StackHacks: Get More Readers - part 3

Even more ways to get more subscribers to your newsletter

More Eyeballs Means More Subscribers

This is Part 3 of How to get more Readers for your Substack newsletter. Here are links to the whole series:

Part 1 - https://pau1.substack.com/p/stackhacks-get-more-readers

Part 2 - https://pau1.substack.com/p/stackhacks-get-more-readers-part

Part 3 - https://pau1.substack.com/p/stackhacks-get-more-readers-part-cb2

Part 4 - https://pau1.substack.com/p/stackhacks-get-even-more-readers

Part 1 showed how and why you should consider Re-Submitting your SubStack articles to:

• Tumblr

• Blogger

• Medium

• Reddit

• Hacker News

• Quora

• How and why to use Twitter Threads

Part 2 showed how and why you should consider Re-Submitting your articles to:

• Flipboard

• LinkedIn

• Pinterest

• and How to Contribute to Online Forums

In this post, Part 3, we will show you how to find guest blogging opportunities.

By re-submitting our work to these other platforms, we are sharing our writing with many more people than just those on our Substack ecosystem. More people (eyeballs) means more subscribers.

Re-Submitting and guest blogging also helps your writing to become Undeplatformable.

What is Guest Blogging? Why?

Guest Blogging is leveraging someone else’s blog or newsletter to mutually benefit both parties - the guest AND the host. You share your writing with somebody else’s subscribers, and if they like your writing, you will get more subscribers for your own newsletter.

You become an authority in the reader’s eyes and gain credibility as an expert in whatever field or niche you write about. The host wouldn’t let some first time, naive writer post about a subject they are impassioned about, if they didn’t trust your writing.

It multiplies the number of people who read your post.

And because you use certain keywords in your article (read about it here:
StackHacks - 6 Steps for More SubStack Subscribers with SEO for 2022) you will gain quality Back Links, a major signal to help Google rank your post on the first page of their search result for those keywords.

Guest posting is good for the host too. You can exchange links and articles back and forth to use your combined lists for growth. The host gets free content that week, so that helps them out. It’s a win-win.

There have been cases of guest posters picking up hundreds of new subscribers just with a single helpful article.

Where to Find Guest Posting Opportunities?

The easy and obvious way is using your network of Substack writers whose newsletters you comment on. People who are already familiar with your work, and you theirs. Reach out to your fellow writers through the weekly Writer Office Hours most Thursdays: I’m honored to have made this list of writers helping other writers! Post that you are looking for collaboration opportunities for the topic of #YourPassion.

Or just reach out to them through their Substack email address or contact info on their newsletters. Say you write about similar topics, and would they be interested in an exchange?

Interviewing another newsletter writer works too. As they will always retweet your post to their list. Here’s an email interview I did with the financial Green Chicken - DoombergT, and another with Medium writer John P. Weiss, Super Creator.

I have a new collaboration with the smartest man on the internet (my accolades, not his), coming up. Check out David’s Newsletter - if you like America:

I am always looking for guests - and to guest write on other newsletters. Reach out if you see a mutually beneficial collaboration. (paul@pau1.ca)

There are a couple of other ways. This first one is the easiest. It is a list of 500 newsletters that have reached out to one of the largest and most well-respected SEO/content and link-building marketing companies - The Hoth - to say that they are looking for guest posters!

Here is the PDF, with the Names, Website URLs, Domain Authority, and Categories all broken out for you. Just find your category and contact the website to see what criteria they like to see before publishing your articles:

500 Guest Posting Opportunities

1.63MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

The next way requires a bit more work on your part but will uncover some hidden gems to have new audiences find you - and you them.

The trick here is to use specific search operators in Google to find guest posting opportunities:

• Keyword + “guest post”

• Keyword + “guest article”

• Keyword + “write for us”

• Keyword + “guest blog”

• Keyword + “guest blogger”

• Keyword + “guest Column”

• Keyword + “guest author”

• Keyword + "write for me"

• Keyword + "become a contributor"

• Keyword + "contribute to this site"

• Keyword + inurl:category/guest

• Keyword + "guest blog" + inanchor:contact

• Keyword + "guest blogger" + inanchor:contact

• Keyword + "guest Column" + inanchor:contact

• Keyword + "guest article" + inanchor:contact

• Keyword+ "write for us" + inanchor:contact

• Keyword + "write for me" + inanchor:contact

• Keyword + "become a contributor" + inanchor:contact

• Keyword + "contribute to this site" + inanchor:contact

You can substitute Keyword for your Competitors Name. Here is what this looks like in action using SEO as the keyword:

Tons of results

So once you run your searches, you will compile a list of websites that accept guest posts in your particular niche and paste those into a spreadsheet.

The + inanchor:contact at the end of the search will bring up the contact us page, or the site owner’s contact info.

Contact a few of these and ask whether your writing would be a good fit for their audience. Include a relevant example post. This should be your best writing. Treat it like a resume. You want to get in front of all those new eyeballs.

Rinse and repeat. You may even land a paid gig out of the exercise. Good Luck!

Next in this series will be how to re-purpose your posts by …

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Wouldn’t it be cool to have your own Writer’s Cottage?

This is David McCullough’s writer’s shed in the backyard of his West Tisbury home. A biography about him on HBO is called “Painting with Words“.

Photo was taken from the TV show

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Have you submitted your site to The Sample yet? Do it now! Another good way to get some new subscribers…

Thank you to all the subscribers. I answer all the comments. Share or Tweet if you like, or click the Heart. Peace in Ukraine!