8 Sources Of Compelling Content For Your Guest Posts

There are many different guest blogging techniques and strategies. Some require minimal effort, while others take extra work and considerable time. Like most marketing campaigns, though, the work you put in directly affects the results you get out.

Churn out 500-word pieces with minimal research and no actionable content, and you’ll struggle to get any traction for those pieces. This kind of approach is normally favoured by cheap SEO services. They generate links, but those links will not necessarily get tangible results until hundreds or even thousands have been built.

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Create a 1,000 to 1,500-word post, unless otherwise requested. Add links to external sources. Create your own images or videos to accompany the piece. Take real time to research the content and include actionable steps that the reader can take themselves. Follow these guidelines when writing guest blogging content and you will reap far greater rewards.

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Guest Blogging For Content Marketing

Whether I’m working for SEO clients, or directly for my freelance customers, I prefer to implement guest blogging as part of a content marketing campaign.
Create a linkable asset (like Moz’s toolbar), or a high-quality piece of link bait (like this guest blogging guide at Branding Media). Use guest pieces to drive traffic, encourage social shares, and to build links to that asset. This may sound like it takes additional effort. Ultimately, though, it is worth the resources it takes and additional sweat that will flow.
Your efforts will be multiplied.

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Finding Content Ideas

Obviously, finding content inspiration is only a single step in a guest blogging campaign. Find viable sites, judge their quality, compile the content, and create guest post pitches that are so good they can’t be ignored. Monitor the publication, answer queries and comments that are posted in response, and conduct any follow-up. Then there’s performance tracking and campaign optimisation. Every step of the process requires attention and effort. However, if you don’t have a quality concept, to begin with, your guest blogging will fall flat on its face.

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1. News Sites And Curators

There are news sites everywhere. Google News is one of the most popular. As well as providing publishers with a potential mine of quality traffic, it is also a feast of story ideas. Visit the Google News site, type in your industry, your keyword, or the type of product or service you sell. You can also apply filters, including how recently stories were published, and you could even find a breakout piece.

Provide background to your news pieces, and try to link them to some informational or actionable content within your piece. By expanding on a news topic in this way, you can create what is essentially an editorial. You have all the key ingredients for a top-quality post – information and data, a relevant and newsworthy topic, and a story idea that has already proven popular with readers.
You can even use the popularity of the story when pitching your idea to guest post websites.

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2. Analyse Your Analytics

Unless your own business site is brand new and has no search volume, you can use your own analytics to find popular pieces. Repurposing content is a powerful tool for content marketers.

Choose your most popular post. If it’s an old post, consider whether the information has changed, and create an updated version. This enables you to easily link to the original piece, citing it as your inspiration for writing the article. Doing this also gives you more data when pitching a piece to another website owner. If the post is evergreen, rewrite it completely, ensure that it is unique, and try to add some graphics and images to the new piece. Not all site owners want you to include images, but many will appreciate it.
Tip: what’s more if you’re struggling to include links, and you create your own visual, then you can add a link to your website as the source of the visual.

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3. Check Your Comments And Emails

As well as your analytics, look through the comment section of your blog posts, and check back over old emails to find commonly asked questions. You could create an FAQ page as a useful resource, or you could simply find the most commonly asked question and turn this into a compelling and popular piece.
Crowdsourcing is a great way to identify new angles and unique takes on a topic. Even after years of writing on specific topics, somebody will surprise you with an unexpected question.

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4. Use Question Sites Like Quora And AnswerThePublic.com

There are many sites out there that encourage discussion and debate on a range of topics. Sites like Quora are particularly useful as community question and answer sites. Somebody asks a question, and experts in that field answer those questions. Although these sites are not necessarily beneficial for building SEO links, they can drive direct traffic, and they are also a great source of topic inspiration.
Use your keywords or industry and search these sites for excellent topic ideas.
Tip: we have recently been using AnswerThePublic.com in a similar way. Search for your keywords, and you will see a visual list of questions relating to that topic, curated from a variety of sources. It also includes useful proposition based phrases that use the same keyword.

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5. Check Competitor Sites For Their Best Performing Content

As well as trawling through your own website to find out the most popular content, look at the performance of your competitor’s sites. You might not have access to their analytics, but you can still determine their most popular posts. Look at social shares, measure the number of links that a page has, or use software like SEMRush to determine which are the most popular pages and posts.
Again, this is information that you can use when crafting your pitch, as well as when looking for inspiration.

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6. Find The Best Performing Content On Blogs You Pitch To

Take a look at the blog that you pitch to, look at social share and comment numbers. Look for the categories that have the most popular posts, and look at the topic of the most popular posts. Consider how you can add a new spin to those topics, and create something incredible that the blog owner can’t help but want to publish.

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7. Use Tools To Identify Breakout Content

There are websites and services, such as CrowdTangle (it’s free but you do have to request access), which offer a free and accessible means of quickly identifying emerging stories. These breakout topics are just starting to go viral, but have not yet hit saturation or overload. This means that you can reasonably find information, create your own spin, and end up with a piece that could feasibly go viral. Include some images, try to take an angle that hasn’t yet been approached and then pitch the piece to the site that you want to be published on.

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8. Use Twitter, Facebook, And Other Social Media

Google is, by no means, the only source of information on the Internet. As well as searching for your keywords on the search engine, also consider conducting similar searches on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms.

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Even using different platforms you will find a lot of the information and many of the posts to be similar, but not always. Dig deeper than the home page or search results for some of these sites and you will find unique stories and new angles. What’s more, you can use the information to help create the best pitch, as well as the most appealing guest post.