Episode 23 – Guest Posting

Dylan: [00:00:00] Hey there you are listening to the SEO for photographers podcast with Corey and Dylan from Fuel Your Photos today is episode 23, and we are talking about guest posting.

Corey: [00:00:10] Nice. I am excited about this episode because I feel like guest posting is one of those things that most people either don’t know about.

Don’t consider it to be a part of SEO or a marketing strategy have never tried or. Maybe they don’t realize like the full benefit of doing this. There’s so many really interesting, direct and indirect benefits of writing a post that goes on someone else’s website. So what, why don’t we start by thinking about, Hmm.

Why, what if you heard someone tell you Dylan, go. For someone else go write some really good content, put tons of work into it. And then you’re going to hand it off to someone else and let them put it on their website instead of your website. And why, even though that sounds maybe. Counter-intuitive that you would do all of that work and give it to someone else to get the benefit.

Tell me why that’s actually maybe more beneficial than you would think.

Totally.

Dylan: [00:01:23] So I think that a lot of people are right to, to, to think that at first to make that, that first assumption You’re typically leveraging a site that has a much larger audience than your own. And they typically are more authoritative on the subject that you’re talking about or, or on the overall area topic that the post might be in relation to.

So it gives you a chance to show your expertise and hopefully reach a much larger audience and to kind of associate yourself. Being an expert in that field.

Corey: [00:02:00] Yeah. I like to call that idea. Authority hacking is basically finding another website that has more authority than you do, and has probably honestly, a better chance of ranking, especially ranking quickly on this topic and leveraging that authority to.

Rank a post that’s still establishes you as the expert. Exactly. Yeah. I think there’s other, there’s other benefits. Maybe we should start with a story. Do you have any stories of guest posts that you’ve done and maybe like what the result was of, of doing that guest posts?

Dylan: [00:02:39] Totally. I’ve done quite a few.

I’m trying to think of the best guest post I’ve ever done. I would say the, by far like the guest posts that affected my career the most was a tutorial that I made to do a special technique and camera. And it, it was double exposures and. I personally don’t think I could rank for that term, like how to do a double exposure, but that was picked up by a major photography news blog.

I think it was F stoppers first and then their version of that tutorial ranked for that term. That, that was kind of a, an interesting case where it was first published on my site and they saw it and they saw that it was doing well on social media and they asked, Hey, Publish this on our site and they let me keep mine up.

I might’ve had to canonical lies to there’s. I can’t remember. But it, it definitely got me much more reach than I could have done on my own. Other cases have typically been Either different photography techniques or obviously SEO tech technique or news or other associated plug posts where people knew that I was an SEO expert.

They might have a site that has much more authority or more reach and they wanted to. They wanted my expertise and I wanted their authority audience, et cetera. So it’s a, it’s a really good trade-off where I can provide my thoughts on their blog. It ranks for the terms that it’s optimized for and, and for that topic they obviously get the majority of that traffic.

But I do get to refer people to my site and refer people to my services and build a a brand for myself as a SEO expert.

Corey: [00:04:23] You know, I’ll, I’ll jump in with a story of mine. I was at I think it was at which conference was it? I was probably, WPPI. Yeah, it was WPI in Vegas in 2016 and the trade show.

And I’m like walking around, talking to different people at the trade show, different businesses. This was at the beginning of fuel your photos. And I. I was trying to just make some connections in the industry. And I found that when I was talking to them in person, cause I had, I had maybe emailed a few people about whether they wanted an article written and most of the time either get ghosted or, you know, they’d never, they either never respond or they respond and they’re like, yeah, we’d be interested.

And then that’s kind of this far as it goes. There’s a lot of that that happens. But what I found when I went to the trade show and asked is that people saw that I was a real person and that. Professional and all these things, and they’re like, yeah, let’s make it happen. You know, put me right in touch with the person who could help make it happen.

And we did, but you know, it got picked up our, I got to be able to write a guest post for Animoto ShootProof, there was two or three others F came directly from that conference. And what I found is that whenever you do that, initially, You were saying something about like having your brand associated with one of the things that happens is it makes it easier for you to make those connections in the future.

So after that, if I go to someone and say, Hey, could I write a guest post for you? Even if I send them an email and I link to a couple of examples and say, Hey, I’ve written for this person. And I’ve written for this person or this company and this company. And they’re like, oh, that gets their attention.

And they know that you’re not just messing around. It’s almost. Instant establishment of legitimacy. Whenever you can get to write for a major brand that people recognize,

Dylan: [00:06:19] oh, I completely agree. And then you can have those little logos in your footer, or you can say that you’re a published author in these spaces.

Yeah.

Corey: [00:06:28] When is the first time you ever thought about guest posting? Like what, what initially turned you on? Do you have any idea? It

Dylan: [00:06:35] was one of it’s still in Boise. So it’s been a while. And I, I think it was just as soon as I had the realization that I could write about topics that my site personally couldn’t rank for.

And I was trying to figure out how to, to rank for those topics. And then I think I honestly read one of those old blog posts that was about like gosh, it was something, it was a guest posting SEO blog post from back in the day. I think it was Brandy or something.

Corey: [00:07:05] Yeah. It’s. It’s interesting because this is somewhat controversial in the SEO world.

If you, if you like where to go and search on Google for his guest posts. Bad for SEO. I haven’t done that search. Maybe we should do it and see what happens, but you’re probably gonna find some official answers from Google. John Mueller has commented on this quite a few times and some other people in these like webmaster Hangouts and the general advice that he gives his guest posting will never help your SEO.

Yeah. And I’m like, oh, come on. But the problem is. I think it’s important to understand the ecosystem a little more. So we kind of jumped right in and we didn’t, we didn’t really talk a lot about like, what is a guest post and why would you do it? And how does it help? We started getting right into that immediately, but in the industry of writing online and publishing online, it’s a pretty common practice.

Like you see lots of websites that will accept guest posts as kind of the main. Form of generating content. In fact, if you think about it, the wedding blogs that we’re all familiar with, that we’ll accept submissions from photographers. Those technically are like guest posts, right? Same idea. And a lot of the times like the standard within the industry is often that you pay to get to write on these sites, especially the big ones.

They will accept guest posts, but it is. Going to cost you $500 or whatever the price is. Or there’s like some other stipulations or what else have you seen? Like as far as this is?

Dylan: [00:08:47] I mean, I, I, I do agree. I, I, I feel like Google specifically has always said, Hey, guest posts go against our terms of services.

You shouldn’t do them. If you do, they should be no followed. And then they try to come out with that. Like they don’t work. And then every SEL. Yeah, they don’t I don’t do those.

Corey: [00:09:06] Well it says the sarcasm in his voice there. Right? Exactly.

Dylan: [00:09:10] Yeah, gosh, but I mean, I remember back in the day, like Forbes and business.com and sites like that, they were all just guest post sites and you could pay 50 to $250 or whatever to have your article on one of those sites.

That has changed. I believe. I don’t know. Do the pay to play anymore. I think that kind of got shut down. But yeah, I it’s, it’s a gray area where I, I do think that that it’s obviously against Google’s terms of services and what they want people to be doing, but it, in my opinion is a worthwhile activity that I don’t see any real downside to if you’re presenting value to the audiences.

And you’re hoping that webmaster. Content that they couldn’t do themselves or don’t have the time to do themselves. And you’re accepting the term that you’re publishing that content on somebody else’s site. They’re going to see the majority of the benefit typically. But that fraction that you do get is worthwhile, then it doesn’t hurt anybody.

I don’t, I don’t, I don’t understand why Google thinks it’s negative to the whole ecosystem of the.

Corey: [00:10:18] I think it’s because what we’re talking about in this podcast is we want people to put the same effort that they would put into writing for their own website, into writing for someone else, right? Yeah. Or more like, it needs to be significant effort to produce a genuine authoritative unique content that serves an audience.

Okay. So that’s kind of the baseline. But in the, the scope of the internet, I think the majority of what’s happening is spam. I think that what happens is you’ll get these link building services out there that will build legitimate links and they’re going to be guest posts. And what happens is they’ll like spend some content or use AI writers and they’ll.

Have their own little networks of blogs that are people who will basically accept these placements for like 50 bucks or whatever. And they’ll go out and get them placed. And they’ll call that a guest post or, you know, just similar things to that where it’s like, if, if sites are accepting guests, ’cause that’s they need guest posts to generate content that’s potentially maybe not a red flag, but it’s like, those are not the kinds of things that we want to encourage.

So why don’t we talk a little bit about, like, how would you find a good guest posting opportunity? What would that look like?

Dylan: [00:11:39] Totally. So, gosh. Yeah. There are a lot of guides online that are going to walk you through how to use like SEO tools and search operators and other ways to find sites that are typical guest post sites.

My personal experience in my personal opinion is that those are not the opportunities that I want to look for. I don’t think they’re high quality. My goal isn’t to find like every site that’s accepting submissions or has authors that are not a part of that site. I. I would first think about what, like I would probably start local or regional.

And I would think about what blogs or brands have an audience that fits my audience and they have decent reach and they have good authority but could use my expertise on there or my thoughts on their blog. I’m trying to think of any good example off the top of my head. Wedding planners, obviously for my, for my wedding photography site smaller regional wedding blogs, obviously.

Or you could go to nationwide wedding blogs, but I think that targeting like for me I ha I’ve had some stuff in June book they’re based in Seattle. I got to know the old owner and was able to show her. I have expertise in SEO and that I’m knowledgeable on that subject and that they could value, or they would see some value from me sharing my thoughts on that.

So making that in person relationship reaching out to them pitching them, my idea and getting featured was fairly simple process. Yeah. So I think I would start down that

Corey: [00:13:12] road. What if you’re not a wedding photographer?

Dylan: [00:13:17] Yeah, totally. I mean, You might have to get a little bit more creative, but it’s kind of like we’ve mentioned HARO help a reporter out on this channel before where you’re getting prompts that are a wide range of ideas of topics that authors are trying to write about.

And they need sources for information or people to provide a quote or something like that. And we always talk about how, if you’re a photographer, say you’re a newborn photographer in Dallas, you might be a female entrepren. You might be just an entrepreneur in general, you are most likely you have skills outside of just the fact that you’re a newborn photographer that you can talk about typically.

Or you can start sharing like just your photography or experiences in the city in general travel guide type stuff. Like there might be a coffee shop that needs new photos. And you could just do a little write-up about why that’s your favorite coffee shop to work out of. I don’t know, something like that.

Anything, any other associated expertise that you might have?

Corey: [00:14:23] Yeah, I think that’s really important. I think if you can think about what it is that sets you apart as a photographer, like, what is unique about your business? What do you believe in, what do you, what do your clients believe in that you are trying to.

I’m trying to make that connection between your, your beliefs and people who are like you, who believe the same thing. What are those things? And they might not be photography related. They might not be related to the type of services that you offer. Maybe it just has to do, maybe you’re really, really interested in.

Yoga or maybe it’s coffee, like you said, like who knows what exactly it has to do with your, your daily routine, the type of software that you use for your workflows. That’s a really popular thing that I’ve seen software blogs love to have a guest. Explain maybe they’ll even do an interview of you.

That’s still pretty much a guest post. So think of like the products you use, the things you believe in th th anything that, you know, that you would say kind of sets you apart as like you’re someone who really has an interesting opinion on that, that could be a candidate for. I guess post I do, I do feel like a lot of the local stuff is like easy.

There’s so many easy wins locally. Like, what I would be doing is probably looking at. I don’t know to all cities do these like little like free newspapers that have the like competitions is like best of whatever category and that they could do an award. Every, I know we have those around here where it’s like, so, you know, I was voted best of blah, blah, blah.

And this newspaper for five years or whatever, I would basically be looking for things like that, where you’ve got this source of all of these businesses, then go to their websites and look for ones that have blogs and find the ones that. It looks like they were trying with their blog, but then they just like never really posted to it.

I found what I was looking like that I was writing the course lesson about guest posting, which by the way go really in depth on. Specifics of like how to make a guest post successful and like how to find these opportunities and categorize them, et cetera, et cetera. But anyway, when I was looking through that, I found several sites within my city that were directly, that could directly relate to photography services that had blogs that were almost empty or.

You know, just, they looked like they needed some help. One of them was like a clothing boutique for kids. One of them was a wedding venue. Like all of these places, if I went to a clothing boutique and I said, look, I’ll take care of a style shoot. I’m going to get a model. I’m going to get the props. I’m going to take care of the location.

And I just want to basically borrow some of. Close that you sell and we’ll put them on this model and we’ll take these photographs. And then I’m going to do a writeup on for your blog about like this, you know, new product line you have out the spring or whatever, like almost no one would say no to that, right?

Like if you, if you really put the effort in, I think it’s pretty easy to find other businesses that need content. And if you can generate that content you’re in bed.

Dylan: [00:17:43] Yeah, I totally agree. 100%.

Corey: [00:17:49] So, okay. Let’s say that you have found a few places that are potential candidates for writing for someone else’s website.

How are you gonna reach out?

Dylan: [00:18:00] Yeah, so the biggest thing here. It’s hard. My, my personal success has been people that I’ve already met in person or made sure to try to meet in person first. Those are, like you said, with your WP pipe PPI story, I think it’s a real game changer when you have an actual connection with that person, or if you have like a friend of a friend or acquaintances or any, any sort of way to get your foot in the door.

And so I would leverage those first, if you can then it goes to the. Brutal step of trying to reach out over email, where you’re trying to make sure that email gets opened, trying to make sure that the pitch is interesting enough to them, that they even think about it and reply to you, and then make sure that they actually want to go through with it.

So that has a much lower win rate, but it’s still worthwhile. But, like I said, I, I would recommend, if anything, trying to exhaust your list of vendors, you’ve worked with people, you know, connections you have around your city or town or area. First.

Corey: [00:19:03] Yeah. Like if you know someone that you can send a DM on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or whatever, and they would respond to it pretty quickly, or someone you could get a text or anything like that, I would start there.

Going to talk to someone in person, I think makes a huge difference if you’re talking about something local. And then when you start to get into bigger publications, if you don’t have a connection, which by the way, I would, I would try to see if you can. For example, I’ve been looking at a few websites lately and I was like, you know, I could really get to know this author by.

Reading all of their posts whenever they cause they post regularly. If I just read their posts and leave a thoughtful comment on every post, like within a few weeks, they’re going to know me on a first name basis. Right. Like, and be like, this guy is always commenting. I mean, I know whenever I write stuff, if people comment, I get excited for like real genuine comments.

And so it doesn’t take a whole lot usually to get on someone’s radar, if you can be thoughtful and give them some some comments on their content that they already have I think having some writing examples is probably beneficial. If you have something on your website and you can say, look at this guide that I wrote, I would love to create something kind of similar for your website.

What do you think about that? Or maybe you do some sort of partnership where it’s like, I’m actually, I did this with a wedding planner one time. I don’t think we actually posted on her website, but we could have, and it was basically tips for. Planning a wedding. And like, some of them were from the specifically from a photography perspective.

And that was like the part I contributed. And then the other parts were from this planner and we kind of joined and made it one article. I think it just went on my blog, but that kind of thing where it’s like, what if we do a collaboration where we trade advice for each other’s audiences? What is.

You know, you start a series where it’s like, I’m maybe I have my article about 19 locations for engagement sessions in Columbia. But what if I reach out to the local tourism website? And I said, I’m going to make an article for you. That’s five locations to do a photo session in Columbia. It’s not exactly the same topic, but I can basically pull from stuff that I already have.

I can show them an example of something that’s working, driving traffic, and it can say, look, this will drive traffic to your site. It’s related to what I’ve already written. I’ve already got examples here. It’s doing really well for me. It’ll do well for you too. I think having that kind of pitch ready to go is going to increase your success rate a lot,

Dylan: [00:21:36] a hundred percent agree.

And like you said about following your favorite authors and commenting, just follow them on Twitter. Like it’s so easy and I’ve, I’ve definitely had success with that, so,

Corey: [00:21:46] yep. Let’s see what else. So I guess. Okay. Let’s kind of go back to something we talked about a little bit earlier, and I’d love to just kind of riff on this or hear, hear your thoughts.

How would you decide on what ha what you should give away? Like what is too good to give away as a guest post versus posting on your site? Are there any things that you would like not recommend writing for someone else or where it’s always better to have it on your own site? Anything like that. Yeah.

Dylan: [00:22:21] So I’m thinking for the typical like wedding photographer, the, those posts and pages, the topics that we think are successful on most, almost every photographer site, like a venue list, venue post, I think that that’s worth breaking on your own site, doing the work to have that rank.

And that would be giving away just too much traffic to somebody else. My favorite type of. Post or topic that I would consider it to give away to somebody else. It’s something that I don’t think I can rank on my own site. Ever. Those are like the easy ones. Like if I’m doing a review of a camera that I’m not going to rank against Ken Rockwell or whoever else is winning those reviews these days.

But if I can do a guest post for BNH sure, like they’ll get some traffic. Those are kind of the situations where it’s just an easy decision outside of that. I think you have to make a content calendar for yourself, little content strategy, and just go through that and look at like what, what could drive traffic to your site.

But it’s going to be really difficult and would be an easy win. Like if you put this topic on a Junebug or a, Animoto or something flow themes. Trying to rank a list of WordPress themes for photographers on flu theme site is going to be pretty easy, ranking that on your brand new photography blog that has 40 domains that link to it.

It, it’s not going to do anything. You’re going to be on page eight for two years. So. Those are the situations where it’s just a really

Corey: [00:23:57] easy decision. Yeah. That makes sense. I like that. We talked a little bit about, so we started talking about the benefits. We talked about authority hacking. What else, what other benefits do you see to guest posting?

Dylan: [00:24:11] I think one aspect that is probably in my mind outside of the whole backlink like, yes, you’re probably getting some, some really juicy backlinks, but. For me, Google’s always trying to associate entities with each other. And so if I can be associated with a high authority, like high expertise entity on my topic or in the same field, that’s going to be a big bonus.

So if, if my name can just be on B and H. Or on at stoppers or pet a pixel or any of these big, like photography news sites. That’s going to tell Google, like this is a photog, this is an expert in the photography space. And you can just do that on any scale. So even if it’s like, this is an expert in the local family photography scene or newborn scene or wedding photographer scene it’s just going to be a huge benefit to be linked with those entities.

And then I, I think one huge benefit that we haven’t, I don’t think we’ve touched on yet is how, when you write for somebody else, it generally, at least for me, it gives me the pressure to really put out my best work and not come off as an amateur. And I I’ll probably spend three times as much time writing this guest post than I would if it was for my own site, because I.

I don’t want to look like I’m not the expert, so I’m going to be researching. I’m going to be exciting. I’m going to be asking people to review it for me, multiple drafts, like long editing process. And I really want to put out my best work and that, that just elevates your entire game. And so I think

Corey: [00:25:47] that’s a huge benefit.

I’ve every time I’ve submitted a guest post to someone else, they’ve had someone on their team who’s going to review it and edit it. And. Just thinking through that as you’re writing, like, what is their audience? What’s the target length? What, why do they want this on their website? It really does help to improve your writing.

I think that I made a post in the Facebook group this week about how, like the direction of SEOs kind of like. The wrong way, where people are just trying to like find every way they can to game the system and make money. And I really want to see more. Like human connection, more human saying, I can use the internet to make the world a better place by helping other humans like that’s right.

Really worthwhile. And I do think that sometimes guest posting is an opportunity to not think about optimizing for ranking so much. And think about like, what’s the message here? What is, what do I want to get out to this audience? That being said, if you are really good at SEO as well, and you can write a well optimized post for these people, especially, you know, if you’re going back to.

Like the local kids boutique that I was talking about, and I have my set of expert X, my set of skills, where I can say, look, we can get this ranking for like children’s boutique Columbia se like, we’ll look at this ranking for that. No problem. That’s like a really cool added benefit. You know, if I’m writing for a major publication or a software company or something like that, who has a readership, like they’ve got people who subscribe to their blog and like they get an email, the email, a hundred thousand people every week or something like that.

I can think a little bit less about that because they don’t really care that much about the traffic that’s going to come from Google. Some of them do. And I do right. So like I want it to rank so that my brand can, can be there, but. It’s really interesting to kind of think about what would I write if I just wanted to focus on the message

Dylan: [00:28:01] completely.

Just that that entire little conversation is making me think back to like the first SEO blog posts I did on my site when I didn’t think I had any chance of ranking for any of the topics I was writing. And so they were all completely just what would be helpful and that’s a really great way to, to frame your

Corey: [00:28:23] content.

Yeah. I was thinking about that the other day when I made that post and I was just like, it was almost nostalgic. I was like, man, I remember whenever I was like in the early days of writing online and I was just like, I didn’t care about any of this stuff with making money with it. And all, it was just like, what, what do I want to share with the world?

I think we’ve come a long way from that in a lot of spaces. And it would be nice to at least at least keep that as like a true north. Right? Like it doesn’t mean that we can’t work on optimizing. I still think that’s so valuable. I just think that if your brain goes a hundred percent to optimizing, just to get the click, just to make the money.

You, you, it pulls you away from sharing the right message in some cases. Yeah. Another thing that I think is like maybe the most important benefit from guest posting is just building relationships. Like for me, it has been one of the best ways to get like a genuine connection with a person at a company who has some say within that company.

So. It’s been really interesting. Some of the opportunities that have come out of me just reaching out and saying, Hey, can I write for you? And I’m saying yes. And then we go through that process and we get that done. And then later, what else comes of it? Like I did a talk at ShootProof headquarters and I got invited to some parties from some other person that I wrote for.

And you know, had some really interesting conversations with the company that I wrote for about You know, it just, it presented some really interesting business opportunities that would have not been on the table. If that kind of deep connection wasn’t already made. If I was just emailing them and said, Hey, can we have a call and talk about blah, blah, blah.

They’d be like, you’re one of a thousand people who emailed us this week about that. But after I’ve gone out of the way to. Really show that I’m going to put their audience first and put in some effort to give them something valuable. Now they’re like, oh, this guy’s real, this guy’s genuine. I we’re going to call him again.

Next time we need something about this, especially for some of these companies, like, you know, I mentioned ShootProof and Animoto as ones that I met up with at WPPI. They don’t care about SEO as far as like, they’re not trying to sell SEO to their audience. Right. And, and for a lot of photographers, it’s going to be the same thing.

It’s like, you can reach out to these companies that aren’t ever trying to sell photography services. That’s not even on their radar. And so for you to come in and be the, the expert on. W or whatever the subject is that you’re writing about. That’s a huge opportunity. If, if their audience aligns with who you’re trying to reach, that that may be a little less relevant for some photographers.

Like if you’re a newborn photographer and you’re just trying to, like, you’re not going to reach out to Animoto and then send out an email to their list. Like, for me, it made sense. Cause they’re all photographers. Right. And like that audience is who I was trying to reach to talk about SEO, but I think there’s opportunities like that.

And just the, the relationship. That come from the real people that you have to deal with whenever you do something like this, and that’s just invaluable.

Dylan: [00:31:42] Completely agree. Do you have any like big don’ts when it comes to guest

Corey: [00:31:48] posting? Like, yes, actually there are some really big don’ts and one of them we kind of already talked about with.

Google saying that guest posting could be bad for SEO or it’s never going to help your SEO. So, you know, it’s funny, you mentioned that Brian Dean or have one of his pulled up and he has this whole thing for finding guest posts and it’s like go to Google and search your keyword plus, right? For us, your keyword plus guest post opportunities, zero a keyword for submit blogs.

W all these things and it’s like, Hey, those are exactly the ones Google doesn’t want you to write for exactly.

Dylan: [00:32:26] What do you think Google has trained their algorithms to look for when they’re devaluing a link on a site with

Corey: [00:32:32] that list that Brian Dean made exactly. Right. I’m going to take this and put it into our algorithm for what?

Not to reward. Yeah, for

Dylan: [00:32:41] sure. Yeah. I would say that’s huge. I would also say. You should not pay for any guest post spot endless. I mean, there might be examples of like, there might be regional wedding blogs. I don’t know of any that do this, but they might be like, Hey yeah, it costs a hundred dollars to be on this blog.

And that’s just like to pay for our time, I guess, editing and publishing and everything. I could see that being okay. But if, if somebody is coming to you and saying like, Hey, here’s this list of sites you could do guest posts on. Two 50 each 500 for this like New York times article. What do you want? Yeah, just don’t

Corey: [00:33:17] do those.

It’s probably not worth your time. You know, it’s okay. I’m going to give people like a little bit of a sneak peek of like what we’d go into in the course. I and the things to avoid section of this lesson. I said, copying articles from your own site and it funny, cause you mentioned that earlier, when you got picked up by F stoppers and talked about canonical links that we went into that really quick, early.

And Th that that’s a complex and we don’t have to get into all of it, but in general, my rule would be it, you should not pitch a post that you’ve already got published on your site. If you are doing that in your, especially a high value target, they’re probably gonna want you to either take it down or canonicalize to them, which gives them the credit or something like that.

But actually, okay. So in this lesson I gave some examples. So I have an article I just published. How much do you tubers make in 2021? This is obviously a while ago. It’s pretty long piece of content, 4,000 words and covers quite a few intents at the heart of the content is a study. I did over a hundred channels to find the average CPMs for different niches and the average amount that YouTube has report earning.

I also had a custom calculator made and I have a section that gives quick tips from the YouTube channels. I studied. To distribute this content. I’m thinking about writing several spin-off pieces. So for example, here’s some titles that I came up with that I thought might be good to pitch us. Guest posts, 10 tips to instantly increase YouTube revenue by 68%.

How to calculate the value of a YouTube subscriber survey of 100 channels shows small YouTubers can make big money. How to go full time on YouTube step-by-step plan for 2021. So all of those new ideas are directly related to the content that I wrote on my site, but not the same topic. And so what I can do then is I reach out to these people who and I pitch a really good idea.

And that idea naturally is going to link back to the post on my website as kind of. The source of this idea, right? So then, you know, I’m like linking back and I’m saying a study that shows how much YouTube is making. I linked with that study back to my website. And so now I’m the study that shows how much YouTube has make no.

Wall street journal or whoever else is studying that, but me. And so that kind of strategy where you do have content on your site, and then you intentionally find some sort of spinoff of that content. That’s different enough that it’s not directly competing, that can rank for kind of a separate keyword, but references your, your content.

I think that is maybe like. What do you call that? It’s like doing that Italian hand, you know, it’s like the, the meme of, of the month, but I’m exactly so good. It’s good.

Dylan: [00:36:02] So, I mean, that, that kind of goes into what, what other tips for writing that successful blog post do you have? So you’re going to link to your internal pages that you want to rank.

Could you maybe link to the other internal pages that are relevant on the hosting site? Yeah, that’s

Corey: [00:36:18] typically, I think that’s, that’s a big thing is like showing that you’ve done the research, you know, so here’s a, here’s a pro tip man. Maybe I’m giving too many pro tips. Go, go take the course. I’m just kidding.

So what I would do, let’s say I’m going to write for Let’s say we’ll just use ShootProof again, as an example, let’s say I’m going to propose something to them. And it’s about SEO for photographers. Well, I’m going to go and go to Google and I’m gonna do a site colon shootproof.com and find out and put in some sort of keyword, like SEO, marketing, online marketing websites.

I’m gonna put in all these keywords, I’m going to see what kind of content do they already have on their domain. That’s somewhat related to. The thing that I’m going to be writing about and then make sure that you. Kind of build your content so that you can reference those different articles on their site.

So you’re, you’re doing good internal linking for them, even if they don’t know that they should be doing internal. Like, you know, w if you’re working with publications that are like big leagues, they probably have a team, you know, like SEO team, and they’re going to be going back and doing this kind of stuff anyway.

But if you can go ahead and do it for them, one of the things I have found in my guest posting experience is that. Often the editor will take out links and they will replace them with links to their own content. And that can be a bummer. I think it’s really good to have some communication about what you expect with links before you start writing.

Ideally. But I think for photographers, a lot of the people that they’re going to be able to get to, to work with. If you go ahead and do the linking for them, you do all the internal linking and it’s beautiful. And you link to your site a couple of times and it’s, you know, relevant to not spammy. And you’re not trying to make it commercial, or it’s not a call to action.

You’re not trying to, trying to get people to leave necessarily sort of, but anyway, you know, it’s it, I think that they, there’s a better chance that they’re going to leave it and not say anything about it and just kind of give you that privilege a hundred percent

Dylan: [00:38:27] agree. I would also maybe consider linking to your bio if you’re, if you’re doing this quite often having an author’s bio on your site and then linking to that and establishing that authorship kind of based entity on for Google is

Corey: [00:38:40] pretty important.

That’d be like your about page for a photographer or? Yeah,

Dylan: [00:38:44] I think that typical photographer would just use the about page. Yeah. Another option would be. If you had like an archive of all the blog posts, you’ve written on your site with that like typical WordPress author archive, but build it out to include more of that about you probably want to like blend the two maybe.

And then you could also link to different sites or articles across the web that you’ve written different blog posts, guest posts done which I used to have on my site. And I should maybe rebuild that. And it’s funny

Corey: [00:39:11] because. You could put those on your about page, like linked to all the places you’ve been featured in published, and that kind of builds authority and trust.

But also when you’re writing these new guest posts, you’re going to have those references. So you could do internal links for the website, links to your website and links to potentially articles that you’ve written in other places, if it’s relevant.

Dylan: [00:39:33] And that’s, I mean, that’s honestly a, I’ve done it before and it’s like a nice little boost.

It feels sneaky, but you’re, you’re like increasing the. Of the third-party sites that you’ve also been featured on like doing SEO for them. So the year benefit is, is coming back to you even more powerful.

Corey: [00:39:50] It’s it’s fun, man. This is like next level SEO right now.

Dylan: [00:39:54] So many layers to this

Corey: [00:39:56] guest post. Another thing I would say is if you are writing a lot of guest posts maybe change up your bio every once in a while.

So, you know, if you have that kind of standard little blurb that you show your author byline or credit or whatever I’ve seen a lot of people make one that has like an exact match anchor text for their keyword. And they can like submit that. And, and I will say if a site that is accepting a guest post is likely to let you kind of have some freedom with your linking.

It’s usually in that little paragraph that you make for your bio they’ll lot of times they’ll let some stuff slide there. So I’ve seen people will take advantage of that and use like exact match anchors and blah, blah, blah. That could be okay. But if you do that, 100 times. I am not expecting very many photographers, do a hundred guest posts, but you know, a couple dozen times even, and it’s the exact same link and the exact same surrounding text.

And it’s on all these different websites. Again, we’re going to trigger those flags where Google’s like link building, link schemes, guest posts. We don’t like that. So make it as natural as possible. I would challenge you to, to write a unique bio for each site maybe, or at least make it so that you can kind of tweak it so that it’s relevant to that.

A hundred percent. It’s funny. Cause I was, I was being interviewed earlier and, and they asked me, what are you passionate about? I’m like, well, it’s a lot of stuff, but what’s relevant to this audience is, and then talk about SEO and stuff. But I think that’s true for most people. It’s like you, you’ve got a lot of your multi.

Faceted, and you can kind of decide what’s the appropriate way that I want to present myself to this audience so that they can, they’re more likely to say, I’m going to go check this person out. I really want to see what else they’ve written a hundred percent. And by the way, that is another direct benefit of guest posting.

It is the traffic that you get because there are some of these blogs, especially the ones with readership of that send out emails. They’ll get, you know, 50,000 views to their blog posts that they make each week or something like that. And it’s like, whoa, this is a lot of people. And if I made this interesting enough, some percentage of those people are going to my website, like they’re going to click the links.

Either. The ones I included in the text or the ones in the author, bio, they want to see more of what I have to say. So that might be. Another reason, like you said, to have that page that you link to where you show all the other things that you’ve written or an author page, where you can say, oh, you liked that you might also like these other things and lets them kind of really get to know you that way.

Dylan: [00:42:35] Speaking of that referral traffic, it, it can last for years. I, I still see referral traffic from guest posts that are five plus years old. Like it’s mindless.

Corey: [00:42:45] Yeah. That’s pretty awesome.

Dylan: [00:42:47] Yeah. Well, I think we’ve pretty much wrapped up our guest post episode for today. Why

Corey: [00:42:54] don’t we make a challenge for people?

Let’s do it. So I guess what I really would like to see is for, I want to challenge you to think about the next thing that you want to run. Is it possible that you could make it a guest post? Maybe you already had something that was going to be a perfect fit for your website. Don’t, don’t give away something that you think you just really wanted to put on your site, but can you come up with a topic and make it so that your next big piece of content is going to be published on someone else’s site?

Can you successfully get a guest post pitched and published somewhere? That’s really the challenge. It’s just take, take your normal thoughts about blogging and content creation, the way that you would normally run on your website and see if you can get it published somewhere else. And then let us know where should they let us know Facebook group?

Dylan: [00:43:52] Yeah,

Corey: [00:43:52] let’s do Facebook group. Turn the comments on, on the, on the podcast episodes. Yeah.

Dylan: [00:43:58] Hopefully by the time this is aired, we have comments turned back on, on the. But if not, we’re going to link to a Facebook group post and I’m going to join this as well. Are you courses? I really need to get some guest posts going.

Okay. Yeah. So we’re each going to attempt to get a blog or a guest post up in the next coming weeks. And we’re going to post the progress in that Facebook group post. And we’d love to follow along on your progress as well. And through ideas. Talk about the challenges we’re coming up against and how the

Corey: [00:44:25] process is going.

So if you’re not already make sure you join the Facebook group, feel your photos and the podcast show notes will be up at fuel. Your photos.com/podcast. You can find the episodes there. This is episode 23 in case you’re meeting the reference. Yeah. And we’ll, we’ll have the notes there. If you have questions, feel free to post them there or in the group.

We’ll see you on the next episode, for sure.

Dylan: [00:44:48] Totally. And if you want more info about guest posts too, a little bit more in depth than we talked about today, feel free to look at our SEO course. It’s fill your photos.com/seo. And by the way, the way

Corey: [00:44:59] that lesson the lesson on guest posts is a very in-depth lesson.

It’s almost like a mini course by itself. It’s directly related to another lesson that is about backlinks. And the two actually go hand in hand. I won’t give away the whole thing, but like, if you do both of them in conjunction, you’re going to have an even better success rate. We’d love to see you there in the course.

Dylan: [00:45:22] All right. Take care, everybody.