A Basic Guide to Guest Blogging

Guest blogging or guest posting is a content marketing tactic where you write blogs as a guest author with at least one link pointing to your website.

Businesses invest in guest posting to spread brand awareness, increase website traffic, build a personal brand, increase online authority, and improve search engine ranking.

There are also many other benefits of this marketing tactic if you plan right. Here I’ve discussed how guest blogging works, so you would know where you are investing.

A Basic Guide to Guest Blogging

• Define Your Guest Posting Goals

You should start by deciding what goals you plan to achieve with this investment. Is it to increase brand awareness or increase website traffic. You might be trying to build a personal brand or just increase search engine ranking. Whatever the goals, you should write them down and make sure you share them with your team.

You don’t necessarily have to follow just one goal. Try to keep one primary goal with each campaign and make other secondary goals. It is important because you will choose websites and write content according to these goals. Content trying to cater to more than one goal usually ends up directionless and you don’t get much benefit from it.

• Make a List of Links and Anchor Texts

As guest posting is a part of SEO too, you have to consider your link-building strategy. You have to decide what anchor texts to use and which pages should get the links. If you don’t know about this, you should take the help of the best SEO link-building agency to do it for you.

A professional’s help will ensure your resources and investment is put in the right place and you get the best return on investment. An SEO expert will study your business and online market and decide the anchor texts. This step has to be done carefully because unnatural backlinks can have a negative impact on your search engine rankings.

• Find Relevant Websites

After you have decided your guest posting goals and created a link building and content marketing strategy, you have to decide the website where you will publish your posts.

These websites have to be relevant as well as high quality. You have to find all websites with the same niche and collect the email addresses of their managers.

If you are unsure if a website can benefit you, see who its audience is. If the website gets your target audience as regular visits, then it’s right for you. However, you should also look into things like domain authority, monthly traffic, and spam score.

Once you have a list of final websites, you can move on to the next step. This very step is actually not as easy as it sounds. It takes a lot of work to find the right sites and then manually pull out their email addresses.

• Write an Email Pitch for Bloggers

Once you have the email addresses, you have to write to them to see if they would be interested in publishing your articles. You can also see if they have a “Write for Us” page on their website. If they have this page, this means they accept guest posts.

You will still need to contact them and let them know your plans. As you will have a lot of email addresses, you should write one engaging pitch and send it to all of them. This will save you time and ensure you send an effective message to all of them.

Many of them won’t even reply back and some will simply apologize. Those who might agree will also have some questions. You have to answer all their questions and convince them why they should agree to publish your guest post. If you are also running a blog and want to make money selling backlinks then you should definitely do it. As, it is one of the good ways of making handsome money.

After all, why would they take the risk of promoting you on their website?

They don’t even know you. Someone could complain against them because they referred to your business and you did scam those people. Your pitch should address all their insecurities with a convincing answer.

• Negotiate a Deal

Most bloggers don’t publish guest posts for free. They will ask you to pay a certain amount for it and you will have to negotiate a deal with them. The amount depends on the quality, traffic, niche, and domain authority of the website. They can ask for up to one thousand dollars for one post with one link.

Many websites even have the policy that they will delete your link after a few months. If you want to improve your SEO, then you will need do-follow backlinks. You have to be clear with them that you need a do-follow link.

A do-follow link means they are endorsing your business as a vote of confidence. They don’t want to do that, so they will try to convince you on no-follow links.

You can make all this easier for you if you take the help of a professional service like Globex. Such companies already have a large network of bloggers and they can get your posts to publish at much lower prices than what the blogger will ask of you.

• Write Unique Guest Blogs

Your job doesn’t end at convincing bloggers to publish your post. Now you also have to write a unique and valuable post for each website. It takes a lot of time to write something that actually has new information and shows that you are one of the industry leaders.

You will have to select unique and interesting topics and then do research to write those articles. You also have to make sure that the article caters to your business goals. It makes you appear as a competent business without directly marketing it.

• Follow Up to Ensure Publishing

Even after writing and sending the article, you have to stay in touch with the blogger until it gets published. They have to follow their own calendar and might not post the article on the date you want.

This means you have to write follow-up emails to ensure they publish the article and it remains published. You should also watch out for scammers who would take the payment but won’t meet their end of the bargain.