The $200,000 Outreach Strategy

Transcription

1 Copyright 2015 by All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. 1

2 The $200,000 Outreach Strategy Or What I Learned from Placing Over 1,000 Guest Posts in Google If you keep doing what everyone else is doing, you re going to have the same results as everyone else. Chapter 1 This Guide is Not for the Casual SEO...5 Googles Penguin update forever changed the way we go about link building & SEO in general. We can t use the same link building tactics that worked before April 24th, This first chapter explores the current status of the link building landscape & we delve into why I believe building your own guest posts are a safe & essential part of any serious SEO s link building arsenal. Chapter 2 How to Identify a Google-Safe Link Opportunity...12 Guest posting has been the flavour of the month for quite a while now. An unfortunate side effect of this is that some of the more unscrupulous members of the SEO community will try & take advantage of those looking for a quick fix. In chapter 2 I will show you the quick & easy way to spot a perfect target for guest posting. You will learn exactly how to identify the kind of site that is safe to get a link from & the type of sites you want to stay away from. No link analysis software required. Chapter 3 The $200,000 Outreach Strategy...16 This is it. My no holds barred, step by step system I ve used to find thousands of authority blogs to guest post on. Here you will learn exactly how to scrape up thousands of potential targets & how to perform the necessary quality control, so that you ensure you maximise your most important resource your time. Chapter 4 Using Advanced Search Modifiers...38 Is time a factor? Do you need to test out a specific markets potential before getting involved? This is the best way to find super specific guest posting opportunities in a just few minutes. Here you will learn how to use advanced search modifiers to turbo charge your scraping so you only find guaranteed opportunities & eliminate time wasters. 2

3 Chapter 5 How to Hijack All of Your Competitors Links Why should you do all the hard work when someone s already done it for you? This is one of the most effective ways to quickly find phenomenal guest post opportunities. In this chapter we focus on quality & quantity - you will learn how to quickly & accurately identify all of your competitor s previous guest posts using software. We will automate this entire process so you can pick & choose which links you want to get for your clients. Chapter 6 How to Build a Lethal Outreach Team for $2 an Hour...46 One of the most important tasks in guest posting is also one of the most tedious ing the thousands of blogs you re going to uncover in the previous chapters. We re going to build a team of virtual assistants to do all the grunt work for us. I will give you my exact template that I ve refined over years of outreach & show you how to manage you a successful outreach team. Chapter 7 How to Disguise Your Links from Google & Avoid Penalties...59 Since Google is on the war path for any & all link builders, we re going to take steps to ensure we disguise our links as best we can. This chapter will teach you the best ways to reduce your footprint & avoid any kind of manual or algorithmic penalty that may result from link building post penguin. Chapter 8 How to Get World Class Content & get Maximum Exposure to Your Links...62 We re not going to go to all this trouble & spend all this money, just to throw up any old content on these blogs. Chapter 8 will reveal the #1 trick you must know to find the best writers. You will learn the 7 fool proof methods to come up with awesome article titles that will ensure your content keeps getting shared & collects comments for weeks after it s posted. Chapter 9 Simple Tip & Tricks to Super Charge Your Guest Posts...70 Chapter 9 is dedicated to getting every last inch of value out of your links. We ll look at some simple ways to get more exposure more comments, more shares & more SEO benefit out of each & every link you place. 3

4 Getting Around This Guide This Guide is Not for the Casual SEO...5 Can t I Just Use an Outreach Service?...9 What Kind of Blog do I Want to Guest Post on?...12 This is Scrapebox...16 Let s Trim the Fat ,000 URL s? I m Not ing That Many Sites!...46 Building Your Outreach Team...48 Keeping Track of Your Virtual Assistant...50 Assessing the Blog for Suitability...51 Set Up a Fake Blog to Appear More Authentic Outreach Template Flattery Will Get You Nowhere...55 So How Much is Each Guest Post Going to Cost Me?...56 When Negotiating a Placement on a Blog...57 Disguising Your Guest Post from Google...59 What Makes a Good Supporting Link?...59 Article Topics 101: Commanding Comments & Social Engagement...62 I m Not Going to Write This Content Myself!...67 Getting Even More Out of Your Guest Posts

5 Chapter 1 This Guide is Not for the Casual SEO This guide is for those of you who are looking for a predictable & reliable method of building high quality links & have a decent budget to play with. This applies for those of you working in agencies, who are looking for a scalable link building strategy to sell to your clients each month. It is also suitable for those of you who are serious about link building. Real Links Ain t Cheap This guide is not for the casual SEO. If you don t have a budget of at least $1,000 per month allocated for link building, I suggest you read another guide, like Backlinko, Quicksprout, Point Blank SEO or Moz. These will be much better suited to your needs, as you won t have the resources to properly execute the strategies I am going to demonstrate. You either pay with your time or you pay with your wallet, there is no such thing as free traffic. This Guide is Not for the Uber White Hat SEO We re going to be paying for links & we re going to leave them followed. If you re looking for something that s 100% white hat, I suggest you look elsewhere. In a perfect world, we would have unlimited time & resources to build only white hat links, but that s not what this guide is about. This guide is going to show you how to use blogger outreach as a predictable & sustainable source of relevant & high quality links. It s up to you to decide if this strategy is right for you & your clients. You need to be realistic & understand that although no one really admits to it, purchasing links is what drives a huge portion of the professional SEO industry. Real white hat link building is very much hit & miss. Clients want results, they don t want to hear we re going to spend $5,000 on this idea, we re pretty sure it s going to get a few links Will guest posts still work in 2015? I have seen a handful of examples of sites who were allegedly punished by Google for using guest posts to increase their rankings. I have also seen many more case studies where sites have used guest posts 5

6 to increase their rankings in Google not to mention my own personal successes using guest posts, which I can t specifically reference for obvious reasons. In my opinion, guest posts work very well and can be a viable part of any link building campaign, just don t make it the only part of your link building campaign, you need to diversify your link building efforts & build a natural looking backlink profile. Google Lies to Us All the Time It s no secret that Google lies to us all the time. They employ their head of webspam, Matt Cutts, to deliver warnings & misinformation to the SEO community via his video & blog posts. Over the years, he has systematically outlawed nearly every link building tactic in our arsenal. Explaining that any links intended to manipulate Rank or a site's ranking in Google are breaking Googles terms of service & we could potentially be deindexed if we take part in such practices. Although, even after penguin, panda, pigeon & a whole host of other animals, you can still find recent case studies of people who are able to spam their way to the top of Google. What does Google have to Gain from Lying to us? Because their algorithm isn t as great as they would have you believe. What s the next best thing to having the smartest algorithm in the digital world? Making people think you do. If everyone is convinced that they are able to algorithmically identify & punish paid links, then do they really need to be able to? 6

7 I m not suggesting they can t detect paid links, I m just saying not to the extent that they would have you believe. This is why they ask the community to report the paid links of their competitors and voluntarily disavow their own paid links. I don t think so Matt, do your own dirty work. The Lions Share of Googles Revenue Comes From Advertising Google is a publicly listed company & they have a responsibility to their shareholders to increase their revenue year on year. They re very good at making money - according to Search Engine Watch in 2014: Google's Q1 numbers are big a 19 percent year-over-year (YoY) increase in revenue when the numbers are more than $15 billion. 68 percent of that revenue came from Google sites (the AdWordsmanaged ads on Google itself, YouTube, Maps, etc.) It s in Googles best interest that we all buy AdWords ads. Each quarter, they need us to spend more on AdWords than we did in the previous quarter. How Does Google Ensure We Keep Spending Money on AdWords? Between Googles preferential treatment of big brands, the personalised search results and the increasing difficulty in SEO, they re forcing us to purchase AdWords ads if we want any kind of guaranteed exposure on the first page. Don t Believe the Hype Google doesn t want you to believe that purchasing links is a way to the front page they want you to think that AdWords is. Google constantly spreads their propaganda that if you buy links, you re going to get punished. They make a large public display of this every few months, making an example of sites like MyBlogGuest. com, RapGenius.com, JCPenny.com, etc, to put the fear of god into us. 7

8 Technically Everything we do is Against their Terms of Service If you ve ever actually read this thing, you ll see that damn near everything you do in regards to SEO is grounds for a penalty. I ve worked both client side & with agencies over the years & the unfortunate truth is that we need to manufacture links if our clients are going to be competitive. It s rare to get a client who is understanding & patient enough to do what it takes to legitimately earn 100% white hat links. Who is honestly interested in linking to a crane hire company or a bank? I m not suggesting it can t be done, but with the budget & time constraints that we re usually facing, we need a scalable method of building high quality, relevant links each month. Social Signals are Going to Take Over Links as a Ranking Factor No they re not, at least not anytime soon. Links are the best metric Google has for site quality. They ve spent billions of dollars & over a decade perfecting an algorithm that relies on backlinks as an indication of quality. They re not going to abandon their link based algorithm the moment social signals come along. Why Should You Listen to me? I have been in the SEO game for over 10 years now & have placed over 1,000 sponsored posts in the last 2 years alone. I have helped clients in tough industries like insurance & finance reach the first position in Google. It s my job to manufacture links at an agency level. I work with monthly budgets in the tens of thousands and if you read through this guide, I can show you how to scale your guest posting to professional levels & compete with the biggest brands in your industry. Does the SEO Community Really Need Another Outreach Guide? No, probably not, but I m going to write on anyway. I feel that my process is different enough to other guides out there to warrant being shared with the community. I m not saying the others are wrong & that I m right. I m just publishing what has been working for me over the past couple of years, so that others can hopefully share in my success. 8

9 Can t I Just Use an Outreach Service? Sure you can. There are plenty out there to choose from and they re both cheap & convenient. But at the end of the day, you get what you pay for. We want to focus on real blogs who can give us high quality links. I ve dealt with most of these services in the past & I can assure you that you re better off doing your own outreach. These services don t have the same quality standards that are required for successful link building. (Ask to see some sample blogs, keeping in mind that they re putting their best foot forward.) Outreach services are usually one small step above a public blog network. Their blogs have no real audience & their backlink profiles consist of directory submissions & free blogging platforms. Let s compare a $30 Guest Post with a $200 Guest Post I ve used Majestic SEO to compare 2 sites where I purchased guest posts in the past. One was through a guest posting service, the other I found & placed myself. No points for guessing which one is which. 9

10 You can see that the $200 guest post has far more & much better quality links. Even though the $30 link may have a DA of 30, you re not going to get any benefit from appearing on that blog. I ve compared the same 2 URLs below using ahrefs: 10

11 Note that the $30 link has zero social signals. You Really Do Get What You Pay For I m not suggesting every outreach service out there is total rubbish I can t definitively claim that, but I don t use them at all, I ve had too many bad experiences. I said before that real links ain t cheap & I meant it - link building is about quality over quantity. UPDATE FOR 13th AUGUST 2014: Google recently updated their webmaster guidelines to mention low-quality guest blog posts are considered on par with scraped content. What does this mean to us? It means that more than ever you need to stop using cheap & easy guest posting opportunities. Take the time to find quality targets we want relevant & exceptional blogs. This is exactly what you will learn in this guide. 11

12 Chapter 2 How to Identify a Google-Safe Link Opportunity What Kind of Blog do I Want to Get a Link From? What kind of a sites do we want linking to us? Authority sites. That s my main criteria when I m looking for link opportunities. There are thousands of blogs out there that have been created specifically to sell guest posts to unsuspecting SEO s & they re total crap. They have boring content, generic WordPress themes & abysmal back link profiles. These sites will not help boost your rankings & are a total waste of your money. So How do You Identify an Authority Site? Jonathan Leger covered the topic of authority site identification in this video. Metrics like DA and Rank aren t a consideration, Jonathan identifies an authority site from the following 6 factors: 1. Strong social presence 2. Clean professional theme/site 3. Top quality engaging content 4. Branded domain name 5. Branded logo with header graphic 6. Proper legal, contact & about us pages The main factor I look for when I m guest posting is whether or not the blog is a real site. Do they have a real audience who are actively engaged in the site? This means I m looking for COMMENTS and SOCIAL SIGNALS - Is their audience commenting & sharing the content on that blog? 12

13 Everything else should fall into place if the site has a real audience Authority blogs have a real audience for a reason, because they have enough real links & social signals to rank for a lot of phrases. This means Google already trusts them and is sending them a decent amount of traffic & getting a link from them will help pass some of that authority onto you. Judging a blogs SEO strength on a metric like page rank or domain authority alone is flawed. These metrics can be artificially inflated with surprisingly little effort. I do use them as a rough guide, but I will ultimately make up my own mind as to whether or not a blog is appropriate. Check Out Those Comments Have a look at a range of posts, do they have real comments? Most WordPress themes will show the number of comments each post has accumulated alongside the title. So you can get an idea of how genuine a site is just by checking out the homepage. I will sometimes let a lack of comments slip if I see evidence of REAL social sharing. This means that there is a regular audience & we may be able to coerce a comment out of them with some engaging content. 13

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15 Make sure you read some of them, spotting spammy comments is dead easy. You need to be aware of fake social engagement. If every post on a blog has exactly the same number of shares & tweets on each post or an unusually high numbers of shares, tweets, etc. These are both red flags & would warrant further investigation into a sites legitimacy. I generally don t waste my time assessing the backlink profile of every site I deal with, there just aren t enough hours in the day. This is the general quality control check list I try to adhere to: y The blog is relevant to your niche y There are genuine comments on most posts y There are real social shares on most posts y DA of at least 15+ y Blog is indexed in Google y Blog has on a unique IP y Blog is not exclusively made up of guest posts y Blog is not involved in bad neighbourhoods (gambling, porn, payday loans, pharmacy, etc) A Quick Word about Domain Authority We all know that DA isn t great. It s extremely easy to game & I only use it as a very rough guide. Of the 1,000+ posts that I ve placed, my average DA is 40. If I can see a site has a real audience, but a very low DA, I will still place a link because the site is growing & its authority will increase over time, I m just getting in on the ground floor. Adjust your minimum DA to suit your own needs. 15

16 Chapter 3 The $200,000 Outreach Strategy This is Scrapebox Once in a blue moon there comes along an SEO tool that make you wonder what you did before you discovered it. Scrapebox is that tool. I use Scrapebox almost every day, I m constantly finding new ways to use it & functions I didn t know it had. It s a SEO Swiss army knife & should be a part of everyone s arsenal, if you don t have a copy of Scrapebox yet, it s only $97 for a lifetime license you need to purchase it right now. It s the backbone of everything I am going to teach you in this guide. 16

17 We re going to use Scrapebox to enter specific queries into Google, make massive amounts of searches & record the results so that we can identify thousands of relevant blogs to place links on. I m not going to make this an introductory course to Scrapebox, many SEOs before me have already done this. The more you learn about it, the more uses you will find for it, so it s definitely worth your time doing some research. At the very least, I recommend Jacob Kings Scrapebox tutorial and you can find some extra training videos here. Do You Want to get Your IP Banned from Google? Of course you don t. You will need some private proxies to get the most out of Scrapebox. This is absolutely essential if you re going to do some serious scraping - do not skimp on this. Scrapebox has a built in function that can find & use public proxies, but it s time consuming & unreliable. If you re reading this, I m assuming you re at an agency level or at least a serious SEO, so loosen the purse strings & get some private proxies. You can get 10 private proxies for $20 a month from buyproxies.org - these guys are great & I can t recommend them enough. Their proxies are super-fast & if you manage to kill any of them, they will usually replace them within a few minutes if you their help desk. 17

18 How to use Scrapebox Like a Professional I m going to teach you how to shoot past the novice stages of scraping & propel you straight to advanced Scrapebox use. We are going to enter a query string into Scrapebox. It will then search Googles index for blogs that feature these footprints. Most guest posting guides recommend you enter their massive list of guest post variations into Scrapebox, alongside your main keyword. This approach is far too broad & is generally a waste of your time. While it will give you a few decent opportunities, 95% of what it will turn up is pure rubbish & 5% will be the same blogs everyone else is using. If you keep doing what everyone else is doing, you re going to have the same results as everyone else We re concentrating on generating a laser focused list of real opportunities. To increase our productivity, we only want to use a very strict set of search modifiers. This will greatly increase the likelihood that we will find real blogs actively involved in guest posting. The 3 Elements of a Successful Scrape The first thing we need to do is find suitable blogs to post on, this is going to be completely handled by Scrapebox. You will need to include the following 3 elements in your scrape. Scrapebox will work with any single element listed below, but when you add them all together, you will get a much more successful & targeted set of results: 18

19 1. Guest post related footprint 2. Keyphrase related footprint 3. Quality indicator footprint Your query string will eventually look like this once it has been put together: 1. The Guest Post Related Footprint This is the footprint on a blog that indicates they ve already placed a guest posts and would (hopefully) be open to posting more. Simply using a broad footprint, like guest post on its own will return a lot of irrelevant results, this phrase it far too common to be a reliable footprint. We re going to rely on a super strict set of footprints. The trick here to use advanced search modifiers like inurl & intitle, which specifically searches the URL & the page title for footprints - instead of the entire page, which will give us a lot of false positives. Copy & paste the list below in a notepad file and save it somewhere on your computer. y inpostauthor:"guest post" y inpostauthor:"guest author" y inpostauthor:"guest" y intitle:"guest blog" y intitle:"guest post" y intitle:"guest author" y intitle:"guest blog for us" y "become guest writer" y "become a guest writer" y contribute to our blog y "guest blogger wanted" y "guest bloggers wanted" y "guest post guidelines" y "guest post by" 19

20 y intitle:"guest blogging opportunity" y intitle:"submit blog post" y intitle:"submit guest post" y intitle:"write for us" y intitle:"write for me" y inurl:category/guest y inurl:tag/guest y inurl:guest*blogger y inurl:guest*author y inurl:guest*post y inurl:guest*posts y inurl:guest-blogger y inurl:guest-post y inurl:guest-posts y inurl:"write for us" y inurl:"write for me" y "accepting guest posts" y "become guest blogger" y "become a guest blogger" y "submit a guest post" y "submit guest post" y "submit your guest post" y "submit your own guest post" y "guest blogger wanted" y inpostauthor:"sponsored post" y inpostauthor:"sponsored author" y inpostauthor:"guest" y intitle:"sponsored post" y intitle:"sponsored author" y intitle:"submit sponsored post" y inurl:category/sponsored y inurl:tag/sponsored y inurl: sponsored*post y inurl: sponsored*posts y inurl: sponsored-post y inurl: sponsored-posts y "accepting sponsored posts" y "sponsored post by" 20

21 2. The Keyword Related Footprint You will also need to give Scrapebox a keyword so that you find blogs relevant to your industry. The trick here is not to use simple head terms. For instance, if you re looking for finance blogs a bad keyword would be money or credit cards. You are going to scrape up a lot of irrelevant blogs that feature these words because they re so common. You want to enter long tail phrases. Use industry specific terms that only relevant blogs would feature. The more technical your keyword selection, the more relevant your targets will be not too specific or you won t get any results. Some examples of good keywords to use in the finance industry: y capital gain tax y high interest savings account y fixed interest rates y current home loan interest rates This will omit any of the crappy general interest & mommy blogs that may mention finance related terms in a post about their kids lunch money. I usually scrape with a list of 20 keywords at a time. Paste them into a notepad document & save it somewhere on your computer. Here s a trick to find a lot of great long tail keywords very easily: 1. Find a top 10 blog in your industry 2. Go to the Google Keyword Planner 3. Instead of a entering a keyword, enter the blogs URL into the planner. This will scan that blog & give you a set of keywords that are relevant to its content. 21

22 4. Use some common sense - scroll down the list, looking for long tail & industry specific phrases. 22

23 3. The Quality Indicator Footprint We re going to include a footprint that will increase the quality of your scrape & ensure you re finding blogs with a real audience. We re going to use the presence of comments as an indication that the blog has an audience. When a reader comments on a blog post, most WordPress templates list the number of comments that the article has accumulated. This is a footprint that we can scrape. Using this footprint means that we re only going to scrape up blogs that have comments on their posts. Create another notepad document listing numbers of comments, like this: y 1 comment y 2 comments y 3 comments y 4 comments y Etc I usually go all the way up to 40 comments, just to be thorough. Make a list of comment footprints & save it in a notepad document somewhere on your computer. This means that now your Scrapebox search string will look something like this when we put it all together: 23

24 Putting it all together in Scrapebox Now we need to add these 3 lists into Scrapebox. You should have 3 separate notepad documents saved on your computer: 1. Long tail Keywords 2. Strict guest post footprints 3. Comment list (1 to 40) Open up your copy of Scrapebox - for now we ll be working in the top left window the Harvester. Copy & paste your long tail keywords in there I usually work with a list of about 20 at a time. Don t forget to wrap each keyword inside quotes. 24

25 You now want to add the guest post footprint variations that I listed earlier. Press the M in the top left on Scrapebox & navigate your way to where you saved this file this will combine each keyword with each guest post footprint, giving you hundreds of variations (20 keywords x 41 guest post footprints). 25

26 You can see in the screenshot above, we have now jumped from 20 keyword variations up to 820 keyword variations. Now we need to add our comment footprints. You should have already saved these in a notepad document, once again press the M button & import these. 26

27 You can see that we now have 32,800 keyword variations that we will be scraping with. This is going to take a while to scrape. Depending on how many Queries & the type of proxies you have, it could take 12+ hours (I ve seen Scrapebox take 36+ hours on a single scape). Because of this, you might want to run Scrapebox on a spare computer, or perhaps rent a VPS to do all your scraping on. Scrapebox Settings There is a lot of debate over the best settings to use here in Scrapebox, but this is what I go with. I only choose to scrape Google & omit Yahoo & Bing. This will ensure that any blog we scrape up is already in the Google index. I only scrape the first 500 results you can choose to scrape up to 1,000, but you generally get a lot of rubbish after the first

28 This means that for each query string, Scrapebox will check the first 500 results in Google it s going to check the first 500 results 32,800 times (this is why we use a bunch of private proxies). Getting Even More Intricate It s also worth noting that at this point you can add any other footprints you would like to include. Want to find some educational guest post opportunities? Add in a file with the modifier site:.edu. I Only Want to Find Guest Posts in My Country In the lower left hand box in Scrapebox, you will see a little button marked D click this & you can search any geographically specific version of Google you like. This is handy when you need to find local link opportunities. You will need to add another modifier to your search string, specifying your country: site:com.au. 28

29 Did Scrapebox Just Crash? Did you leave Scrapebox going for 24 hours, only to find that it s frozen? Not to worry, it keeps a log of everything it has scraped up to when it crashed. To find it, just go to where you have Scrapebox installed & look for the folder called Harvester Sessions. Now sort by Date Modified and open the most recent folder. It will contain your most recent scrape. Let s Trim the Fat We now have a massive list of target URLs to sort through, so we re going to refine our list & remove any unsuitable prospects to make better use of our time. I highly recommend performing these tasks in the order that I have listed them below, some processes are a lot quicker than others, so we re going to cut our list down as much as possible before we run the more time consuming actions. Removing the Duplicates Scrapebox will return a lot of duplicate results & the first thing we want to do is Remove Duplicate URL s. 29

30 Now run the option for Remove Duplicate Domains this is much more unforgiving and will often cut your scrape down by 95% or more. Remove the Useless Sites There are some types of sites that we will have scraped up that are no good for our purposes, we need to weed these out now to maximise our time. You can remove any government & educational sites (they are not very likely to give you a link), as well as any of the free blogging platforms. Here is a list of the footprints you want to remove: y.edu y.gov y wordpress.com y weebly y blogspot y tumblr y Blogger 30

31 y Typepad y SquareSpace You can either do this via excel, or there is a function in Scrapebox, which is a little more time consuming. Under Remove/Filter choose Remove URLs Containing Check the Rank On the right hand side of Scrapebox, there is an option to check the Domain page rank of every site in your scrape, run this & remove any PR 6 and over. These higher quality sites are less likely to be selling guest posts, so we won t waste our time contacting them. You could even remove PR 5 s - depending your results, it s worth seeing how they respond to your offer & adjust your strategy accordingly. 31

32 I don t remove any low page rank sites, since PR is such an unreliable metric these days. We will remove any low DA blogs instead, which still isn t a perfect solution, but we ve got to work with what s available. Checking for Social Signals This is where the Scrapebox Addons are going to come into play. A lack of any social signals is a pretty good indicator that a site is not worth your time. Yes, of course social signals can be faked, but we re still going to use this as one more metric to further refine our list. Go to the Addons drop down & click on the Scrapebox Social Checker (you will have to install this if you haven t already) 32

33 Click on Check Domain Only, this will check the homepage of the site & not just the URL. Let this addon run through every URL in your list. You can now remove any site that doesn t have any social signals associated with it. 33

34 I usually remove all sites with only a single like & share as well, this is usually just the blog owner giving their content a boost & is not an indicator of a real audience. Check the Domain Authority You want to install a free addon called Scrapebox Authority Addon. This will automatically scrape the Domain Authority of each of our targets. You will need to enter your Moz API here, I just use the free version, which has a 10 second delay between giving you each DA, this means that this tool can be very time consuming on large lists leave it overnight & check it in the morning. 34

35 I usually delete anything with a DA of less than 15 & higher than 70. This ensures that we are not wasting our time with any super low quality sites or any sites that are too high quality & are less likely to respond to us. You can adjust these limits to suit your strategy I have landed a few DA 80+ sites before, but these are definitely the exception to the rule. 35

36 Make Sure Your Blogs Are in the Google Index Are your targets indexed in Google? If you followed my instructions above & only scraped Google for guest posts, then yes they are & you can skip this step. If you re greedy & also used Bing & Yahoo, then you might want to give this a go. You want to check that the homepage is indexed in Google & not the URL that you scraped up. A page not in the index isn t an issue, but if an entire site is missing, then that s a deal breaker. 36

37 Use the Trim to Root button & then Remove Sub Domains, to give you the top level URL. Go over to the right hand side of Scrapebox & run the Check Indexed function. Remove anything that isn t in the Google index. That s it now you re ready for outreach You will now have a super focused set of blogs to target & you re ready for some serious outreach covered in the next section. Before you get started, here are a couple of killer strategies to find more guest post opportunities. 37

38 Chapter 4 The Broad Specific Approach to Finding Link Opportunities This method is designed to find highly targeted link opportunities very quickly. It relies on using broad head terms & advanced search modifiers in Scrapebox. You can use this strategy to scrape up a highly targeted list very quickly the output won t be as thorough as the previous strategy, but it will be super specific. What we re looking for here are relevant blogs that have broad keywords in their URL or title as an indication of relevance. ie super broad keywords like credit, money & investment would be suitable for the finance industry. The following 2 search strings will search the page title & URL for footprints: y inurl: y intitle: We want to combine this with the 2 broadest guest post footprints: y guest post y sponsored post For instance, if we go with the finance example again & add the word money into this search string, along with our quality indicator footprint: y inurl: money guest post 1 comment This will find blogs with the keyword money in their URL and who feature the words guest post somewhere on their site: y y y y y 38

39 y PROTIP: you can even take this a step further & search for a string like: y inurl: money inurl: guest post 1 comment Get creative, this approach can be particularly powerful, but is extremely specific. This shouldn t be your only strategy to find targets, since not all blogs will use such a Scrapebox friendly URL structure. Don t forget to check for social signals, DA, etc to ensure you re only contacting suitable targets. 39

40 Chapter 5 How to Hijack All of Your Competitors Back Links Why not take advantage of someone else s hard work? Other SEOs out there have already placed guest posts all over the internet, let s reverse engineer what they ve done & use it to our advantage. Find a blog offering guest posts in your industry we ll call this Target A. Find out what footprint Target A uses to label their guest posts, failing that, you can just use the phrase guest post. You can see in the screenshot below, where we found the footprint this is a guest post from Now we re going to use Scrapebox to quickly scrape up every guest post on Target A. Just enter the following search string into Scrapebox: site: domain.com your unique guest post footprint In our example, Target A is the blog Get Rich Slowly so our footprint would be: site:getrichslowly.org this is a guest post from This will limit our search to getrichslowly.org & give us every page that the phrase this is a guest post from appears on every guest post on Target A. 40

41 Don t forget to run Remove Duplicate URLs to dedupe the list. You can see below that we now have 289 guest posts on Target A that we can reverse engineer Export the list to excel so it s more manageable & start visiting each URL to see who each guest post belongs to. You can outsource this to a virtual assistant for a few dollars more on this later. 41

42 We now have a list of your competitors, who have purchased a guest post on Target A. We want to find out where else they ve purchased guest posts, so we can post there too. I m assuming that you all have access to a link analyser: Open Site Explorer, Majestic and ahrefs are the most popular. Matthew Woodward did a recent comparison of all the major link assessment tools and ahrefs came out on top, so if you need to purchase one, check them out first. Grab the URL of one of the sites (we ll call them Competitor A ) who purchased a guest post on Target A & enter it into your link checker to reveal every referring URL to Competitor A. Export this to excel. Now grab that that list of Competitor A s backlinks and paste it into Scrapebox & remove duplicate URLs 42

43 Go to the Scrapebox Addons and choose Scrapebox Scanner The Scrapebox Scanner scans the HTML of a URL looking for any phrase that you specify. In this case, we re going to tell it to scan every back link of Competitor A & find every URL that mentions the phrase guest post. This will give us every (identifiable) guest post Competitor A has purchased. I m not going explain exactly how to use the page scanner, you can watch a quick video here. I tell the page scanner to search for the following phrases, you can add more variations if you want: y guest post y sponsored post y guest author y write for us y contribute to our blog Now Load the URLs from the Scrapebox harvester & hit Start (leave it at 25 connections) 43

44 Once the page scanner has finished you will have a list of every backlink that features a guest post footprint, or every guest post Competitor A has purchased. 44

45 Export your results & paste the relevant URLs back into Scrapebox. Now you can run your quality control factors again look for social signals, minimum DA, indexed in Google etc. In our example above, we were left with 93 guest post opportunities that we can now contact. Repeat this on every site that has purchased a guest post on Target A (Get Rich Slowly) & you ll soon have a super targeted list of real guest post opportunities. Ie run down the list & do this for Competitor B, Competitor C, Competitor D, etc PROTIP: Did you just get sent a massive list of URLs from a link broker? You can also use the page scanner to check massive amounts of URLs for bad neighbourhoods. Ie links to payday loans & pharmaceuticals. 45

46 Chapter 6 How to Build a Virtual Outreach Team for $2 an Hour 5,000 URL s? I m Not ing That Many Sites! You should now be left with a list of a few thousand super targeted blogs that you need to contact for a guest posting opportunity. If you re anything like me, you re far too busy to spend your time contacting bloggers. Not to worry, we can outsource this task very easily to a virtual assistant (VA). The best place to find cheap labour for a simple task like this is Upwork.com. You want to post a job for an Assistant or a Virtual Assistant. I have found that females from the Philippines make the best VA s for outreach. OK, But How Much is this Going to Cost Me? The sweet spot is $2 to $4 an hour, you may be able to get someone cheaper than this, but you re really pushing your luck in terms of reliability. You will want to hire multiple assistants & test them out for a few hours of outreach to find yourself a reliable VA. Remember that you need to hire fast & fire even faster. If someone isn t working out, it s usually not worth your time giving them one on one training, just hire someone else. How to Find the best Help for Your Outreach Post a job on Upwork.com explaining the project outreach. You will get hundreds of responses for such a simple task. You should state in your brief that you are looking to hire someone for no more than $4 an hour. Go the Extra Mile Although you will get more than enough responses to your job, we re going to take the time to reach out to our perfect applicant. Use the Find Freelancers function in the top right of the Upwork.com interface & use the following criteria to filter through the available freelancers: 46

47 y Feedback Rating: y Hourly Rate: $0 - $5 y Hours Billed: At least 1,000 y Location: East Asia y English Level: Fluent 47

48 Now sort through the freelancers, inviting any females from the Philippines to apply for the job. After 24 hours, you should have plenty of suitable applicants to choose from. Building Your Outreach Team You probably want to hire at least 2 or 3 VA s to begin with. Break up your list of URLs & share them with the VA s via Google docs. Tell them to work their way down the list, highlighting the sites that they contact (they re going to need to confirm each site is a suitable target before they contact them). From my experience, a decent VA will spend an average of 4 minutes to assess & contact each site - that s 15 sites per hour. Doing the Maths At $2 & 15 sites per hour, it will cost you about $130 to perform initial outreach on 1,000 sites. On a super targeted list, like I ve shown you how to create, I typically see a response rate of at least 30%. This means in a worst case scenario, you re spending $130 for 300 responses or $0.43 a response. Keeping an Eye on Your Virtual Assistant Have your VA send you a mini report at the end of each day (or week) telling you how many sites they contacted & how many hours they logged (you can confirm this in their work diary). If they re spending more than 4 minutes per site, let them know they need to work harder or let them go altogether. Cut them some slack if it s the first week you re working together. A new VA will generally get better at a task as they get more experience. PROTIP: you can hire a project manager to manage all your VA s as well as handle all the responses from your outreach efforts. It extremely difficult to find someone reliable & train them up to the stage where they can work completely autonomously, but depending on your needs, it could be worth the headache in the long run. 48

49 Gmail is Rubbish for Outreach I don t like using Gmail for outreach, it s far too unreliable. In my experience, Google monitors what you send & is looking for evidence of unsolicited ing. They re keeping track of people who send the same template day in & day out and will label them as a spammer. If Google thinks you re a spammer, a lot of your s will go directly to the junk folder. Google Aren t as Accommodating as they used to be Gmail doesn t like it when you share accounts across different countries. This is a safety feature to stop your account being hijacked, but if you share a Gmail with a VA in another country, Google can lock you both out of the account indefinitely & you will lose all access to your outreach efforts. It s Best not to Upset Google If you re going to be doing a lot of unsolicited ing, then don t involve Google they can hold a grudge against you for the rest of your life for something you did years ago that wasn t even against their TOS at the time So What Address Should I use for Outreach? Pay for your . If you ve read this far into this guide, you re obviously very serious about your link building spend a few bucks a month on some web space & you ll get unlimited accounts with it. You will have a lot more control over what you can do & you will look more professional to the bloggers you re contacting. We re going to be setting up a fake site very soon too, so bite the bullet now & buy some web space. You can now set up a new address for each VA. This will let you monitor their performance & the quality of each scrape. 49

50 PRO TIP use a websites contact form instead of your account whenever you can. This will ensure you get around as many spam complaints as possible. I don t like to send my outreach template out from an account more than 30 to 50 times in 24 hours. But you can via contact forms all day long. I m Spamming the Internet & No One Can Stop Me! Just because you re using a private address, doesn t mean that you can spam to your hearts content. Your hosting provider will still monitor any spam complaints against you & can shut down your entire guest posting empire if you receive too many (however, they re nowhere near as ruthless as Google). If this happens, you will have to set up shop with a new host & create all new accounts. PRO TIP add an unsubscribe option to your outreach template, something like reply with the word REMOVE to unsubscribe this just might save you from a few spam complains & every single complaint against you counts! Keeping Track of Your Virtual Assistant By now you should have a bunch of addresses ready to go: y dave@yourdomain.com y bob@yourdomain.com y jim@yourdomain.com The best way to monitor your VA and all of the responses they re generating, is by setting up a dedicated management program to host all of these accounts in one place. I use thunderbird for this Thunderbird is Mozillas answer to Outlook, it s free & it works great. 50

51 Get Your VA s to use Thunderbird too You want your VA to use thunderbird too, this saves them from using the messy online interface that comes along with private accounts. You will want to speak to your new host & find out the settings to get up & running in Thunderbird. Create a step by step document that shows your VA exactly what they need to do to set up their own version of Thunderbird. Use screenshots & be very specific, give them copy & paste settings. This way you can just forward this document onto any new VA s that you hire. Assessing the Blog for Suitability You should now have a team of VA s & a list of blogs to contact. Your VA will have to visit each site on your list & assess whether each blog is relevant enough for them to contact. Even though we scraped up a super targeted list, there is bound to be some rubbish in there, it s just the nature of scraping on such a massive scale. You will want to create an outreach document that you can give to all new VA s. This doc will explain the task. It will show them exactly how to perform outreach & what to look for when assessing a blog. It 51

52 will make hiring new VA s extremely easy as you can just hand them the training doc bonus points for creating a video instead of a document & uploading it to YouTube. I only give my VA s the most simple of tasks. Their only instructions are: y Is the blog relevant to my site? y Send the customised template I supplied How Relevant Does a Blog Have to be? It all depends on the niche your site is in. Would this blog have a reason to naturally link to your site? Think 6 degrees of separation. If I m working with an automotive site, I m only going to get links from vehicle themed blogs. If I m working with the insurance industry: Insurance > money > finance > credit cards > loans > etc anything finance related is fine. We have a fair idea of how Google categorises websites. When you set up Google Analytics, you re asked which category your site fits into. These are the options you re given to choose from: Which is the closest fit for your site? I don t see any insurance category, but I do see finance. I don t tell the VA to keep an eye out for spammy industries payday loans, Viagra, casino, adult, etc, I will do this myself in the final assessments of the site, this will keep their task that much more simple. 52

53 Set Up a Fake Blog to Appear More Authentic Since you re already purchasing some web space to gain access to the accounts, you might as well put it to use. Get a free WordPress template & some free content, head over to FIverr for a $5 logo & set up a fake blog. This fake blog will be the face of your outreach. It doesn t have to be fantastic & it doesn t have to rank. It s just a shell so that if any curious bloggers want to find out who they re dealing with (a good indicator of a genuine blog), you seem like a legitimate entity. So is a fake blog called a flog? It also acts as a buffer between your spamming unsolicited ing & the internet, to protect you & your clients from any negative backlash from angry bloggers. Here is what I ve been using recently. It s deliberately ambiguous & ugly as sin, but it serves its purpose. You can see I didn t even bother adding a custom logo or any content whatsoever. It does give me an excuse to be ing the blogger though. Keep in mind that 95% of bloggers won t even bother checking you out. 53

54 PROTIP: at the bottom of your outreach template, add a signature that mentions your title, contact details & URL. This adds that little bit more authenticity to making you seem like a real person & not a spammer. You get bonus point for adding an online phone number, but this is generally unnecessary. Thanks for your time. Ben Benson Head of Customer Relations M: Ben.Benson@your-domain.com W: 54

55 Outreach Template Flattery Will Get You Nowhere This is one area where you are going to get a lot of different opinions on the best course of action. Some people will tell you that you should reference their blog, tell them how much you enjoyed reading it, etc I m here to tell you that no one cares. Think about how many unsolicited s you receive each day. If someone sends you a wall of text, will you read it? Of course not. Do you believe it when a complete stranger gives you a complement? Hell no. The best thing you can do for your prospect is to take up as little of their time as you can & get straight to the point. This is the template that I use, feel free to copy it, although you should probably rewrite it & give it your own spin: Subject: Advertising on Template: Hello, We re interested in advertising on blogs, like. Are you able to let me know the different advertising options you offer? We re specifically interested in guest posts. Thanks for your time. YOUR NAME This template accomplishes a few things. From the subject line Advertising on BLOG NAME, they can tell that this is an advertising inquiry & will not ignore our if this is something they offer. If they read on we also mention that we re after guest posts, so they can reply with their pricing & guidelines if they want to participate. Personalisation is important when performing outreach. If you can find out the bloggers name, use it. I instruct the VA that if they can t find it within 30 seconds, to forget it & skip the name. Mention the name of the blog you re contacting in your template, ensure you capitalise it appropriately. 55

56 When do You Reveal the Client? I never mention my client or website until I m sure the blog is on board with the guest post. If you re not careful, you could potentially open your client up to having their name dragged through the mud. I m happy to reveal the industry before I mention the client, but I generally play my cards pretty close to my chest to protect the client at all costs. PRO TIP Some bloggers won t need to approve the clients site before agreeing on a post. This is potentially a red flag. It s not a deal breaker, but a real blog will want to ensure some form of quality control. This goes for the article title too, if they don t want to approve the title they will be posting on their site, you should be concerned that they will post any old crap they re given. Follow Up with the Non-Responders I like to follow up with all non-responders twice. There are plenty of reasons why someone might miss your first , so give them a couple more chances to respond. If I haven t heard from after the third attempt, I leave them alone for good. PRO TIP Whenever you finish placing a guest post with a new blogger, ask them if they can recommend any other bloggers they know who may be interested in a similar agreement. Nothing beats a personal recommendation & you never know if someone owns numerous blogs or is in a particular community of bloggers. So How Much is Each Guest Post Going to Cost Me? There is no set pricing structure for guest posts & there are a lot of variables that will affect the price I m willing to pay. My average cost per post, over 1,000 guest posts, is $167 + article cost keep in mind I have large 56

57 clients with massive monthly budgets & I can afford to spend money on quality blogs. Each blogger will have their own idea of what their site is worth, these guys are generally very misinformed about SEO & the average cost will vary from industry to industry. Ask the blogger how much they want to place a post that you provide some will ask you for a quote. As a rough guide for a DA 30 I offer $75 to $100 USD. I usually don t pay more than $300 USD per link, that s just my personal rule, although I have broken this rule occasionally in the past when I ve come across some fantastic opportunities. If in doubt, low ball them & gauge their reaction from there. You can negotiate with the blogger & most will give you some wiggle room to save a few bucks, but keep in mind that this will take up more of your time. When Negotiating a Placement on a Blog By now you should have received some responses & agreed on a price. A few points you will want to confirm the following with each blogger before you go any further: 1. Are the links followed? this is a deal breaker for me 2. Can we place our links in the body content (not in a resource box)? not a deal breaker, but you will be very low on my list of preferred targets when I m allocating my budget for the month 3. Can we add 2 to 3 other followed links to similar/authority sites? not a deal breaker, but you will be low on my list of preferred targets when I m allocating my budget for the month. I will even pay extra to include relevant links in my article. 4. Will this be labelled as a guest post? not a deal breaker, but it s preferable that those words don t appear on the page 5. Is this a permanent post? Some blogs will want to charge you a yearly fee, some will be permanent placements, it s all up to the blogger. Know the terms before getting involved to avoid arguments later on. 57

58 6. Are you able to promote this post via your social media platforms? Some bloggers will do this for free, some won t do it at all, some will want more money for this service ask. Any social media attention is good. 7. Is each post on a Unique IP? This is a deal breaker watch out for blog network & poor quality sites by checking all new sites through a bulk IP checker. 58

59 Chapter 7 How to Disguise Your Guest Post from Google & Avoid Penalties Disguising Your Guest Post from Google We want to minimise out footprint as much as possible, to reduce the chance that Google can determine that we re guest posting. You re going to want to add links to 3rd Party Sites in your guest post leave everything followed, or else it will raise more of a footprint than if your article only contained your link. Adding relevant links to your post will help disguise your paid link efforts & also indicate to Google that you your site is associated with these authority sites, since your link accompanies them so often. What Makes a Good Supporting Link? It s imperative that you add other links to you guest posts. These extra links will help disguise your true intent from Google and they ll also demonstrate the kind of neighbourhood your client should be associated with. When I say you should be adding links to authority sites, I m not talking about Google.com or Wikipedia. org. I m talking about authoritative in your industry, not to the internet. For instance, if I was looking for authority sites in the automotive industry, I would include links to car manufacturers & popular car blogs: y y y y cars.ebay.com The whole idea is to disguise your link & give it authenticity, so we re surrounding it with industry heavyweights. You could even add links to other relevant industry websites that aren t in direct competition with you. 59

60 ie, if you re a mechanic, add links to car detailers & car rentals. You will be providing free links for these guys, so it s up to you if you want to take this step or work out a deal with a bunch of related businesses in your industry. Don t include in the same links in every guest post because this will create a footprint. I m Not Recommending You Do This There are some SEO s out there who will buy a guest post from a blog, telling them they re from SiteB. com they re not, they re actually representing SiteA.com. Their guest post will feature a link to siteb.com & also link to supporting sites, including a link to their real site SiteA.com. This means that if the blogger wants to label the guest poster this is a guest post from SiteB.com their client gets off squeaky clean, since they are not actively taking part in a guest post & only being used as a reference. Tiered Link Building to Protect Your Client Spammers who use automatic link building software build their links in tiers of descending quality and increasing quantity, to help control the flow of authority & ranking power to their money site. 60

61 You can use a similar strategy with your guest posts to protect your clients site. By building paid links to your super white hat links, you will still be passing the lions share of the authority to your client, but you ll have the extra layer of protection from the big G. I ve used this strategy successfully in markets where I can t find any decent guest post opportunities. ie, if a client only wants com.au links, but they don t exist, we can create a few legitimate links on low quality comn.au domains, then concentrate our guest posting efforts on these URLs. It s not an ideal situation, but sometimes it s still the best option. 61

62 Chapter 8 How to Get World Class Content & get Maximum Exposure to Your Links Article Topics 101: Commanding Comments & Social Engagement I usually provide my own content wherever I can because I know I can create better & more engaging content than the average blogger. There are certain situations where it is better to have the blogger write the article for instance, when they have a loyal audience who are accustomed to reading their voice. Coming up with an interesting & engaging article title is another crucial step in guest posting. We want to write about topics that demand the reader clicks, comments & shares out content. Can t I Just Copy Whats on EzineArticles.com? You could search for your keyword at Ezine Articles & sort through the results. The following are all titles taken directly from Ezine: y Cheaper Home Insurance Premium Strategies y 40+ Home Insurance Savings Tips y Tips to Reduce Your Home Insurance Costs y Shop Around and Save on Home Insurance Do you notice a pattern emerging? That s right, they re all deathly boring. Not one of these are going to get the click, let alone a share or a comment. You can find some inspiration at Ezine, but it s generally not the best use of your time. To come up with predictably engaging content topics, we re going to reference Brian Deans Skyscraper Technique to help identify proven linkable assets. In the Skyscraper Technique, Brian outlines how to identify predictably popular content to create your own link bait. We re going to borrow some of these ideas to come up with article titles, since we re going to be treating our guest posts as a type of link bait. 62

63 1. Open Site Explorers top pages function You all know what OSE is. Grab a top 10 blog in your industry, or you can use the blog you re going to be guest posting on. Click the top pages tab to reveal the popularity metrics for every page in the site. You can now sort by number of inbound links, Facebook likes, etc, to determine which page has the most popular content. This will show you exactly which topics people like to share & link to. This is a perfect indicator that people want to read more about that topic & you should create your own version for a guest post. 2. Topsy Topsy.com is a site designed to help you find content that has already been shared in your industry. Start by entering the industry you re in: 63

64 Sort by All Time : 64

65 You re now able to sort by links, tweets or any other metric you want to use to determine popularity. 3. Check Out Frequently Asked Questions FAQs are fantastic sources of information your audience commonly asks & would be interested in finding out more about. Ie if I were coming up with health insurance titles, I would search health insurance FAQs & check out all the lenders FAQ sections for article topics. 65

66 4. Most Popular Infographics Infographics are a great source of done-for-you research. You can take the title, all of the content, or just a couple of points and write some unique content around it. Search for popular finance infographics (or whatever industry you re working in) to reveal pieces of content that have already proven themselves to be popular. Alternatively, you can head over to some of the popular infographic directories & check out their top rated offerings. 5. Pop Culture References Involving pop culture references into your article titles can prove for some remarkably shareable content. Some of the more serious blogs won t want to have anything to do with ridiculous titles like these, but other bloggers will love them & they usually get a lot of attention from their audience since they re so unique. I ve had great success incorporating things like zombies, James Bond, the Kardashians, etc into my articles. The trick is to actually present a well thought out & professional argument to go along with the ridiculous title. ie: - Calculating a life insurance policy for the crew members on Deadliest Catch - Would a health insurance policy pay off during the apocalypse? - Haunted hotels you can stay in around the world 6. Popular YouTube Videos This doesn t work well in all industries, but it s usually worthwhile checking out your main keyword on YouTube. You ll be able to identify videos that have a lot of views as promising article topics. Don t forget to check the comments, their audience will sometimes ask questions they re doing your research for you. 7. Industry Relevant Forums Are there any online forums in your industry? Check them out & sort by the most viewed/ replied to threads. What are people asking? What topics are getting the most attention? The trick to coming up with a good title is making sure it s unique & specific. It should take a particular stance & evoke a reaction from the reader. 66

67 You usually only have 500 words, so tackle 1 specific idea & say something different or unique. The reader should actually learn something from reading your article, they should walk away with some actionable information. Paddy Moogan gives some great advice in his link building guide, in reference to coming up with link bait ideas: Set a timer for 10 minutes, go & find 10 people who will care about your content What he s saying is, Will anyone really want to read your article? Is it genuinely helpful and/or interesting? If you can t honestly answer yes to these questions, read through the above paragraphs & start again. I m Not Going to Write This Content Myself! Finding & keeping talented writers is critical to successful link building. You want to consistently produce engaging content that will be naturally shared & commented on. The best sites to find writers are Guru. com & Upwork.com. You will have to spend some money here since talented writers are not cheap. The one trick you must know to find the best writers The thing you need to realise about finding decent writers is that all the best ones are already working & most likely not looking for more work you need to reach out to them. Both Guru & Upwork.com have a search function where you can look for suitable applicants. You can find writers from $10 to $100+ per 500 words. You generally get what you pay for, although there are bound to be a few exceptions. I generally try to pay no more than $60 per 500 words. Below is a screenshot from Upwork.com. I ve used the Find Freelancers page, specifying the following options: y Category writing & translation y A feedback score of 4.5 to 5 67

68 y An hourly rate of $15 to $100 y At least 500 hours billed y Native English speaker y From North America Only 68

69 You can now go through this list of writers & invite them to apply for your job. I like to invite 20 to 30 to begin with. See how many respond, read their samples & take it from there. Look After Your Writers As I mentioned earlier, be prepared to pay more for good writers. They re pretty hard to come by, so when you find one, make sure you keep them busy. Over pay them (especially on their first gig) & give them unannounced bonuses every now & then to keep them motivated. An employee who feels apprecaite is more likely to go the extra mile to deliver their best work for you. I like to keep a team of at least 3 or 4 writers working for me at all times. This ensures that I m never left in the lurch without a writer to turn to. Always be on the lookout for strong writers I m constantly subbing in new writers to keep my content fresh & interesting. This also allows me to reuse proven article titles multiple times. Using new writers on popular titles gives an old title a new perspective & keeps the content fresh. You can create a training document (or video) to give to all new writers, explaining to them exactly what you re looking for. Be clear about the voice you want them to take, give plenty of examples, etc. Get them to link to their research (3rd party links) throughout the article. Ensure that they always write for humans and not for SEO. We don t care about keyword use, keyword density, etc. 69

70 Chapter 9 Simple Tip & Tricks to Super Charge Your Guest Posts Getting Even More Out of Your Guest Posts Most people consider their job done once their guest post is live. We re going to go the extra mile & promote our content. The idea is to amass more comments & social shares on each post, in turn driving more traffic to it & increasing its SEO strength. Facebook Sponsored Content We re obviously not going to spend a fortune on this, but it can definitely be worth your time spending $5 promoting your guest post to the right audience to increase its visibility. I m not going to get into Facebook advertising here, all I ll say for now is that it s an extremely powerful (and cheap) platform and if you plug into the right custom audience, you can increase your exposure immensely. Blog Commenting I m not talking about spamming here & I m definitely not suggesting you blog comment to build links. We want to leverage the traffic other popular blogs are already receiving. Check out recent posts on other high traffic blogs in your industry. Read the post, if it s suitable, add a genuine comment & link to your guest post as a reference. This should send some highly targeted traffic your way. Not only that, but the people who will follow those links are commenters, so they re more likely to comment on your post. You can see all the comments below link to other financial blogs, notice that they re not spam, but actual insights on what they ve read: 70

71 Buzz Bundle Buzz Bundle is a great piece of software that tracks mentions of your keywords across social platforms like forums, Q&A sites (yahoo answers), blogs, social media, etc. It s a very convenient way to track & answer relevant conversations in your niche. I m not going to do a full review, you can watch Matthew Woodwards review here. 71