Publish Content on External Sites

Objective: Increase the volume of relevant traffic to your website, while boosting your organic search rankings.

How: 'Guest blogging' gets a bad reputation, especially within SEO, because of the fact that so many companies have been doing it to death. More to the point, focusing on large volumes of low-value guest blogs in an attempt to build links.

For any of you involved in SEO, or that have rolled out guest blogging campaigns, you'll know that this doesn't scale well at all, and it's VERY difficult to get a return on your time.

So just to be clear, what I'm about to go through is not focused around pumping out a bunch of crappy content to low authority sites in order to build links.

What I am suggesting is working with blogs/publications that have a hyper-relevant audience to you and the ability to refer traffic to you.

• Forget looking at things like Domain Authority to decide whether you should be publishing content on a site.
• Forget about whether you're going to get a dofollow link from the website.
• Forget sending 1,000 outreach emails to websites to see if they'll accept a blog post from you.

Here's how you should evaluate a website that you want to publish content onto:

• Does each post on the website get a significant amount of engagement? i.e., comments, shares, etc.
• How much traffic does the website, and more importantly, the individual posts get? (use SimilarWeb)
• Is their audience full of my buyer persona?
• Do I think that this will result in any kind of meaningful referral traffic to my website?

You may be thinking, "A few of those seem like they'd take a while to evaluate."

Well, that's because this process takes a little time. The more time you spend doing it, the better the results that you'll get.

Instead of writing a piece of content and pushing it out to a bunch of different websites, spend time crafting a specific piece that is tailored completely to the audience of the site you're going after.

On top of that, put time into pitching the idea. Figure out specifically who within the business is the decision maker. Can you get an intro from someone you know? If not, can you build a relationship via Twitter or LinkedIn first and add some value before you ask for something?

Ultimately, the worst that they can say is no. If that's the case, you can always publish this on your own website.

Second Option: Publishing to Platforms

Outside of pitching to publications, you can publish content to platforms that enable you to have an account with publishing rights. For example, Medium or BuzzFeed.

I'm not going to go into all the details of this here because I wrote a huge guide on reaching the front page of BuzzFeed a while back. All I'll say here is to take a similar approach to the above where you're looking to add as much value to the individual platform's audience.