you're maybe peering out and seeing who it is or you just have the guts and you go to the door and open it and what's on the other side is usually a salesperson there's somebody who wants to have a transaction with you so you have this unexpected knock at the door you're not planning you weren't planning to receive the door you weren't planning to buy whatever they're selling or to sign whatever they're asking you to sign from that but that person is prepared on the other side of the door for that knock they know what they're gonna do from you it's not really the best relationship in fact it's no relationship it's a one sided transaction if they're lucky they may get you to buy something to go through but it's not it's not that helpful and I look at this and some of you who have blogging sites and even if you don't these are the people who knock and they send something over and you're like what the heck right they it comes in and they've knocked on your inbox and they share it and you're like this is really bother at best it's just an irritation right cuz you don't have to buy anything you can close the door be polite but you can close the door and move on from that and so there's that transactional the one-way transactional blogger and it's funny because even if you don't have a blog you will still get those people I have a couple clients who don't have any blog and then they get the thing complimenting them on their blog and how much this person wants to write for them okay thanks not tempting to start a blog based on their feedback but here's where most of us in the guest blogging community live from that we are on the other side of the door if we are the blog site we are the blogger who shows up there's an expectation right somebody's on the other side of that door they've ordered that coffee and donuts or whatever breakfast they're having there and so they're happy to see this gentleman show up with their coffee because they are expecting that action from that and that's what you do right now is a most sites if you accept guest bloggers or if you're a guest blogger you're delivering something that they probably want now maybe it may be made to order or it may not be exactly made to order but it's a transactional relationship it's two-way transactional and that's really where most of us end it right this person who opens that door is never gonna see this guy again it's gonna be a different delivery person they're not interested in forming a relationship with the guy who's delivering their coffee that's not their goal their goal is to get the coffee so for other sites the goal is to get the blog from that and the bloggers is to submit it and get it published and then that's it and that's where most of us leave off and that's fine it's two-way transactional it gets the job done but you do a lot of work to get to the be able to deliver the coffee to deliver the blog and you should be able to use it longer and sites want you to have that so we'll go to the third knock at the door this is the relationship you want so you want we can tell this family has shown up there's friends or family on the other side that are expecting them from that they're gonna have a nice celebration they're looking forward to seeing them and they're bringing gifts so chances are these gifts have been thought of who the guest is who they're going to see that they're customizing the gift from it it may be made to order gift or it may just be something that they think they're interested in and that's what we're going for in a guest blogging relationship that gets invited back but you get the invitation to knock on the door to come and to have either to come into the organization and have a meaningful conversation and to make sure that you're delivering from that so we don't want to be the person who just knocks on the door and says hey here I'm selling this do you want to buy it and guess blogging is free so it's more attractive but we really want to get to this point so that's what we're gonna go through today is how to get to this and not to it start with the coffee order we're not even gonna pay attention to the the guy in his robe having to answer the cold call at the door from Matt so there's a five steps we're going to go through some a little quicker than others because you're probably more familiar with them and kind of get into some meat more meat at the end to come through so you need your purpose you need to prospect and figure out where because anywhere is not gonna work well for you the pitch so most blogs take pitches for those of you who do accept guest posts how many of you accept blog pitches so pitching an idea from that and how many of you will require the full post requires the full post but we're gonna talk pitches cuz that's more common to come through publishing getting getting the agreement to do that and then the last one promote and partner from that so we will take through and then the goal is to have questions at the end and certainly I'm available afterwards from that so the purpose why are you guest blogging you have to think about it as part of your content marketing strategy guest blogging is not just a nice to having something to do if you think that way you're not going to reap the effects and the benefits of it from that if you're just looking to get published to come through so these are just some of the high kind of common ones reaching a new audience so somebody has an audience that you want to reach it needs to be relevant though to what you do and to what they do so think of the Venn diagram crossover so you're reaching a new audience and I will say the slides will be available later and one of those people who turned it in late so they will be uploaded later to go through growing in your credibility so if you want to perhaps there's somebody in your company that you want a position as a subject matter expert perhaps it's the company you want to make sure that we're out there higher profile of talking about this subject there's thought leadership all that kind of thing to get into you might want to connect your name to a reputable site or a brand from that so if you're looking if you're in the tech industry and you want to get published on the IBM blog I know they have several from that and to do that connecting your name to then say you have a link from IBM that's a credible connection from that that IBM values your content enough to come through and also just to be seen as a helpful resource so it's not just that you're expecting everybody to come to your site or the site to do that you're interested in reaching out and building a community from that to come through backlinks are often thought of as the top reason for guest blogging and that's fine if that's your reason you just have to think about it so including and when we talk about backlinks it's writing content and including a link in there and we're going to talk more about that but it's too helpful content it's not promotional links to your site you're a product page and that kind of thing that's we're talking about valuable content and and relatable links because those links will then drive traffic to your site it helps from an SEO perspective and especially if the site is a high domain authority some of this if you're not as familiar there are some resources at the end I share but the domain Authority is a Moz calculation on how again it's more of a credibility how reliable are you delivering content that people want is the quick version of the Moz score for the domain Authority you may want to expand your social media presence so they may be sharing their content and their blogs posts and so you're gonna help get connected to them you're gonna get tagged in it from that and the last one is increase your own doggie ins and as Joe pulizzi was talking about yesterday and he this is his mantra for a long time from that that you want to own your audience if that's your goal with guest blogging you need to think a little differently it's not just about getting published it's about how can I Drive the traffic if I'm driving traffic to my site if there's a linter if there's an external link in there and I'm driving traffic to our site what does our site look like are we asking for subscribers on that page you still want to provide the relevant and helpful content but how are you pushing that if in some places they you can't say in the middle of the post subscribe to our newsletter that's a little promotional and usually it does not fit into the narrative of it but maybe in the bio you can put from that like subscribe we have a weekly newsletter or something like that you could just add it into the bio so that's kind of that narrow focus and it requires you to think differently about how you're gonna do it so that's where kind of understanding your purpose your why and how it fits into your overall strategy then allows you to find sites and ways to communicate aren't through guest blogging to come through so prospecting and where do I find these sites to guest blog from that first of all there's two things that has to happen you need to pick a site that has in multiple sites we're not going to limit it to one that has an audience you want to reach that you want access to and a site that covers topics relevant to your brand and what you want to talk about so for example if I was trying to reach dad's 30 to 45 from that to come through there might be a fashion site that reaches men 30 to 45 and that's their target but they're not focused on the dad part of it so my content on dads at 30 to 45 that need to be written to try to attract that items wouldn't necessarily work on that fashion site so even though we have similar audience overlap we don't have similar purpose and topics from that so as we figure out our prospecting the first thing I'm gonna tell you is create a tracker and I have an Excel spreadsheet I can email to you and I've got information at the end that goes through this from that this kind of table thing you want to keep track of it and you want to keep organized because this is gonna be a lot of information coming in and you're gonna forget you also need to keep track not only of the sites that you want to publish on that have guest blogging that look like good candidates you want to keep track of the sites that don't have guest blogging so that six months down the road when somebody says why aren't we on that site you can look back at your tracker and say well they don't have a blog or they don't have guest blogging or somebody else on your team is using it when you're using multiple people from that so keeping keeping track from that obviously customize the the columns to whatever works best for you to come through but start the tracker from day one when you're prospecting to come through so finding the sites here are a few resources I ask your fellow coworkers how many buddy in sales in here ask the sales team where did they go to find out about industry trends where do they go to get the information that they talk to their customers hopefully you're one of those resources but they're probably using other resources so where do we get trends from where do we find out what's happening what are the pain points from that kind of thing to do so ask employees and then if you're talking to customers which I strongly recommend when you're doing content marketing on all sorts of things add the question about and where they get their information you can use excuse me you can use the free almighty Google put in your topics see what the results come in and even go to page two or three that's okay because you're looking for sites that are publishing and talking about your topic you're not looking for what they're saying at the moment on it but that's a helpful resource to do an easy one to do sometimes this sometimes it parts of this can be a good intern project and I think one of the challenges sometimes is we expect interns to to be the their own workers and to know what to do but they should be able to get to this level of Google from that keyword tools SEO tools will be helpful in finding sites that cover your keywords your topics from that and then evaluating those sites so SEMRush buzzsumo some rush I just did a clip of their domain overview so you put the domain of where you want to possibly blog and they're gonna give you all sorts of information about that domain so you can decide does this have the audience we need is this getting the traffic and all those kind of things to do it buzz tsumo down here it's way too small to read but they talked about social interactions so Facebook engagements Twitter shares of articles you know we searched it a search for content marketing from that so you can get some social reddit engagements they do a monitoring of it and so it helps you pick your topics but it also helps you pick your sights and kind of narrow your focus to do and the last one is look at the page again the website of where you want to go whether it's their blog or other content and look at their tags look at their categories and see what that tells you what's important to them so they may cover a lot of topics but look at the categories they're covering so for example in Content Marketing Institute it's down here we publish it right after the byline and there's a primary and secondary category that we pick so in this one it's content creation and then the other categories are blogging SEO conversion optimization and productivity we like a lot of them because it falls in this one fell into a lot of categories but that gives you an idea for example of what's important at the Content Marketing Institute from that so you can look at the tags that are published on the site and that's the great thing about all of this is there's so much information already there it's just doing a little bit of digging and you can find information and this will set you apart it will definitely we're gonna get to some of the don'ts later but it will set you apart so that when you're pitching or writing you're gonna be far more on target than the average submission that comes in to do back to our tracker so in our tracker we want to make sure that they have a blog first of all and that is guest blogging permitted the great sites have guest blogging guidelines and that's helpful include the link so again if somebody else is doing this make sure that the link is there to the guest blogging guidelines and you can move on from that but again hitting the handle the social handles the topics the audience and this is one of the tips when I when I reached out and I think it's a great advice the time to build the start building the relationship is actually before you knock on that door it's following them on social interacting commenting on their blogs that they have from that and already making an introduction of yourself from a digital perspective to come through it's not bugging them with the phone call the old days if you wanted to get a guest column in a print you might have to bug them with a phone call and you feel like more like you're pastoring this is pretty easy that you could just start following them on social and kind of interacting with them in that way so then your name may be familiar now the blog person may be somebody different but at least your name is familiar and you're also learning at the same time of what kind of content gets a response what kind of content are they doing from that so looking at their social channels and then if you can find a name that's great names are sometimes hard to come by for for various reasons but think about it so now that you've picked your site don't you're not expected to read this to know right now that you've picked your sites you have a list of sites to go through you've verified that they have a blog at least you maybe make an inquiry if they accept guest blog posts if they don't have guest blogging line lines blogging guidelines say that three times to come through from it and then you're gonna look at the blogging guidelines now I recommend do not do the whole list right now you've got your tracker list and you've got all these sites and you spend a lot of time and energy pick three pick three to focus on because if you try to do 50 you're gonna get lost you're also gonna start pitching pretty much the same thing to multiple sites and then you're gonna get in that you have two dates at once problems they both show up at your door and knock at your door and wonder why there are two of them there so make sure to just pick a manageable number so I recommend three it could be five but pretty much don't go beyond five unless you're even if you're a large team there's a lot of communication that has to happen to go through so this was fun Dara's this is fun Dara's guest post from that and they are thorough very thorough and Leah's company also has a very thorough site content marketing institute has a very detailed site first it's a test to see if you can read and that sounds like it's easy it's not we've learned I think fun Dara's goes is just a ton is anybody connected with the company here it's it's a great example but it's a ton of information to digest and we've actually at the content marketing student we shortened it believe it or not when you look get it because people weren't reading all that we knew people weren't reading all of that so they if you have though and you do accept guest blog submissions and you're getting less helpful stuff think about doing that they detail their audience they explain who they are they're the largest online publisher focus solely on financial advice for starting growing and managing small businesses I'm not reading all of this don't panic they talk about the diverse range of topics that they cover but they're saying here's what's more likely to get published over there you get two links and titles you can look at some titles that they do they describe their readership they even have a link to show you what the perfect blog looks like from their eyes to come through and they put a word count this is really extensive their word count is like a 1500 to 2500 and then they said the longer the better I'm not sure I want to read 3,000 words on the small business but they give you everything so they've they've opened the store for you they've opened their door take advantage of that when you're looking at it from that whether it's as detailed as this or it's very simple in the process that you need to take to come through pay attention to that and you will get noticed