Guest posts are a great SEO and
marketing tool – if used correctly, of course. After the demise of
article directories and changes in the search ranking algorithms that
made many other ways of getting backlinks obsolete, guest posting on
reputable sites remains one of the best ways to make your site
visible to the world (and search engines).
Key Points
How You can benefit From Guest Posts
Basically, the benefits from guest
posts are two. First, you get free exposure in front of a new
audience (i.e. the audience of the blog you are guest posting to) and
second, you get a backlink or two to your site. If you post on a
really popular blog, you can get substantial amounts of direct
traffic to your site and in the ideal case, when your product is of
interest to the visitors from the other blog, you can make sales.
The second advantage – the backlink –
is the main reason why guest posters submit content for free to other
blogs. If the site is a high ranking one and it is in your niche,
then this backlink is especially valuable.
Why Guest Posting is Different from Article Marketing?
One of the reasons why some people are skeptical to the power of
guest posts is that they believe this is just the good old article
marketing. While there are some similarities between the two, guest
posting is very different from article marketing. When you are guest
posting, you are submitting to blogs in a niche, while when you
submit to article directories that generally cover all topics, the
links and traffic you get are less relevant.
With guest posts, you can’t submit hundreds of posts a month
simply because there aren’t that many good blogs where you could
submit content, so article spamming is harder to do with guest
posting, if you are doing it right. You pick only relevant, high
quality blogs for submission and as a result, the backlinks you get
are valuable even after the Google Panda update.
With article directories you can have automated submissions that
blast your article with dozens of directories at once but with guest
posting this doesn’t happen – you write an article exclusively for
one blog, contact each blog owner in advance and only after he or she
approves your post, it goes live. Very often you can publish only 5
or even fewer posts a month simply because not all suitable blogs in
your niche are interested in publishing stuff from other bloggers.
How to Find Suitable Blogs to Guest Posts on
One of the key moments for the successful use of guest posts is to
find good blogs to post on. The first you can do is search with
Google for “guest post” “your keyword” to find blogs in your
niche that accept guest posts.
After you find a couple of blogs in your niche that accept guest
posts, the next step is to filter the good ones only. You do this
with the help of the various ranking
services. After the blog passes this test – i.e. it has good
parameters according to the criteria of ranking services, you still
need to browse through the blog to see if it is a quality one or full
or crap because it is quite possible that a site has good metrics but
its content isn’t something you would like to be affiliated with.
Alternatively, you may search for lists of sites that accept guest
posts or join MyBlogGuest.com (a site where bloggers looking for
guest posts and authors of guest posts get together) but still the
ranking check and the manual content check is to be done by you. You
may also want to check if a site is blacklisted by guest posters
because there are many dishonest Web masters, who simply steal your
content – remove your links or change the byline, which virtually
renders your guest post useless for SEO and promotion purposes.
Write the Post, pitch, Get Published, Answer Comment
After you have found some good blogs you’d like to guest post to,
the next step is to write the post. Usually blogs that accept guest
posts have their guidelines, so make sure you check them before you
submit the post. When you write the post, don’t forget to include the
allowed amount of backlinks in the byline, or even better – in the
post itself.
When the article is ready, don’t submit it right away even if
their guidelines say so. Many blogs that say they accept guest posts
don’t answer at all, so when you submit the article with them, it is
practically blocked from submitting elsewhere (because if you do, you
risk having it published on two or more sites, and this will make
bloggers furious because of the duplicate
content penalty). This is why it is best if you first pitch and
only if you get an answer that the blogger is interested in your
post, submit the article itself.
After submission, check the site daily till the article gets
published because bloggers not always email you when the article is
live and if you don’t check regularly, you might miss it. If there
are readers’ comments, answer them.
If you decide to guest post on a regular basis, it is best to keep
a file with all the links to your guest posts and check them at least
once a month for new comments or simply to make sure the post hasn’t
been deleted. Sometimes bloggers will delete guest posts for one
reason or another and if this happens to you, you will hardly be
happy. However, the good news is that after some time, when the
deleted post is cleared from the indexes of search engines, you can
submit it elsewhere and still make a good use of it.
Guest posting is a very powerful tool, so if you haven’t used it
so far to promote your blog and to get backlinks, consider giving it
a try. And remember, as with many things in life, it is quality, not
quantity that matters, so don’t aim to publish dozens of guest posts
a month on crappy blogs. Focus on high quality blogs and only then
you will see good results.
