Whenever I work with someone on Guest Article Promotion the problem we run into is a finite supply of topics to write about.
What I’ve found is that — with a bit of framing — you can write the same article time and time again and promote it to new sites. And the sites are excited to get a new version of an old article from you.
How? With very specific framing.
Here’s what you need to do to generate infinite guest articles from a small number of existing articles.
First, look at your most popular content. These are the articles that get the most reads and shares. (Google Analytics and BuzzSumo are both your friend for this).
Now, distill down the topic and description of that article into a pitch. You want to follow this format:
- Article Title: One sentence that can work as the title for the article
- Article Description: Two or three sentences that describe the outcomes and benefits the reader will experience after reading the article
- Social Proof: A link to your existing article, along with mention of any social proof like “It got over 50 tweets” or “It was one of the most popular guest posts on the site in 2015” or “After six months, it keeps getting comments!”
Then, combine those three elements into a short pitch for the article. It should look like this.
- Article Title — Article Description (Social Proof).
Do this for your 3-5 most popular articles. Articles that you’ve written for your site or on another person’s site as a guest article.
You’ll end up with summary pitches for your most popular content.
Using the outreach email template I talk about in this article, you want to draft up an outreach email for these most popular articles.
Here’s what that can look like:
Heya {Name},
I’m a big fan of {Website} and loved Recent Article where you talked about Topic.
I help teach people {Benefit Focused Outcome}. I’d love to write an article for your site and teach your audience about any of the following topics:
- Pitch #1
- Pitch #2
- Pitch #3
These are three of my most popular pieces of content. What I propose is I write a new, unique version of one of these articles for your site (on the same topic).
Does one of these topics look like it would be a good fit for your audience?
If so, just hit reply and let me know which topic you’d like me to write about. After that, we can work out scheduling details.
When you do this, you can pitch (and re-pitch) the same topics across multiple sites as guest articles.
Every time you pitch, you’re leveraging social proof, pointing to an existing article (+) about an already proven topic (++) that your audience is interested in learning more about(+++).
When the editor says “Yeah! We’d love you to write a version of Pitch #1 for our site,” your job is now to write a new version of an article you’ve already written — a task that’s a whole lot easier than writing a brand new article from scratch.
And for readers? There are two possible reactions:
- Reaction #1 — They’ve never been exposed to this content from you before, so you’re now established as an authority and expert on this topic in their mind
- Reaction #2 — They’ve seen this content from you before, so now you’re reenforcing your authority and expertise on this topic in their mind