Guest posting has become a hot topic recently so I wanted to show you how to automate and manage your campaigns with my personal strategy.
The actual process of guest posting is quite lengthy and it can be very difficult to keep track of even if your only dealing with a few guest posting sites…
Nevermind when you’re trying to deal with thousands.
This tutorial will show you how to use guest posting software in the quickest and easiest way using this personal guest posting strategy.
What You Will Learn
- How to do guest posting in the easiest way possible
- How to find thousands of guest posting sites
- How to filter your guest posting sites database effectively
- How to contact all of them in a couple of clicks
- How to sweeten the deal
- Use guest posting software to track & manage your guest posting
Guest Posting Video Transcript
Hi guys Matthew Woodward here and today I’m going to teach you how to automate and manage guest posting. It’s been a hot topic recently and I wanted to share with you how I do it in the most efficient way possible.
- You’re going to learn how to find thousands of guest posting sites with my personal footprints
- How to get all of the key stats on your targets database and filter them
- How to automate the contact of all these guest posting sites in a couple of clicks
- How to sweeten your guest post proposition so they have no choice but to accept even if you don’t read their guest posting guidelines
- And most importantly how to track and manage all of it!
The typical guest posting process looks something like this-
First of all you have to find sites that accept guest posts
Then you have to drop them an email with a request
Speak with the site owner to negotiate a post and understand all of the guest posting guidelines
Wait for them to publish it
Track the results and make sure it doesn’t get removed
And manually maintain a database of guest post partners
Now if you only want to do a few guest posts it doesn’t take that long, but what about if you want to 20 guest posts or a hundred? or even thousands?
Well, I have a solution for that by hacking link assistant from SEO Power Suite. Let me show you what I mean.
LinkAssistant is part of the SEO Powersuite package and its meant to be used to contact link exchange partners and then get your link added to their page of links. You probably know what I’m talking about, the old school method of you have a links page and people contact you to get their link placed on it and they would link to you in return, reciprocal linking and all that kind of thing.
That’s what it’s meant to do but with a few tweaks and a few hacks you can actually use it to automate and manage guest posting. So I’m going to show you how to do that end to end but before I do that I wanted to show you a campaign that I’ve run. So here you can see there’s a list of partner domains here that we can contract, the page rank, the email addresses and also the status. So we can see I’ve got some guest post requests sent, guest post response which means they’ve replied to my request, the guest post is live or not and various things like that.
And if you come over to the email section you can see where here are the responses I have had to my request. Here’s one here I really appreciate your writing guest articles on my blog you can post your own way as you like it. This one says thanks for getting in contact I’m always looking for good quality guest posts. This ones asking me if I’ve got any articles currently and yes we only accept guest posts of high quality so you can see there I’ve got quite a lot of responses from the campaign I sent out and it’s a really easy way to manage to the guest posting outreach and then the actual results of what’s going on.
So let me show you how to set this up and I’m going to start a new project, so come up to file, new project. Enter domain.com into here click next and that will scrape some data we are not going to use and click next. Contact name, enter your actual name and for contact email address you want to enter the email address you want to receive guest post responses to. So that is going to be your actual email address in this example I’m going to be using a temporary hotmail account just for this tutorial and then click on Finish.
Next come up to preferences, proxy settings and onto proxy rotation. Import your list of private proxies here then come up to the email client section and we need to enter the server details for our email address. Now what I typically do is my contact email would be my actual email address I would then fill out the incoming mail server settings for that email address. But for the actual sending of the guest post request emails I usually use a hotmail or yahoo account and use their outgoing mail servers. Now you probably only need to do that if you’re going to be sending out hundreds and hundreds of guest post requests. If you’re only going to be sending a few a day or only a handful of requests then you can use the outgoing mail settings for your primary contact email address. But if you’re going to be sending hundreds we are going to take advantage of hotmails and yahoos smtp servers and then all of the requests will get sent through those and any responses will get delivered to our primary email address.
But for the sake of this video I’m going to pretend that my temporary hotmail address I’m using for the SMTP outgoing mail server is my actual main email address. So I’m just going to pause the video while I fill out these settings one moment. Ok they are setup now it is always a good idea to test the connection when you’ve put in all your details so make sure you do that then click ok.
So let’s now find some guest post targets to do that click on search, find sites by keyword search, make sure enable expert options is ticked and click next. Here we are going to write inurl:”write for us” in quotation marks and write for us is a common footprint that sites that accept guest posts use. I’m going to show you more footprints and little tricks to find targets later on in the video but just for now inurl:”write for us” in speech marks and click next. Here untick all of the search engines and just select Google and then you can decide to scan for an unlimited amount of potential guest post partners or you can acquire a specified number so just for this tutorial I’m going to go out and find 10 potential partners and click next.
Interested partners filter we skip and here leave all the options at default except for this one you need to tick get complete URLs and here you can apply some various ranking factors and filters. You can actually add more filter and rankings factors so it will go out and see how many times the domain has been mentioned on Twitter or any number of filtering options there’s loads of different ones here you can pick what you like to see. Personally all I want to see is the domain page rank to see if we can get a decent backlink from a high pr domain and also the alexa rank to see if the guest post can generate any potential traffic. Ideally we want to get a post on a high page rank domain with lots of traffic so just select these 2 options here and click on next.
And that will go out and scrape for potential partners and pull in all of those metrics we have just selected so while it does that I’m going to pause the video and I’ll resume it once it’s complete. Ok now that’s done we can just click select all click on next and then click on finish.
And in here straight away we have got some details about our potential link partners and if you come up to this little cog here and the show all selected click on edit and add domain PR and alexa rank and click on Ok, and Ok again. And there we can now sort by domain PR and alexa rank.
What you also want to do is sort by partner email and remove any that don’t have an email address in this column it try’s to look them up automatically but it’s not always possible so just remove these link partners here.
The next thing that we need to do is setup the email template that we send to all of these guest post targets so to do that come to preferences email management, edit email templates and then click add to create a new template. We are going to call this guest post request and then you just need to enter a subject line for the email which I usually just have as guest post request and I have a pre prepared email template that I use I will make this available for you to download underneath the video on my blog. You should use this as a template only to give you a rough idea of what you should be sending out please make sure that you tweak and edit it before you go and send it to everyone and it just basically introduces myself, recognises they accept guest posts and then I offer them an article that is 100% original, well written, SEO link building orientated, relevant to their audience and exclusive to them.
The added little bonus that I do down here is that I offer at least 25 facebook likes and tweets to the guest post to help promote it. Now you normally find blog owners are falling all over themselves to take you up on this offer but actually all this is is a cheap fiverr gig that gives you a few tweets a few likes I think it also gives you some diggs and some stumbles but it only costs $5 and you can throw this bonus line in on some of the more important targets. For example you know if you were trying to get links from PR6 domains that might help sweeten the deal to convince them to accept your guest post but all in all that is just a fiverr gig, it costs $5 and is a nice way to entice people to accept your guest post request.
So again this template will be available underneath the video on my blog to download, tweak it to your liking and then paste it into this box and click ok and then we can click on ok again.
So just to show you what the actual process looks like I’m just going to update the contact email address for one of these potential guest post targets so we can act as both the requester and the person offering the guest post opportunity. So I’ll just edit this link partner and change their email address to the hotmail one we are using in this tutorial. All we need to do is click on the people that we want to email, you can do them one at a time or you can select them all I’m just going to do them one at a time then click on email here. Then in the mail template you can select your guest post request template and then just click on send and it will asking you if you want to put it in the outbox to send later or to send right now, I’m just going to send right now. So once that has sent we will then check our inbox on the email and just click on receive here and that will connect to the email box and download any emails. And we’ve not got anything just yet let’s do another receive, there we go so there’s the guest post request and this is as the person you have just sent it to would see it. You can see I came across their page there, the actual guest post url so that is what people would actually see when you send it out.
Now if you had thousands of partners you can just highlight them all click on email, select your guest post request and click send and in this example I’m not going to send these out but its that easy. One thing you should take note of though is if you come to preferences, email management and email client settings on the mail management tab here you can enable delays between sending your emails so if you’re sending out a thousand emails that are all roughly the same you might want to have delays of I don’t know, 30 seconds – 3 minutes or something like that but if you’re just sending out a handful, you know a few every day you don’t need to worry about this really. I just wanted to touch on that delay option if you’re going to be sending these out on mass.
So after you have sent out your emails to contact your guest post partners if you just right click and go to update multiple partners and status you can add in a few statuses. So we are going to add in guest post request sent, guest post response and guest post live so for all of the ones we have just sent emails to we are going to change the status to guest post request sent and you can see that has changed there.
And when you get a reply to a request for example I’ll use this one here you can just right click on it, update the status and change that to guest post response and if we come back here you can see here that we know this partner has responded to us and we are currently in negotiation of a guest post. After the guest post has gone live again you can come to the email tab and let’s say for example this is our live guest post URL. We can right click here and go on edit link partner and go on the backlink to you and enter the url of the live guest post here and then click on ok and then we can go on update multiple partners, status and change that to guest post live and if we come back here we can see that the status has changed from guest post live and the URL of the guest post.
So that when you’re doing thousands of guest post requests or even just fifty or a handful you can see how keeping track of everything here and updating the statuses and managing it from this email inbox here makes it really easy to manage all of your guest post campaigns. So what I wanted to take you through next is how to import thousands of targets and really take this to the next level. The built in scraper of Link Assistant is pretty limited but I’m going to show you how to leverage Scrapebox and import a huge target list into here and then filter them out. So let’s head over to Scrapebox.
So if you enter a list of niche related keywords in my case I’m going to use SEO, link building, social media and then I have my own list of guestpost footprints and you can merge those against your list. Now these guest post footprints are available to download underneath this video on my blog so come and grab those and use them to merge with your keyword list and then just click on start harvesting and I’m going to pause the video while that completes. And once that’s done you want to export your url list and copy it to clipboard and jump back over to LinkAssistant. Now I’m only using 106 targets here but you can quite happily use thousands just make sure you’ve got them on your clipboard and I’ll see you back in LinkAssistant. Next we need to import those targets urls, so if we go to file, import, plain text and we can just paste them in here and click on next, make sure enable expert options is ticked. Make sure we tick get complete URLs leave these other settings at default. Again you can setup ranking factors and filters I’m just going to check the domain Google Pagerank and the alexa rank. If you want to add more factors you can do down here, click on next. And that will go out and import that URL list and get all of that data for us. So I’m just going to pause the video while it does that.
Ok that’s finished so select all click on next and click finish and there we go you can see we’ve now got a new list of targets imported. We can remove any that don’t have the partner email and I think that is there and now you can choose to either select them all and drop an email out to all of them, I’m not going to do that in this example. Or you can be more specific and say well I want to post to a site that has a decent alexa rank and therefore traffic and actual visitors and subscribers and just select the ones with the best alexa rating.
You can pretty much do what you want from this point on. Some people will be happy just sending out a few guest post requests at a time, other people will want to send out thousands of them just make sure that if you’re going to be sending out a lot of requests in settings here to add delays and to make sure you are using a yahoo or hotmail outgoing mailserver. It’s likely at some point this account will be banned and terminated but if that does happen any responses to sent email will get sent back to this incoming mail setup and this contact email address here. So all of that is worth noting.
And that brings me to the end of the tutorial, you now know how easy it is to automate and manage all of your guest posting with a few tweaks and hacks of Link Assistant. There is a free trial available to download so you can familiarise yourself with the software and the link is on your screen now.
It is also worth noting that link assistant is part of the SEO powersuite package which also includes Website Auditor for doing on site SEO audits, SEO Spy Glass to download and analyse your backlinks as well as RankTracker to track all of your rankings. I use SEO Powersuite on a daily basis and consider it an essential tool for any serious SEO. Check out the free trials and see what you think.
If you want to see more tutorials like this then please head over to my blog and subscribe via email in the sidebar or at the end of one of my posts.
Hope you enjoyed it, see ya!
Resources In The Video
Link Assistant FREE TRIAL – It’s main purpose is to find reciprocal link partners which sucks. I use it to automate and manage my guest post campaigns with a few tweaks.
SEO Powersuite FREE TRIAL – This has a huge range of uses and includes a few pieces of software – read my full SEO Powersuite review.
Don’t Like Videos? Follow This Instead!
Guest posting on high quality websites is a huge topic of late. I will show you how I manage and automate it in an efficient way so you get the most value out of your guest post.
I will teach you how to:
- Find target guest posting sites
- Search and filter through the guest posting sites database
- Automate contacting your targets
- Create the best proposal
- Keep track of your guest posts
Process of Guest Posting
There’s a few steps that goes into guest posting.
Typically the process goes something like this:
- Locate websites that are looking for guest posts
- Contact the owner by email for guest posting guidelines
- Discuss the nature of your intended guest post
- Waiting period until the post is published
- Keep track of the statistics and results of your post
- Create a list of guest posting partners
Using SEO Powersuite
There is a way you can modify Link Assistant in SEO Powersuite to manage your guest posts instead of link exchanges.
In the columns, you can see my Partner Domains available for contact, the rank of the website, email address and status of the post. On the right most column, I have some guest posts sent, some are live, and some I have gotten a response.
When you click the Email tab, you can see all the details for the email correspondence including date, sender, and what their response is.
So you can see that Link Assistant manages your emails in an organized way so you can easily see who you’ve contacted, who you’ve written for and who is waiting.
Setting Up a New Project
Let’s get started on a new project. I’ll show you how to tweak Link Assistant to make it work for managing your guest post database.
So first, go up to File and click on New project. Enter in your URL and it’ll go and collect some data.
Enter in your name and email address that you want to be using for contacting other websites for guest posts. After you finished that, go to Preferences, Proxy Settings and click Proxy Rotation.
Remember to import your private proxies.
Next step is to select Email Client under Email Management. This is where we put in our server details and it’s important to figure out what details to enter depending on how many posts you want to send.
If you are thinking about sending out a bunch of guest posts in one day, say a hundred, then I suggest using a Yahoo or Hotmail account and using their outgoing mail servers.
If you plan on sending only a couple of emails a day, then you can enter in your website’s contact email address with those incoming mail settings.
The reason why I advise doing this is that when you’re sending out so many email requests in one day, it’s better to take advantage of Hotmail’s SMTP servers instead.
After you fill in the details, click Test Connection to make sure everything is good to go!
How To Find Guest Posting Sites
Now we’re ready to look for some guest posting sites to post on.
- Click Search
- Select Find sites by keyword
- Check the enable expert options box.
Click Next and in the following box, enter your keywords you’re searching for. One footprint I suggest using is “write for us” a common one used by websites accepting guest posts.
The next step asks you to select your search engines. I just choose Google and uncheck the rest of the choices.
Step 4 asks you to Configure Scan Depth Limits. Now you can choose for no limit at all or choose a specified number of potential partners. I’m going to leave it at 10 so it doesn’t take forever to find results.
Skip Interested Partner Filters and then the next options can be all left at default except for the last. Make sure to check the box to get complete URLs.
Almost done!
Step 7 lets you set the ranking factors with a bunch of different preferred filtering options. I like to see the domain rank since I’m looking to get a link from a high ranking page so you can set the domain and page rank, popularity and Alexa rank as you choose.
Click Next and it’ll go and fetch all of the websites that fit our criteria we just put in.
After it has finished completing the list, click Select all, Next and then Finish. Now you have a nice list of potential linking partners and websites to guest post on!
Sorting Through The Guest Posting Sites List
The list will come up and you can see it’s organized all nicely with the domain, backlink page, contact name, email, and status all in there.
Let’s sort our list a bit more. Go up to the settings cog on the right corner and select Show All under Workspaces. Click Edit and you can choose to filter by domain page rank and the Alexa rank.
Once you finished that, make sure to remove any websites that don’t have a contact email since it’ll be useless to us if we can’t email the owner.
Email Template
To create a template for your guest post emails, go to Preferences, Email Management, Edit Email Templates and click Add with the green plus to create a template.
Next, you need to name your template, add the subject and then type in your body text. I’ve included a pre-prepared template for you to use that you can download below the video.
This template is designed to give you an idea of what you should be saying so you should edit it to make it your own.
This includes an introduction, recognition of their guest post preferences and an offer of a 100% original high quality guest post written by you.
Something extra that I offer for is 25 Facebook likes and tweets to promote the guest post.
I use Fiverr to get the social media shares and you can find some that also throw in a couple Stumbles or Diggs so this is another incentive to make my offer even more irresistible!
What the Email Process Looks Like
To understand how the whole process works, I’m going to change the email contact information for one of our targets so our email will go to our own inbox so we can see how it is for both parties.
Right click on any name and choose Edit Link Partner. Where the box says Partner Email, I’m going to change it to the one I’m using.
So let’s just go and select the one we changed, click Email, paste our template and click Send.
Once the email has gone through, check your inbox and the email should be there. This is what it looks like for both parties during the email process.
Sending Out Bulk Emails
If you have a huge list of partners, you can easily email all of them at once by repeating the same steps. Select all, click Email and send out the template.
Say you have a list of a thousand potential guest post partners. One thing to help the bulk email process is by delaying emails. Go up to Preferences, Email Management, Email client settings and click the Mail Management tab.
There is a box where you can check to send out emails with delays so you can change it to 30 seconds between each email for example.
Status
After you’ve gone and send out all your emails, we need to change the status to keep track. Select your list, right click and choose Update Multiple Partners and Status.
We can add in “guest post response” “guest post request sent” and “guest post live” to make it easier for us to keep track of our progress.
Once you send out your emails or get a response, remember to change the status updates so you don’t forget which ones you’ve sent, which ones you’ve gotten a response and things like that.
As soon as your guest post is live, you can Edit your link partner information again, click on the Backlink tab and enter the URL of your now live guest post. Change the status to “guest post live” and hit update.
On the main page with the list of all your partners, you can see that the status is changed and the URL is shown so you can see right off the bat what posts are live, etc. Link Assistant makes it nice and simple to keep track of all your guest post contacts!
Importing Targets with Scrapebox
There is a way to use Scrapebox to create a target list and filter through them.
Enter in the keywords you’re looking for and I also included my footprints which you can download under the video. Click Start Harvesting and Scrapebox will go and look for targets.
Once it comes back with a list, click Export URL List and copy it to the clipboard. Head back over to Link Assistant and go to File, Import, Plain text and paste in your list.
Check the expert options box and click Next. Check the get complete URLs box in the next window and everything else at default. You can go and filter through again by rank like we did before or add in some other factors.
After it’s done searching, select all and click Next. Now we have a brand new list of targets imported from Scrapebox.
Like we did earlier, go through and remove one without an email address, sort by ranking or go ahead and email all of them.
One thing to take note of is if you are using a Hotmail or Yahoo email account with the outgoing SMTP servers and sending out hundreds or thousands of emails, your account might be banned.
Make sure to sent up the incoming mail setting so even if you get responses to the banned email address, they will be sent to your contact email.
Use Guest Posting Software To Make It Easy
That’s all there is to it! By using Link Assistant, you can easily keep record of all your guest posts and the email process. If you want to try it out, there is a free trial you can download.
Link Assistant is included in the SEO Powersuite package which is another powerful tool to do SEO audits, backlink analysis and track rankings.
I highly recommend it as I use it everyday.
Resources In The Tutorial
Link Assistant FREE TRIAL – It’s main purpose is to find recipricoal link partners which sucks. I use it to automate and manage my guest posting campaigns with a few tweaks.
SEO Powersuite FREE TRIAL – This has a huge range of uses and includes a few pieces of software. You get RankTracker (the best rank tracking software imo), Website Auditor (great for checking onsite issues), SEO Spyglass (download competitor backlinks) and LinkAssistant It is an essential suite of SEO tools that everyone should have in their arsenal.
