I ❤️ guest posts. Here’s why:
- An epic guest post helps me share cool new stories with my readers. Happy readers, happy Noah
- OkDork has 300,000+ pageviews per month, 150,000+ email subscribers, and 100,000+ social followers (aka you get some insane promotion)
By writing a guest post on OkDork, you can join the ranks of other successful entrepreneurs, authors, and CEOs who have published on our site:
- Brian Dean, CEO and founder of Backlinko
- Taylor Pearson, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Jobs
- Laura Roeder, CEO and founder of the 7-figure startup MeetEdgar
If you’re interested in writing a guest post for OkDork, here’s how to get started…
How to write a successful OkDork guest post
At a high-level, there are two types of guest posts which do best on my site…
- 2,000 to 4,000 word step-by-step guides with specific, actionable advice based on experience + research in marketing, starting a business, growing a business, or similar (images and word-for-word scripts also help)
- Personal stories, including overcoming challenges to get insane results. Ideally, these stories are about entrepreneurship, growing a business, or marketing #bevulnerable
Overall, my readers tend to be male, 20s-to-30s, with a STRONG interest in marketing, entrepreneurship, and growing a business.
Below are a set of guiding questions to keep in mind when outlining, writing, and finalizing your first draft.
Title, description, and backend setup
- Are you writing in a shared Google Doc? Please make sure permissions are set to “anyone with link can edit.” I have a few team members who need to see the doc to edit, create a social media images, and upload to WordPress
- Is the title eye-catching? Have you used a tool like Ahrefs to find a target keyword? Is the title SEO-friendly? I recommend you check out BuzzSumo to see what other headlines tend to do well on my site
- What’s the meta description we should use for social media? What’s the meta description for SEO? Take a look at our post about Intercom
- Are all links set to open in a new tab (i.e. about_blank)?
for a good example
Intro
- How do we know each other? Typically, an intro with the funny or interesting way we met resonates with my readers. Here’s a great example from Taylor Pearson’s guest post
- Is the intro short-and-sweet? Are you diving into the meat ASAP? Take a look at Chris Von Wilpert’s guest post for inspiration. Notice how he had a few short sentences on Intercom’s success, and then dove straight into actionable marketing insights
- Are you including a table of contents / anchor links so users can skim around? Notice how we used anchor links for an Aubrey Marcus post
- Are you putting your target keyword in the first 100 words? I highly recommend you check out Brian Dean’s on-page SEO tips to optimize your draft for SEO
Meat
- Is the post engaging for males, 20s-to-50s, who like entrepreneurship, marketing, and growing a business? How can you make it EXTREMELY compelling?
- Are you including word-for-word scripts, templates, or documents readers can copy for massive success? Notice how Steve Chou had tons of copy-and-pastable scripts in his guest post
- Are you sharing advice you’ve never shared before? Are you being honest and vulnerable?
- Is the post for ALL types of readers to understand? Make sure you appeal to skimmers and readers who jump around especially
- Are there helpful and relevant images? Do you include a link to all your images? Google compresses images in Google Docs, so it’s important to link to high-res images we can upload to WordPress
- Are important phrases and sentences in bold or italics? Notice how we bold and italicize our content
- Have you used heading tags to separate sections? Make it easy for people to skim and jump around. Check out our post on Aubrey Marcus for an example
- Do you have any “click to tweet” quotes to increase viral social shares? You can use Share Link Generator to create these HTML links
- Are you including long-tail keywords or more on-page SEO strategies? Watch this SEO video from Brian Dean for more details
Outro
- What’s your challenge for readers? Challenges are a great way to drive comments (which may increase SEO)
- Are you giving away anything for the best comment? A successful strategy to drive comments is to give away a product or service. We did this on our Pierce Brown post
- Are you optimizing the last 100 words for SEO? Watch this Brian Dean video on SEO for more details
Preparing for launch
- Have you prepared to promote this on your end, too? Our best guest posters share this with their email list, social channels, personal websites… and even buy ads to promote the content
- Are you available to respond to comments on the post? You don’t need to respond immediately, but checking and responding to any open questions every 12 to 24 hours can drive engagement
For more inspiration, check out the three guest posts below. This is also some of our most popular content ever:
- Peek inside Intercom’s Multi-million Dollar SaaS Growth Strategy
- Time Management Tips of Insanely Busy People
- How To Email Any Top Influencer (And Get A Reply)
Before you get started, a couple words of warning:
- It typically takes 4-8 weeks for a post to go live from the first draft
- We’ll likely go through 2-4 edit phases — and I might completely tear your first draft apart 😊
When your first draft is ready, hit up noah at this site’s domain name with the subject line “Guest post idea: [Your guest post]”.
And when we publish your post, get ready for results like this…
I was really pleased with how well my guest post did on OKDork. I got over 300 new subscribers within the first few days of my guest post being published, tons of social media shares, invites to come on podcasts, a few dozen “thank you” emails, a few awesome taco recipes. It was well worth the effort. I’d highly recommend it.”
-John Corcoran, SmartBusinessRevolution.com