Guest blogging is a great way to establish yourself as an expert in your field, develop relationships with other bloggers, and build valuable backlinks to your main site. By guest posting on blogs in your business niche, you can attract visitors and business from that blog’s audience.
Focus on guest posting on blogs and sites as close to your own niche as possible – even direct competitors can sometimes be approached for a mutually beneficial arrangement. Guest blogging can be particularly effective for a new site, one without a ton of followers. Blog readers in a particular niche tend to follow the same blogs; by posting on as many of them as possible, you’ll surround potential readers with your blog’s presence. As Leo Babauta of Zen Habits says, Constant exposure is a good thing.”
Key benefits of guest posting:
- Build a reputation in your niche community of blogs and sites
- Build organic links to your site
- Draw traffic from sites with similar audiences
When building a profitable business, networking and becoming established in your local community is very important. Online businesses are no different. Guest posting on other blogs in your niche is an excellent way to build relationships with other bloggers, who can help you launch new products, market your business, and let their audiences know about your services. Many blogs are happy to have someone else help them with the burden of producing new content, as long as it is of high quality and of interest to their audience.
Advertisements
Approaching another site about guest posting is like making a sale. It’s all about explaining “What’s In It For Them.” Spend some time studying the site’s style and subject focus; develop a pitch with a few ideas about posts you could write that might interest their audience. Make sure that you can deliver a focused, well-written post on whatever topic you propose and make sure they haven’t already covered the same topic in previous posts. Don’t waste their (or your) time by sending out generic requests to guest post. Bloggers are understandably protective of their readers – it’s taken them a lot of effort to recruit them! They don’t want crappy posts that only serve to promote your business.
Guest posting can be part of an overall link-building campaign. Building backlinks is key to improving your site’s Google Page Rank and rising higher in search engine results. Many internet marketers start out by submitting articles to directories, which can be great for getting those first few links. However, Links obtained via guest blogging are organic in origin; they are used in context, along with the content, and approved by the website’s editors. Links obtained via article submission may only be seen in the author’s short biography or in the footer section of the article and Google’s algorithm discounts the value of article directory links. According to SEOChat, a leading blog about internet marketing, guest blogging has the edge in terms of getting quality links to a website.
It’s important to focus on guest posting on blogs that are in your general niche. For instance, if your site is about golf clubs, then you want to post on blogs about golf, or at least sports in general. This is because Google’s search engine algorithm values links from sites in your niche more highly than links from non-topical sites. You wouldn’t get the same SEO juice from backlinks from sites about florists or holiday travel.
Guest blogging is also a great backlinking option because it allows you to control the all-important anchor text of the link. Anchor text is simply the visible phrase used in the link. Using proper anchor text is very important to build search engine authority for your targeted keywords. For example, if you were trying to build authority for your golf club site, you’d want to use a phrase like “golf club reviews” in your anchor text instead of something generic like “click here.” Most blogs will allow you one or two links in each post back to your own site. Vary the anchor text in your links in each post to build authority for various keywords you want to target.
Developing a guest blogging schedule is a great way to cheaply market your business to new audiences, develop relationships in your business community, and build links to your site. If you’re already blogging to support your business, it’s not hard to add a couple of extra posts to your regular schedule.
Do you know of any other guest blogging tips? Let us know in the comments.
