Guest posting is a relevant and professional way to gain high-quality links. It is a tremendous way to build clout for you, your brand, and your domain authority. If you’re thinking of starting guest posting for SEO and searching for a guide on how to do guest posting, then this blog is a worthy one for you.
In this article, we will discuss guest posting techniques, and guidelines to set up a market initiative plan, increase brand reach to new customers, and boost domain authority.
Let’s start from scratch.
What is Guest Posting?
In one line, guest posting is the act of writing content to another individuals or organization’s website or blog, for the purpose of getting traffic back to their website.
A guest blog offers benefits for both the guest blogger and the website or blog hosting the content. In this way, a writer as a contributor or guest author submits content to the site owner or publisher. The site contains plenty of new traffic and quality leads for the author site. On the other hand, quality-written blogs support hosting site’s marketing, SEO initiatives, and so on.
Guest Posting Guidelines
An effective guest post to get quality backlinks requires following several important steps. These help to set your goals, expectations, sharpening your marketing plan, and find the best opportunities for you.
Guest posting strategy starts with,
Finding qualified guest blogging opportunities
You have a niche-specific website and you must be looking to increase traffic, not to spend effort and money on a small site that has very low traffic. Before finding an efficient guest post hosting site, make sure about which topics, or categories your audience is interested in.
Suppose, you are selling digital marketing services through your site. So, you have to find your audience’s most visited website to find your niche-related solution. These will help you to get qualified guest posting opportunities and narrow down the brainstorming about the content ideas you could submit to them. Consider that your expected hosting site has the target audience that you want, the amount of traffic to drive, and strong authority on the search result page.
Or else you can find your niche relevant guest posting sites by looking at your competitor posts and backlinks. Which site has already built a link with them, then it’s mostly possible to build a backlink with your site also.
Brainstorming Blog Posting Ideas
Developing content ideas need to consider the interest and comfortability of the publisher’s audience. Analyzing the site’s blogging topics helps to identify the topics that would be fit for their audience but still not covered. Competitor keyword matrix helps to find keyword gaps of targeted sites.
Choose the final blog posting idea before making sure the topic fits the site’s audience and connects to you and your goal. Select topics that allow you to promote your business, services to the audience and make them your qualitative leads.
So, you have your blog posting idea. It’s time to knock the publisher.
Create The Perfect Pitch
It’s not as easy as describing that you submitted a guest post and the publisher accepted it to run it on their site. At first, you have to catch the publisher’s attention with a perfect guest post pitch.
Find the contact information of editors, or blog managers to connect with them directly. Before pitching, find out if there are any terms and conditions, or requirements for guest posting. Make sure your content idea is fulfilling those requirements.
Keep in mind, that you aren’t the only one who is pitching them. Write an eye-catchy and interesting subject which will stand out in their mailbox. Try to be confident and optimistic about the deal you’re offering to them. Mention the benefits of publishing the blog post to their site and how it’ll serve their potential audience. Include other guest posts you’ve written, and other values that show the publisher what you can bring to the table.
You get the deal with the publisher. Now you need a qualitative blog post copy to submit for publishing.
Write an efficient blog post
An efficient guest post writing based on the guidelines and editorial standards provided by the publisher. Follow these things to make a guest post they will love,
- As you’re posting this guest blog to promote your business and services. But remember that, neither the reader nor the publisher won’t like or accept overly promotional posts. Link your sites, or products according to the readers’ needs and expectations.
- Pay attention to adding value to the readers. Give them the expected solution to get over the situation they are in. By serving them valuable information, you gain the trust and motivate them to get directed to your site.
- Grammatical error, misspelling, lower score at readability makes the content unacceptable by anyone. So, after writing ensure professionalism and content clarity through enough rounds of proofing and editing.
- Along with the publisher’s permission, try to include a relevant link to a piece of content on your site. Which drives interested traffic back to your site and boosts the off-page SEO.
You have your guest post copy, submit it to the publisher. And done? Not really, if you want to build a sustained relationship with the publisher then you have to write for them again. After publishing you have to help them promote and manage the post.
Follow up and Track results
Share the posting topics glance or short brief about it on your social platforms and streams. Mention the publisher’s brand to show them your progression of promoting your piece. Be responsive to the audience’s reactions, comments, messages on your post.
To get an overview of how efficient the guest posting is performing, you have to track the results. Among various measurements, the amount of directed traffic, new visitors, reactions and social shares, changes in the search result page, number of new leads, etc. is essential to find the result. Thus, you can identify the guest post hosting sites that helped you to reach your goals and the one which missed the ratio. So, you can keep contributing to potential sites and remove others from guest posting plans.
So, these are the guest posting guidelines; from selecting the publishers based on the audience’s interests, creating a perfect pitch, to publishing and following the content performance, all are included in a plan. Build your guest posting plans to promote your brand and increase the domain authority.
Conclusion
Google uses 200+ factors to monetize your ranking on the search result page. But, in the end, it is only an algorithm that is rarely able to find the difference between dynamic and spammy content. So, you can jam your guest blog posts with over links and keywords which will push your page ranking on the top.
But, you probably won’t be able to generate valuable, high-fit traffics which is essential to establish your business as an authority.
High-quality content with minimal but targeted link stuffing, guest blogging is one of the great ways to increase site ranking and generate efficient leads for your business.
