You are a content marketer, you want to grow your website or business, but do not know how? Well, you should consider writing for another website apart from your own.
Ever heard of guest posting? Digital marketing and SEO is an ever-evolving field and guest posting (or guest blogging) remains a trusted technique for marketers and bloggers to build their brand.
But why? The idea of writing posts for another website may seem counterproductive to your brand-building activity, but if you do it innovatively, it can be very effective, so if you are toying with the idea, we show you the tips and tricks of successful guest posting in SEO to help grow business with a guest post strategy.
Guest Post Meaning: What is guest posting?
Guest posting is simply submitting a piece of content to a third-party website as a guest contributor. Guest posting is commonly used in SEO with the primary objective to promote one’s personal or corporate brand.
When you contribute a guest post or some form of content to other websites, you gain exposure to new audiences in your own niche (more on this below), enhance your industry reputation as a reliable and trusted source and, from a technical standpoint, build valuable backlinks to your own website, which can support your own SEO efforts.
This means that the activity of guest posting benefits both you as well as your host. It’s a win-win marketing tactic if you know how to do guest posting.
Key Benefits of Guest Posting in SEO for your business
Any quality piece of content takes time, so why would you want to invest time in some other party’s website? There are some obvious benefits:
1) Guest Posting Helps Build Relationships in Your Niche
Any business operates within a particular niche. Guest posting for a new business will help you build relationships with more established brands.
Why would they do this for you? They get some good content out of it, at no cost and you get to build yourself as a voice of authority.
Examples of Guest Posting Niches
Health Guest Post
If you are in the increasingly lucrative health and wellness market, looking to expand your reach, you can share your expertise with a wider audience with a well-timed health guest post.
A health guest post can be a powerful strategy to achieve industry clout in the digital era, where information is power.
Health blogs and websites have become go-to sources for individuals seeking reliable and practical advice to enhance their well-being, including their diets, skincare, physical, sexual and mental health.
Health guest posting can allow health influencers to access wider audiences and expose them to newer markets, geographies and demographics.
Fashion Guest Post
The fashion industry is a fast-moving and evolving landscape, making standing out very difficult as a new voice.
Fashion guest posts can benefit both the fashion influencer and the industry brand both.
Brands can reach new audiences and fashion influencers can help build on their online presence with a quality guest post.
Fashion-related websites and blogs are always on the lookout for fresh perspectives and guest posts are particularly beneficial because it allows brands to showcase their products, while helping the fashion influencer gain new followers,
Travel Guest Post
If you are a travel blogger or work in the travel and tourism industry, you can open up a wide array of possible guest hosts with every trip you take or new destination and travel route you wish to offer.
You have a wide variety of possible subjects to cover if you are in the business of visiting new places and exploring new cultures and ways of living.
As a world traveler, you cover a lot of different bases, and you open up a ton of opportunities with a well-timed quality travel guest post.
Travel guest posts can be a list of the places you visit, the things you do, and your thoughts on it all like a travel journal. it can also include videos, as travel vlogs increase in popularity, talking about visas and documentation, notes on stay options such as hotels and inns, as well as tips and tricks to save money along with general money management for a traveller.
Technology Guest Post
We live in the age of tech and the largest tech companies globally have a big say in the world is run now.
So a technology guest post is the most effective marketing tool for a tech blogger or influencer to partner with brands in the tech biz to talk about new tech inventions and the newest platforms.
Guest posts on the latest will help you reach new readers who always look forward to reading about the latest emerging technologies.
A quality technology guest post can reach niche as well as more casual readers who would like to learn something valuable about the digital world we live in. This could be highly technical knowledge involving SEO, Digital Marketing, Web Development Design, email marketing or more cultural aspects such as YouTube Marketing, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Advertising and E-mail Marketing for your business.
2) Guest Posting Increases Brand Awareness
Guest posting will help your blog rank better in search engines such as Google.
Collaborating with established businesses in your niche enables you to weave links inside the post back to your own (more on this below) site.
These backlinks will prove to be crucial in enhancing your visibility online, once you know how to do guest posting.
The more guest posting you do, the more your reach exponentially grows. This not only boosts your SEO but also cements your standing.
3) Guest Posting Opens the Door to New Audiences
The beauty of guest posting is that you can control the audience you present yourself in front of. It’s up to you to decide which brands you want to partner with.
Where this gets more specific is finding the common ground in blogging for a host site’s audience that may not be the same as your own, but, rather, an industry-adjacent audience. For instance, marketing agency A predominantly focuses on SEO-related content for their blog, therefore attracting a lot of readers interested in SEO tips and strategy.
This type of scenario can apply to practically any brand that has affiliations with a complementary industry.
After all, the intent is to access a new audience that is already predisposed to engaging with your content. You just have to deliver content that also appeals to the audience of the blog owner.
4) Guest Posting establishes authority for your business
It takes some effort and a half to build a business from scratch and more to establish trust and authority.
Well-written, well-researched guest posting on reputable websites for established brands resonates with readers. People who enjoy the post will likely click on your author’s bio and visit your site, which can build a new relationship with those users and your business.
By publishing guest posts on major authority websites in your niche, you’ll quickly create trust and readers will associate your business with reliability.
5) Guest Posting and Lead Generation
When you distribute high-quality content through multiple channels, using popular blogs and established platforms, you nurture trust with your target audience.
Furthermore, you also build brand recognition as people become familiar with your content and see you as an expert in the field.
This shortens your sales cycle, as readers will become your future customers and may share your content within their own personal communities.
6) Guest Posting Improves SEO Through Backlinks
Search engines like when a site is referred to by other high-quality websites. This happens usually through backlinks.
When a host site invites a guest onto their site to contribute a piece of content, there is usually an arrangement that allows at least one link back to the guest poster’s domain.
So guest posting positively influences promotion as your relevant post will contain backlinks to your platform on popular resources, with a large audience.
Such platforms with links will help to attract more clients for your business, if they click to know more about you.
How to do Guest Posting: Prepare for Guest Blogging
Guest posting is a bit like handing out flyers for a sale. It’s like a megaphone call, so you best have your house in order before you shout out.
If readers aren’t sure what your business is about and they find nothing of interest once they click through your post, it’s likely you will lose them forever.
So before you reach out and start creating your guest posts, here are a few things that you should do.
Set Goals for your Guest Posts
Guest posting, like any other marketing activity, has a clear set of goals behind it. It’s important that you define the reason for your guest posting activity. This may include:
- Increasing Website Traffic: Current methods of traffic generation can serve as a benchmark to gauge the effectiveness of guest posting as a tool
- Generating Quality Backlinks: Link building, where you acquire backlinks from authoritative sites will improve your website’s ranking on search engines
- Driving Conversions: Guest posting can have specific calls-to-action that direct readers to take specific actions, such as buying merchandise or signing up for a subscription
Build Your Social Network
The most essential part of marketing your new business set-up is an online presence. According to SEO Tribunal, 95.9% of guest bloggers promote their guest posts on social media platforms.
Aside from promoting your posts, you can use these channels to interact with your audience and build connections with others in the same industry.
Create an Author Bio
And, of course, before you start writing any guest posts, create a solid author bio. Put yourself in the readers’ shoes, what would they want to know? A great bio should be short, sweet and to the point, which underlines your authority and expertise.
Set Up Tracking with Google Analytics
Lastly, it’s a good idea to set up tracking with tools such as Google Analytics on your website so you can gauge the impact that your guest posting has on your website traffic. This is even more critical when you want to build awareness and generate leads.
How to do Guest Posting: Pitching
The moment you’ve found a platform to display your guest post on, it’s time to craft your pitch. Much like any job application, you want to present who you are, what you’re good at and what value you can add.
Try to keep your pitch to 200 words or less. The shorter, the better.
Your guest post pitch must:
1) Demonstrate Familiarity
Show that you’re familiar with your host platform by calling out something specific about their brand, product or service that resonates with you. This shows that you have done your homework and that you are invested in the association.
2) Propose a Few Topics for your Guest Post
Offer unique subject matter or at least less-targeted topics when presenting your ideas.
Topics dealing with developments in the industry you and your prospect are part of together are a great bet indicating you are a serious new player.
3) Explain Why Your Guest Post Will Add Value
Keeping up-to-date with close, intimate knowledge of what’s up and coming and the general trends in the industry and how you can add value to help the host be at the forefront of their industry is a great pitch. The guest post idea you have should be the catalyst to help both you and your host reach your goals.
4) Include Samples of Your Work
If you have already written any articles, especially those that have performed well and/or that have been published on well-known sites, then sharing your portfolio always will help get your foot in the door.
How to do Guest Posting: Finding Sites
There are many tried and tested ways to look for the right host to publish the amazing guest post you have out together for your shared audience.
Relevant Bloggers in Your Niche
Social media platforms are the best way to reach out to industry mavens in the niche you are targetting, for example health or tech. You can attract industry influencers’ attention by sharing their posts and interacting on their comment threads.
Google Search
This is the most direct method of initiating your guest post activity. Simply, doing a Google search for relevant keywords related to your niche can get the needle moving,
For example, you could search ‘fashion guest post’ or ‘technology guest posts,’most sites have a ‘write for us’ page that can get you in.
Browser Extensions
Google Chrome extensions can also help you do a direct scan of websites for ‘submit post’ forms. From there, you can directly enquire about the potential for posting guest content on the host website or, in some cases, directly submit your post.
Read Guest Posting Guidelines
Now that you’ve compiled your list of target sites, it’s time to make your guest posting pitch. Make sure you read and adhere to the host’s guest post guidelines to ensure that you start right with your prospect.
How to do Guest Posting: Getting down to Guest Posting
Guest posting can be a tricky endeavor, as you may find yourself writing for disparate audiences and your post needs to pique and hold their interest.
Here are four crucial components of a quality guest post:
1) Offer something unique with your guest post
Quality content boils down to the valuable insight that you offer readers. This will make you stand out from the many other businesses that are using similar marketing strategies so to have any chance of standing out, you must create something unique and of value.
Finding popular content is easy with tools like BuzzSumo, to see what the gaps are you can fill, as you will get an idea of all sites that list published content with the highest social shares,
Using tools like Skyscraper Technique, you can structure your content to create the most engaging copy.
.2) Create value with your guest post
To ensure that your content is high quality, follow the E.A.T. principle: Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness:
Google evaluates the user experience by qualitatively assessing whether the writer is an expert in the field he is writing about.
You need to deliver valuable content that has actionable takeaways.
3) Write an SEO-friendly guest post
Guest posting in SEO is a great technical strategy to drive visitors to your website by earning your website plenty of link juice.
If your hosts do not provide a specific keyword to go after, a little bit of keyword research can help to ensure readers find you when they look for related queries.
As you create lots of SEO-friendly guest posts for authoritative websites, your traffic will grow as your posts become highly visible in search results.
4) Include backlinks in you guest post
Adding backlinks is a crucial SEO aspect of any guest post. If a guest post is your elevator pitch, the backlinks are the closer.
In addition to backlinks, though, be sure to include a few internal links to the host site’s own website.
This ensures you are a trustworthy and reliable partner and will help build longer-term relationships, imperative for a new business.
Conclusion on Guest Posting in SEO
Guest blogging is a long-term strategy that requires patience and great writing. Over time, guest posting can help you build a bigger audience, increase brand awareness, and drive your brand to new heights. For businesses focused on Sales Management, integrating guest posting into your marketing strategy can significantly enhance your reach and help position your business as a thought leader in the field. If you’re looking for more information on how guest posting can benefit your Sales Management strategy, check out this page: Sales Management Features.
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