Want to expand your audience, build your credibility, and touch more lives with the work you do?

Sharing audiences through guest blogging is a great way to do all that.

Here’s the catch.

Have you ever spent hours crafting this epic blog post and blog after blog doesn’t feature it worse yet, they don’t even respond?

It’s a real thing.

It’s even happened to us.

But through some research and hard work we got featured on ProPsychCentral. 

So, we’re dropping in today to give the behind the scenes strategy we used to get more eyes on our website, boost our credibility, and touch more lives with the work we’re doing.

Why?

Because they’re steps you can use, too!

CHOOSE THE BLOG YOUR WANT TO GET FEATURED ON

Do this before you write.

Seriously!

Most hopeful-guest-bloggers write an incredible post and then try to find a blog to share it. But a successful blogger doesn’t want just any old blog post that gives you a boost. They want something that’s good for their audience.

So choose 2-3 blogs that are read by your demographic and then study it.

STUDY THE BLOG

When you’re studying the blog you want to get featured on you’re looking for ways to can, a) add to the blogs value and b) stand out to their readers.

Here are the questions you need to be able to answer with your research:

• What topics do they usually post on? 
• What have they not covered recently that would be valuable to their readers?
• What is the style of the blog (personality-driven, professional, fun, academia)?

Now, it’s time to choose a topic.

CHOOSING A TOPIC

Now that you’ve chosen the blog you want to get featured on, studied it to identify how you can add value and fit into the vibe they’ve already got going on, brainstorm 3-5 blog post topics that include:

• Your area of expertise
• Adding value to the blogs’ audience
• A topic not recently or frequently covered on the blog

By making sure your blog topic includes the three things mentioned you can accomplish the following: grow your audience and boost your credibility while adding to the blog’s value and audience. 

SUBMITTING THE BLOG POST/PITCH

Before we spill our top-secret strategies to making your blog post something bloggers want to share with their audience with the way you submit/pitch submission guidelines for the specific blog you chose trump anything we’re about to share.

Guidelines can be frustrating to follow, but they can also be your ticket to getting featured.

So, if you can add the following to their guidelines, AWESOME! If not you have our permission to disregard:

• Make the subject line of your email super engaging but clear.

EXAMPLE – This was the subject for our blog post titled 7 things online therapists wish they had known before their first online session: If only therapists had known THIS before their first ONLINE session.

This created curiosity and urgency. What should therapists have known? What do I need to make sure my audience knows about this?!

If the submission guidelines as you to send the post to a generic (hello@) email address include GUEST POST before your subject line.

• In the first paragraph of your email write 1-3 short sentences about what you appreciate about the blog or what stands out to you by it.
• Express that you would love to give back because the blog has added to you and give them easy access links to your post.
• Close the email with a quick “thank you” for the work they’re doing and invitation for them to reach out to you for anything they need to make sharing the blog post as easy as possible.

Now, you wait for a response…

WHAT TO DO IF THEY DON’T FEATURE YOUR BLOG POST

If you haven’t heard back from them by the time they said they would notify you (ie, a month) resend the email with a quick, “Hey just wanted to make sure you got this”.

We all get busy. And it’s easy for an email to get buried in an inbox or even opened and forgotten about.

If you don’t hear back from then that second time you don’t have to go through the whole blog post and all your time away.

Here’s some ways to repurpose all your time and energy:

• Tweak the blog post to fit your own audience and share it on your own blog.
• If you don’t have a blog, break down the pieces of your post into social media content.
• Research another similar blog, use all your same points, but position the post to serve the other blog.
• Write another post for the original blog you researched. Why? Because you already did the research and brainstormed topics. 

If it helps you feel any better, the first post we submitted to ProPsychCentral didn’t get posted until we sent a second post (the second one didn’t get shared, but what if we hadn’t sent the second post? Totally worth it, in our opinion).

There you have it. The ins and outs of writing a guest blog post that actually gets featured.

That being said, the submission guidelines for our blog are super simple (but they do include being one of our providers). Schedule yourself a free demo to see if we can simplify the business side of your practice and get easy access to being featured on our blog!