Guest Blogging
How Many Guest Posts Do You Actually Need?
Fewer than most services will sell you, and in fewer places than you would think.
Guest posting is usually sold by volume — ten placements a month, fifty a quarter — because volume is easy to price and easy to report. It is also the wrong unit for a tactic whose value depends entirely on where the pieces appear.
Why Volume Works Against You
There are only so many publications worth appearing in for a given niche. Hitting a monthly quota means going further down the list every month, and the bottom of that list is where the paid-placement sites are.
Pitching the same publication repeatedly has the opposite problem. An editor who runs you every month stops, and the relationship is worth more than the placements.
A quota forces both failures at once: worse sites, and burnt relationships at the good ones.
A Realistic Pace
For most businesses, one to two placements a month in publications that genuinely matter is a strong programme. Over a year that is a dozen or more bylines in the right places, which is more than most competitors will have.
- Build a target list of ten to twenty publications you would be pleased to appear in.
- Pitch two or three at a time with genuinely different angles.
- Expect a meaningful share to be declined. That is the process working.
- Return to a publication that ran you after a few months, not the following one.
- Review the list every quarter and add any new titles worth pitching.
What to Measure
Counting placements measures the supplier's activity, not your outcome. More useful: referral traffic from the publication, whether anyone mentions having read it, and whether sales can use the byline.
A report showing placements and domain authority and nothing else is measuring what is easy rather than what matters. Ask what the pieces actually did.
When More Makes Sense
A large market with many credible publications supports a higher pace, and a launch or a campaign can justify a burst. What does not work is a permanent high quota in a niche too small to sustain it.
We quote per campaign rather than per link for this reason — see the guest blogging service for how that works.