Internet marketers and SEO tend to believe that link building and great contents are the fundamental duo in growing readership and visitors. There were many discussion about how to build an online presence and how to maintain them by creating a blog. And when you want to get more out of it, you can build more authority in your industry through guest blogging.
In short, guest blogging means writing and publishing articles on someone else's website/blog. This way, brands can interact with a broader audience while keeping their blogging methods intact.
Its aim is clear: guest blogging will benefit you when you post on authority websites/blogs, you have your link(s) there to boost SEO, people will look you as an expert on the field, and you can direct a good amount of referral traffic.
Guest blogging has become something in common. In fact, there are many big brands that benefit from guest blogging, and they are doing it for three main reasons:
- Building relationship: adding more value to someone else's blog can create great relationships with other bloggers.
- Finding new people: an already-established community has its own fan. By entering it, they can connect with new audience.
- Ranking on search engines: by including a link(s) that direct to their page(s), the post can add value to their website by making it easier to find by search engines.
If you want to add guest blogging to your strategy, there are a few things you should know to ensure your strategy works well.
- Guest blogging is a mutual benefit that should add value to your and the website/blog you're writing to.
- Always have your link(s) relevant to what you're writing..
- Promote your article to social media networks. The more the better.
- Thanking the owner/administrator/webmaster/moderator won't hurt you. In fact, it may benefit you.
- Always respond to comments you have, and respond them well.
Guest blogging is just like any other SEO and internet marketing strategy: it involves a great deal of patience. By adding value to others, over time, the fruit will taste sweet at the end.
Finding Your Target
Blog or not to blog, guest blogging when done right, can be an extremely consistent and fast way to build your email list and relationships with the people in your market. And not to mention high amount of referral traffic that will flood your website.
When you want to initiate the strategy, you need to first find the websites/blogs that accept guest posts.
The next thing to know is that those websites/blogs may have strict rules. Getting accepted by them can be quite difficult to some. But if you can avoid some common mistakes when you pitch something, you can have a good change to be accepted.
The best websites/blogs for you to write:
- Active website/blog that are relevant to your niche or industry.
- Have pages relevant to you, high in number and respectable.
- Those than have the audience you would like to tap into.
- Have active members/readers that like to comment and share.
Preparing Your First Post
Because posting on someone else's website/blog is like entering someone else's territory, you should be polite. You can't just get there, register, write whatever you want so you can then leave and wait. You should follow some quality guidelines to ensure your post in recognizable and has the potential to drive you leads.
The first thing to do is to know who is your targeted website/blog. Make sure than they have the content you need and the keyword that you aim. Then next thing is knowing the audience: B2B, beginner or experts, general or detailed, specific or just concepts, etc..
After understanding them, you can then observe what previous guest posters do, how their posts perform, and how the audience responded to them. See their occupations to see whether they are bloggers, freelancers, consultants, business owners or something else. Find the great ones and try to introduce yourself with your own voice.
A quick research can determine the success rate of you future posts.
What Post Is Best And Getting To Know The Community
To ensure that your guest post gets accepted, you may want to pitch the audience on popular topics with your own voice. See what posts are the most engaging, and see how well those posts are shared and commented.
To ensure your well being, you need to increase the chance of recognition. The best way to do this is by commenting on others first, and try to share those posts you find interesting. This will give some added benefit, one of which is recognition, before you even write your first post.
And since different website/blog may have different targeted audience, they may behave differently. Some websites/blog tend to have strict rules, or unwritten rules that pass along the newer audience. Try to understand how they behave and how they speak. Write your post in a wat that you think will appeal them.
Because you're practically entering the "unknown", you may as well behave yourself and keep your post inline with the community's common sense. Try to avoid in creating controversial posts until you and the community are ready.
Keep It Good And Within Limit
Too much is never enough, but too much can hurt you. Your initial aim when you guest blog is to get more influence and traffic. You post an article, then two, then three. How many until you call it a stop?
Guest blogging is one of the best way to gain backlinks in 2014, but it's benefit has started to fade. The reason for this is similar to backlinks: people are overdoing it; making it a spammy practice. Great articles that populated the web started to be replaced with low-quality ones that don't do any much good to the visitors; all they do is to exist so they can have backlink(s) in hope for better SEO.
On those days, guest blogging used to be a respectable thing to do. It's like becoming a respected author where you can introduce yourself. But since the trends change and people's behavior on the web also change, search engines are putting less weight to guest blogging.
Content marketers shouldn't depend solely on guest blogging as their internet marketing strategy. In a lot of ways, it's a great thing to do, but in many other ways, you should keep things within limit, and never do things that audience are avoiding.\