Guest Blogging: A Definitive Guide
If you are looking for ways to engage more customers then you can try Guest Blogging.
In this era of eCommerce growth and omnichannel approaches, creating engaging content is the key to success.
Blogging is one of the different ways you can to informs your customers and guide them to new products and services. However, you can also do it from the existing one.
How? Keep on reading to learn more about it in detail.
1.
Guest Blogging and Its Importance
Guest Blogging basically involves inviting someone from the outside to write a blog that you will publish on your website.
Moreover, the writer often works in the same industry as your organization or can be an expert on the subjects with your organization.
In this section, we will discuss the benefits of guest blogging for you as a writer and as a host.
Keep on reading.
Guest Blogging can be a great way to work with others in the same industry, whether in the area of sales collaboration or in a tandem with strategies like affiliate marketing.
How Guest Blogging Benefits the Host?
One of the advantages of Guest Blogging is that it benefits both parties.
As a writer, if you are new to the field, or if your company or brans is a small startup, it is a chance to get your thoughts and products to your target audience.
Some of the other benefits are:
Brand Awareness Hosting engaging guest posts can help establish your blog as worth reading.
Moreover, people will associate your brand with interesting content and expertise from a wide range of talent.
This means that they will think of you, not your competitors.
Fresh Content In some cases, blogging can become a little repetitive and stale.
However, when you bring in guest bloggers, you introduce fresh content that brings in different points of view and style.
But the key is to make sure it is relevant.
Leadership You want your brand to be perceived as a leader in the industry.
Finding out experts in your field can help provide guest content so that you can widen the knowledge base of your readers who have access to it.
SEO Guest blogs can be one of the great ways to boost your SEO and Search Engine Rankings.
Moreover, by including good keywords and links to your site, your site may be among the top list and your potential customers can easily find it.
Learn more about How Does Word Count Affect Blogpost Performance? here.
Benefits for Guest Blogger
In some cases, guest blogging is not posts due to an invitation by a host, however, a pitch by the writer.
So, what are the benefits of guest blogging to writers?
Well!
Relationships For new and emerging writers and companies, guest blogging can help you to build relationships.
Having an ongoing relationship with bigger organizations or popular bloggers can lead you to more opportunities and boost the following benefits even more.
Reach Writing a guest blog for a bigger organization or a site can help you to extend your reach.
If you are able to engage the readers well, they will follow links back to your own business or clink on your bio details to learn more about you.
Audience Most writers want an audience.
Moreover, the bigger, the better. With the help of guest blogging, your audience grows.
Readers are more likely to look at your own blogs, as well as share your posts on their social media platforms.
Money Yes! Guest bloggers, not always, but often get paid for their efforts.
In fact, you can make a good living simply by writing guest blogs.
Fame You may not want it, however, if you have a good content strategy, and a number of site invites, you can easily become popular and find more opportunities.
2.
Becoming a Guest Blogger
Well, yes! Guest blogging has a number of benefits like building a profile as an industry or thought leader, growing your personal brand, growing your audience, improving SEP performances, having authoritative backlinks, etc. the key to guest blogging is learning how to do so.
Let’s learn more about it in detail.
After learning about how guest blogging benefits both you as a writer and as a website owner, let’s dive deep into each step of the guest blogging process in order to become a successful guest blogger.
1# Set Specific, Achievable Goals
The first step to start guest blogging is to set attainable and measurable goals.
Your goals might be related to the business performances, like generating more leads, or your website performance, like improving your search visibility or your referral traffic.
Whatever your goals are, make them SMART.
When you have a clear goal, it often becomes easier to pick the topics to write about, the blogs where you want to publish them how frequently to write, and so on.
Most importantly, SMART goals will help to find if this tactic is right for your business and how much you should invest in it in the future.
However, if you are just a beginner, the following are the five examples of measurable goals you can set for yourself:
X referral visits Get them from your guest posts or increase referral traffic by x% from your gest posts.
X leads from referral traffic These come from your guest posts or increase the number of leads from your gust posts by x%.
Clients from your guest posts Or you can increase clients from your guest posts by x%.
Improve your SEO performance or you can improve your SERP visibility by x%.
get x number of high-quality backlinks to relevant content from your guest posts.
For instance, you might set a goal around referral visits, SEO traffic, and backlinks.
Changes in the above matrices can be easily traced back to guest posts, and clients and leads are more important for your business.
Moreover, they can be greatly influenced by guest blogging, however, correct attribution may be a challenge.
Learn more about Backlinks with Reverse Outreach here.
2# Choosing a Topic that will Benefits your Goals
In most cases, guest bloggers often fail because they focus on publications instead of the content.
That is a good strategy to make sure to get published, however, it serves the goals of the publishers, not yours.
Whether you are an expert or just learning about writing blogs, you need to build a successful guest blogging program by picking topics that serve your ultimate goal.
Moreover, it could be referral traffic, SEA performance, leads, or clients.
To do so, you can start by making a shortlist of the top website pages that you want to promote and include them in your future guest blogs.
Furthermore, analyze the current status of each page, like monthly SEO traffic, and set a goal that you intend to achieve in a certain timeframe.
You can also have an overall website goal as well as a page-specific goal.
For each target page, pick an overarching topic that is relevant to your expertise and also be useful to your readers.
Then you can start using keyword research tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs to fuel your bank ideas for upcoming guest posts.
Consider the following example.
You want to create guest blogs over the overarching topic “guest blogging”.
For this, you can create different types of content over the umbrella of this topic: how-to articles, thought leadership, case studies, and ultimate guides.
With the help of tools like SEMRush or Ahrfs, you find article ideas to write content on.
3# Finding Reputable Guest Blogging Sites
After mapping out the content ideas, it is time to find relevant publications.
Start by putting together a list of target websites. Here is how you can discover guest blogging opportunities and populate your list:
Use Advanced Search Operators This is where you will use advanced search operators like “intext: submit a guest post”.
Use Google Reverse Image Search A point where you take a headshot of a popular guest blogger and use it to find places where they published in the past.
Moreover, these publications are most likely to accept guest posts.
Look for a list of top websites that accept guest posts.
Competitor’s backlinks You can also check the backlinks of your competitors to find publications.
Moreover, make sure to prioritize your list and only pitch blogs that have:
- domain authority of 40 or higher
- spam score of 3% or less
- thorough editorial process
Learn more about Web Site Development here.
4# Conduct Guest Blogging Outreach
This is the point where you start thinking about ways to pitch your guest post ideas.
The publications you intend to target have a thorough editorial process, so first look for the guest blogging guidelines of the website, and then prepare your pitch.
According to many experts, your blogging outreach process should be very strategic, starting from the keyword you find and your target publication.
Moreover, check if your target website already ranks for the topic you will choose.
Many experts are of the view that you should go through the posts of publications and see if there is a topic that has not been covered or an angle you can take to complement their existing posts.
Once the pitch is ready, it is time to find your contact person and reach out to them.
While there are many topics you can use to get a response, a good thing to follow is asking yourself “does my pitch offer any value?”.
A number of marketers use Google Sheets or Excel to track their contacts and response.
It is not bad, however, it means you are missing out on tracking a lot of valuable information.
A powerful CRM can help you track all the relevant information you need, like emails, meeting notes, projects, etc. Additionally, you can even go back and refresh your memory at any time.
For outreach, you can use Respona, for instance. It is an all-in-one search, outreach, and engagement platform.
Using AI helps you with your content and keyword research, and lets you find contact information for your target publications.
Once you get approval, you can start fleshing out your ideas and writing a great draft.
5# Write a Post
This is one of the easiest steps, as long as you pick the topic you are passionate about and have expertise on.
You will need to set time aside and start typing.
However, if you are not comfortable with your writing, you can hire an editor to review your draft. It is always good to have a fresh pair of eyes to pick your article and make suggestions.
Feedback is the breakfast of champions!
Whether you are just starting or an expert, the following essential recommendations can help for writing a guest post:
- write long-form compelling content of at least 1000 words
- break the text into small, digestible paragraphs
- optimize for on-page SEO
- use original images and graphs to make your content more linkable
- add quotes from friends and influences
- link to other published guest posts
- link to your own, relevant content
- you can also link to other publications, studies, data, thought leadership, etc.
- internal linking, to other articles from your publishers
- add your byline and explain what makes you an expert
When you send your final draft to the editor, do not forget to include your author details.
These include your full name, a short bio, your social media links, so that readers can connect with you, a headshot, and your website.
6# Track the Results on your Posts over time
This one is the last, but arguably most important step.
You will want to make sure that you always compare your results to where you were at the beginning of the process: Step 1: Goal Setting.
Depending on your goals, you can have different SEO tools to track different metrics.
Moreover, you can refer to the following for blogging tools.
Ahrefs can help check everything from changes in the number of backlinks, referring domains, organic traffic performances, and the number of keywords for which the website ranks in Google.
Guest Blogging and SEO
According to a study by SEMRush, 53% of digital marketing specialists say that guest blogging or guest posting is one of the most effective ways to build a backlink profile.
A similar study by Aira shows that guest blogging is the 3rd most effective way to build backlinks, according to 51% of the respondents.
Guest blogging is such a powerful tactic that websites that accept these allow authors to link back to their own content or resources, as long as it makes sense for the reader.
Moreover, the link is often placed in the body of the article, or in the bio of the author.
In most cases, blog editors place a no-follow tag on links from guest authors.
In the past, that was a “lower-value” backlink as it did not carry any authority.
With relatively recent updates, Google has made it public that even:no-follow” backlinks as signals by their ranking algorithm.
Finally
Some of the best tools for guest blogging are BuzzStream, Respona, JustReachOut, BuzzSumo, Clearscope, Ahrefs, SEMRush, etc.
With this, I hope that you are better equipped to start making your own guest blogging strategies.
The best strategy for your business and your content is always going to be the one your crat, after trial and error. So do not be afraid to begin and learn along the way.