Here is our second blog on how attorneys can use guest blogging to their advantage! In part one, we discussed what guest blogging is, why it's important for your firm, and what types of organizations you should reach out to. Now that you have a general idea of what types of articles you want to send out, you’ll want to target some websites that meet your criteria, whether it be a blog with a large readership, or a blog on a very reputable domain.
Vetting your Sites Before Contacting Webmasters
There are a couple of free tools you can use while link building. To find websites with lots of traffic, you can use Alexa. Alexa is a tool that ranks every website on the Internet, with #1 being the most popular, all the way down to the hundreds of millions. Search engines like Google and Yahoo, or social media sites like Facebook are some of the top sites on Alexa. It’ll be nearly impossible to get a blog published on one of the world’s most popular sites (say, top 1000), but if you reach out to a site with a rank of 200,000 or below, your blog should be read by a lot of potential clients.
To assess whether a site is authoritative or not, you can download Moz’s free toolbar. The Moz bar will rank a website from 1-100, with 100 being one of the best Internet. Any site with a Domain Authority of 30 or above is acceptable to reach out to, but the higher, the better. Sites with a Domain Authority of 60 or above are most influential, so start with those sites first.
Coming up with a Good Pitch
So you’ve found your list of websites to contact. Great! But before you spam 50 webmasters with blog suggestions, first go through the sites’ content. Do they often publish guest blogs? What does their content look like? If you offer to write a very serious, fact-based article for a website that typically posts light content, you likely won’t be successful.
A sure-fire way of finding a site that is willing to accept guest blogs is by using “intitle” or “inurl” on Google. Intitle will bring up all articles with a specific phrase or keyword located in the title, while inurl will reflect the same results in a title.
Here are a few searches you may want to use:
- Keyword inurl:guest-blog
- Keyword inurl:blog
- Keyword intitle: “guest blog”
- Keyword intitle: “guest posts”
- Keyword “write for us”
These will give you a list of websites that have blogs and accept guest submissions. Don’t be worried if Google tries sending some spam filters your way: bots will use specific searches as well, so you may need to prove you’re actually an attorney and not a virus every now and again.
Once you start contacting webmasters, you should keep a list of every website and person you’ve contacted. You can do this in an excel sheet on your computer, online on Google Docs, or even though case management software. This is important to save yourself or your staff some embarrassment down the line and offering a guest blog to the same webmaster twice.
The final thing to keep in mind is that you’ll need to follow up with anyone who shows interest in your blogs! It’s highly unlikely that an article you send over to a webmaster will be published within a matter of hours. You’ll need to persist with the webmaster, just as you need to heckle your clients to return retainer packets. A good rule of thumb is to follow up with a contact at least six times, once per week, until you hear back from him. Once you get a reply, the count resets. As a wise man once said, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease!”