I always recommend people do their own outreach for obtaining guest posts and link insertions.
One thing before we start. ‘Niche edits’ is a bit of an SEO-niche term. In the broader world it’s known as link insertions. You’ll find most webmasters don’t know what a niche edit is, so always say ‘link insertions’ and they will understand.
The vast majority of sellers are just re-selling. They don’t own their own sites, so you’re just paying a markup for the convenience of not having to do the outreach yourself.
This would be fine in theory, but it cuts out the most important part, which is quality control. Not just in how you pick the sites, but the control you have over the content and for requesting things like internal links to your new article.
This entire process you can hire a VA to do, but do it for a couple of weeks yourself first to learn and then hire and automate.
The Outreach Process
Let’s go through the entire process. I recommend using ahrefs, but you can use semrush too.
Stage 1: Compile Sites
I recommend choosing DR 15-75. Backlink type in-content and one link per domain, then sort by DR.
Check each site one by one.
Higher DR(60+)
The higher DR sites won’t all be paid links. Sometimes they’re organic.
You can see usually by the amount of external links. Install a link highlighter tool like link highlighter pro.
When an article has a lot of external links, that’s a sign it’s not a paid link. Paid links are almost always going to be just 1 commercial looking link, and maybe 1 or 2 other links to authority sites.
You can still save these and attempt to contact them, but your success rate will be much lower. Some will accept unpaid quality submissions, and others might be open to paid guest posts. Another approach is you can try to find the writers who published the article(if a name is listed) on social media and contact them privately to see if they’ll accept, but this is a lot of work and more about relationship building. However, the link you would get in the end is much better quality and rarer.
I recommend just saving all the sites that look quality. If the site is flexible, even if they don’t accept paid submissions they’ll sometimes respond back letting you know they accept submissions for quality proposals. There’s no harm in saving everything and it’s quicker than trying to pre-screen.
Lower DR – Especially under 40
Once you get down to the under 40’s you’ll want to spend a little more time checking the quality of the site.
Check its backlinks. Sort them by DR, one link per domain and make sure they have enough quality backlinks.
Personally, I don’t bother with traffic. It’s not a ranking factor. Anything with 100+ traffic for a guest post or link insertion is going to be fine. I would still rather have a link on a small 120 traffic blog that looks clean than a DR pumped made-for-guest-posting site with 50k traffic of spam.
But aim for speed here. Just a quick check of the site, and a quick check of the backlinks then move on.
Your goal is to get lists of sites done quickly. I re-check them later after I get a quote for a price.
Decide on a batch size. 25, 50, or 100. Doesn’t have to be exact. Just a batch. Collect and label the batch.
Save the url, referring domains, DR, niche and ahrefs traffic and batch number.
The batch number makes it easy to do this in stages. Ie, batch 1 might be at stage 3, batch 2 could be at stage 2 and batch 3 could be just freshly acquired in stage 1.
Stage 2: Get contact details
I like to do this separately. It’s easier to focus on 1 thing at a time.
You’ve got your batch of sites. You can now go through each one and find the contact details. Usually an email, but can be a form.
Save the email/web form url.
Stage 3: Contact the site
I use gmass for emailing. It’s simple and ideal for this.
Use a quality gmail account, and sign up for a $25/mo mailreach.co account so you are always “warming up” your gmail.
My [email protected] is always running on mailreach. If I stop it, then my inbox rate goes down even for general client communication.
mailreach create fake conversations with various inboxes. When emails are marked as spam, they unmark. This adds activity for the various providers like gmail, yahoo and hotmail, and gives your email account much more trust.
mailreach is for any email, but gmass is just for gmail.
Your email should be along these lines :-
(gmass lets you use variables to enter the sitename etc)
Subject: I’d like to buy a guest post on SITE_NAME
Hello,
I run an SEO outreach agency and I have a client I would like a guest post on SITE_NAME for.
Do you accept paid guest posts and/or link insertions? If so, how much are they and what are your requirements?
Thanks.
Regards,
Tom
This is clean, professional and to the point. Always say you run an outreach agency. It looks better, and they’re more likely to deal with you if they think you have several clients.
Add a column saying contacted + date contacted.
Stage 4: Await replies
As replies come in, you’ll get pricing/requirements.
This is where you’ll re-check the sites. How good are they? What are their links like? Do they have many spammy looking articles?
Overall you want to work out if they’re worth the price they’re asking.
If yes, then
Save the pricing/requirements info — Make sure to note guest post and link insertion prices separately in your sheet.
If no, then just mark them as red in your sheet and add a note as to why so you don’t contact them again. You can also try to negotiate for a lower price.
If anyone doesn’t reply within 7-10 days, send another email asking if they got your email. You’ll catch an extra few % with this.
That’s your sheet done and you can build this up with your inventory of providers.
Your next stage is to create another sheet for a campaign.
The Linking Process
Now you’ve got a batch complete above you can start link building.
Step 1: Create titles
You can’t make a proposal until you create titles. In your sheet, add:
site url, price, link type, status, title, anchor, page, paid, live url
I recommend planning title/anchor/page ahead of time. Doing 1 at a time is awkward. Plan out the entire month’s campaign.
Step 2: Make proposal to publisher
Reply back, in the same email thread as you got the pricing and thank them for their response and confirm you accept their pricing and terms.
A simple :
“The first client I am interested in getting a link for is X.
I would like the following guest post:
Title: THE TITLE
Page to link to: mysite.com/some-page
Anchor: this will be the anchor
If this is acceptable to you let me know and I will have my writer start work on the article.
Regards,
Tom
Some sites will want payment up front, but most don’t.
They’ll just confirm and then you update your sheet and add a status of ‘approved – send to writer’
Once you send it to your writer, update to ‘writing in progress’
When it’s written: ‘content ready’. Oh, and you’ll want to add another column with the article link. google drive or one drive.
Step 3: Send content to publisher
Reply back to the publisher with the shared google drive or one drive links.
Now is the time you can ask them about adding extra links to make the guest post look more natural. Don’t do it earlier as it creates early friction.
You say at the end of your email:
“Also, it’s very important to keep both our sites safe from Google penalties to add a couple of external and internal links in the article.
Can you please choose a couple of external sites to add links to in the articles? I ask you to choose, because this is not me trying to get more links. This is just the best practice to keep everything looking natural. I recommend 2 more external links, and 2 internal links to existing pages on your site.
Also, if possible, could you add an internal link from an existing article on your site, linking to my new article?”
This will be a little back and forth. Some will say yes, some will say no. Some are completely retarded and just say “More links = more $$”. They don’t understand that they are choosing the links, so it couldn’t possibly be you getting extra links. Maybe 10-15% will be stupid like this.
For the internal links, if they say no, you can offer them an extra $20, $30, $50 or however much it’s worth for that particular site for you to do this. Having more juice flow to your article is beneficial.
Finally, you update your sheet so the status is ‘sent to publisher’
Step 4: Wait for publishing
Once they publish they’ll email you back with the link.
Update the sheet with the live url and status = Published
They’ll then ask you to pay. Make the payment.
Update the sheet to mark the paid column as paid.
And that’s you!
For link insertions, just adjust this process so that instead of creating a title, you pick a page. I recommend for link insertions you create a separate tab on your sheet with different columns.
The entire process is pretty straight-forward.
Just be on the look-out for low quality sites that DR pump. You’ll see weird redirect backlinks from places like google.com which inflate the DR without actually adding any value to the domain in Google’s eyes.
