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.
If you plan correctly, this marketing tactic has many other benefits. Here, I’ve discussed how guest blogging works so you will know where you are investing.
A Basic Guide to Guest Blogging
Define Your Guest Posting Goals
It would be best to start by deciding what goals you plan to achieve with this investment. Is it to increase brand awareness or website traffic? You might try to build a personal brand or improve search engine ranking. Whatever the goals, you should write them down and 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 essential 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 benefit much.
Make a List of Links and Anchor Texts
As guest posting is also part of SEO, 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 hire the best SEO link-building agency to do it for you.
A professional’s help will ensure your resources and investment are 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 on the anchor texts. This step has to be done carefully because unnatural backlinks can negatively impact your search engine rankings.
Find Relevant Websites
After deciding on your guest posting goals and creating a link-building and content marketing strategy, you must determine the website where you will publish your posts.
These websites have to be relevant and 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, looking into domain authority, monthly traffic, and spam score would be best.
Once you have a list of final websites, you can move on to the next step. This step is actually not as easy as it sounds. It takes a lot of work to find the right sites and manually extract their email addresses.
Write an Email Pitch for Bloggers
Once you have the email addresses, you must write to them to see if they would be interested in publishing your articles. You can also check if they have a “Write for Us” page on their website. If they do, this means they accept guest posts.
You will still need to contact them and let them know your plans. Since you will have many email addresses, you should write one engaging pitch and send it to all of them. This will save you time and ensure you send a compelling message to all of them.
Many will not reply, and some will 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.
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 people to your business, and you scammed them. 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 website’s quality, traffic, niche, and domain authority. They can ask for up to one thousand dollars for one post with one link.
Many websites even have the policy of deleting your link after a few months. If you want to improve your SEO, 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 endorse your business as a vote of confidence. If they don’t want to do that, they will try to convince you with no-follow links.
You can make all this easier if you use a professional service like Globex. Such companies already have a large network of bloggers, and they can publish your posts at much lower prices than what the blogger will ask of you.
Write Unique Guest Blogs
Your job doesn’t end with convincing bloggers to publish your post. You must also write a unique and valuable post for each website. It takes a lot of time to write something that actually provides new information and shows that you are an industry leader.
You must select unique and interesting topics and research them to write articles. You must also ensure that the article caters to your business goals. This will make you appear as a competent business without directly marketing it.
Follow Up to Ensure Publishing
Even after writing and sending the article, you must stay in touch with the blogger until it is published. They must 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. It would be best to watch out for scammers who would take the payment but wouldn’t meet their end of the bargain.
