Guest Posting Automation [Method]

Hey guys! I recently posted a quick guide on guest posting automation on BHW, and it seems like many people found it useful. That's why I decided to crosspost it here because I've learned a lot of stuff from WF and want to keep this place alive (at least do what I can do). I'm also super curious to hear your thoughts on it. Going to share more soon.

I've been practicing guest posting outreach for quite some time and I decided to share some tips on automation of this task.

There are no affiliate links, all links are for lazy bones like me.

Back in the days, when I only started my way in SEO doing an internship in a small agency, I had to do some dirty job like spam commenting, some copywriting, basic keyword research, and outreach. That's when I got acquainted with such an awesome tool as Scrapebox (as it basically was the only tool I was given).

I believe its slogan says it all, there are tons of things you can do with it. But if you had to learn it from scratch being a newbie, you know what I felt. It's a freakin Rubik's cube. Huge shoutout to the guy called Loopline for making in-depth Scrapebox tutorials.

I've been doing guest posting outreach using Scrapebox for quite a long time and I was quite surprised when I saw that the same functionality was recently added in Netpeak Checker another tool I used to check PBNs. I'd say it's more user-friendly and easy to use for non-gurus while doing the job pretty good.

It's also a complex tool which does quite a lot of things: checks a bunch of on-page stuff, and aggregates data from lots of services through their API. But the main feature we need is SERP scraper. Alright, let's get down to business.

I. SERP scraping
First of all, we need to find niche websites that allow guest posting. As you could already guess, I'll scrape Google in order to find them.

1. Start the program and go to the SE scraper tool. Enter a list of queries you will scrape. Use common guest posting footprints and add your keywords. You can concatenate them in a Google sheets table like this.

Some of the most accurate GP footprints are:

• "write for us" OR "write for me"
• "Become a contributor"
• inurl:"guest post guidelines"
• inurl:"write for us" etc.

2. Now it's time to choose appropriate settings. Choose the SE you want to scrape, number of results, and geo (if you want geo-targeted results). You better use proxies, you can add a list of proxies, check their connection and status.



What I also like is that this tool has 4 anti-captcha services integrated (2-Captcha, Anti-Captcha, RuCaptcha, and CapMonster) so you can add your API token and use anti-captcha services to 100% prevent yourself from doing a dirty job while scraping a massive number of keywords. For instance, I use 2Captcha which taxes $0,81 for 1000 ordinary Captchas and $2,99 for 1000 reCptchas.

If you don't want any extra costs just use proxies and set a Max number of threads to 1



3. Start scraping.

That's how the whole thing should look like:



II. Filtering and evaluation

Now it's time to filter the results we got and check them by some 3rd party metrics.

Let's filter obviously irrelevant results. After having a quick look at the results, I noticed some pages containing lists of guest post opportunities. We don't need those so let's filter them out. The second condition excludes all pages with numbers in titles e.g. 'top 200 blogs'.



Click Transfer URLs and it will transfer all unique URLs for further analysis.

At this point, you can check all sites by DA/PA/TF/CF/DR etc. etc. filter them and start reading their GP requirements and doing manual outreach. But this guide is about massive outreach, isn't it? That's why let's go back to our process.​

Now select such parameters: On-page - Emails (to scrape emails), and Google SERP - Title, Description. Start crawling. I guess at this stage you can increase the number of threads.



Alright, now it's time for further filtering.



After this, I got 105 highly relevant results out of 541. Not bad at all.

Now I check them by 3rd party metrics and organic traffic. You can use metrics from Ahrefs/Moz/SEMrush/Majestic/Serpstat/Alexa/Whois/WaybackMachine. For a free option, you can use Moz as it has free API access and Alexa.

I check DA from Moz and SE traffic from Serpstat.



Filter them according to your preferences. For instance, you may exclude those that have DA lower than 30 or have traffic less than 1000/mo. Everything depends on your budget and needs. I usually don't segment donors by good/very good, I just sort out obvious trash and reach out to everyone else.

III. Outreach time
Alright, now you have to do bulk outreach offering your guest posts. I see many webmasters who either underestimate the importance of mailing part or overcomplicate it writing a huge detailed letter.

I won't you give you any templates. Don't think it's because I'm a greedy asshole who doesn't want to share his secret email template which has a 99% response rate. The thing is that there are dozens of examples through the web, but your email has to be unique in order to stand out among others.

Tips for good email:

• Noone will read/answer your pitch containing just your name and offer, there are thousands of other (Indian people) webmasters sending the same letters every day.
• Noone will read your 1000+-character letter where you describe how good your writing skills are
• Aim to describe how the website owner will benefit (e.g. you will write with SEO in mind, you'll promote the post in your social media, or to your huge mail list)
• Use custom domain email address (user@yourdomain.com)
• Use informal language, speak like a real person
• Add a small relevant joke (this works great for me, I've done some A/B testing and letters containing a small joke/meme had a higher response rate)
• Check your grammar (I'm not a grammar nazi, but obvious typos make you look like an idiot)
• Add a call to action in the end, asking for a response
• Don't stop with the first letter, send a follow-up (after one week since the first attempt, send another short letter to those who didn't reply to your first offer)

Here are some email services with their free plans:

• Sender - 2,500 subscribers, 15,000 emails per month
• Benchmark - 2,000 subscribers, 14,000 emails per month
• SendPulse - 2,500 subscribers, 15,000 emails per month
• MailChimp - 2,000 subscribers, 12,000 free emails per month
• MailerLite - 1,000 subscribers, no email limit

Costs:

• You can basically do the whole process for free using free trials (Netpeak checker - 14-day free trial, free proxies, free mailing service)
  
• If you have some money to spend, then it will be $19 for the checker, $10 for good proxies, and $20+

for mail service if you have big campaigns.
Hope it will be useful for you, feel free to ask me anything (except my credit card security code ).