A Guide to Guest blogging for good results for businesses

 A Guide to Guest blogging for good results for businesses — Authored by Akash Srivastava

Are you looking for the best online strategy to grow your business? Is something stopping you from becoming an online superstar? Do you want millions of people to know about your business?

‘Guest blogging’ is something, which you should do to achieve the above goals.

Guest blogging is a great tool in your online marketing arsenal. If you are a fan of social media, you might have heard about how you can get benefitted from guest blogging. There is a significant amount of untapped potential in the guest blogging. It is something different than SEOs, paid ads, or online marketing.

Now, you might be thinking — if it is so easy, then why all SEO experts and online marketers are not doing it?

I have been doing guest blogging for years and I have written hundreds of guest posts. Many of my posts are featured on some of the biggest blogs in my niche. A lot of my guest posts were written solely for attracting subscribers and getting traffic. When it comes to guest blogging, I have learned a lot from my experience of guest posting.

After having acquired great knowledge on guest blogging, I have decided to write a complete guide and give the most practical information in this post.

I hope this detailed guide will help you understand what guest blogging is and how to do it successfully. Let’s take a deeper look at guest blogging and what you should do to succeed in it.

What is guest blogging?

Guest blogging is an amazing strategy that tags your name on a quickly written article and publishes it somewhere on the web. Guest blogging is a great pathway to online success, fame, and reputation if done in the right way.

In this strategy, you write for other blogs that could help you gain traffic and quality backlinks, increasing brand exposure. There are many steps to guest blogging and you always want to make sure that your post has high relevance to what you want to accomplish.

However, Guest blogging is something that needs top-quality writing skills and creativity. It can be a serious opportunity to take your name and business to the next level. Let’s dig deeper to know more about it.

Who can do guest blogging?

Guest blogging is really practical and effective in other niches, as you are giving your free content with the hope of getting backlinks, traffic, and brand recognition. It might be difficult for people to find blogs to write for in niches other than those related to Make Money Online (MMO). Blogs you offer would have had only a few guest bloggers competing to write for them, giving you more results from your guest posts.

Anybody can avail of the benefits of guest blogging. Whether you are an online marketer, SEO expert, business owner, or other professional — you can do guest blogging to enhance your online visibility. As long as there are blogs within your niche — you can use guest blogging to drive traffic, generate backlinks or enhance your online visibility.

What are the benefits of guest blogging?

Guest blogging is one of the best ways to grow an online business. But, lots of people are still not convinced that guest blogging is beneficial for their online business. Whether you are an individual blogger or run a company, guest blogging can take your business to the next level. Here are some of the ways in which guest blogging can benefit you.

• Drive huge traffic

If you want to drive huge traffic to your website, you should spend some time guest posting. Guest blogs are published on several big blogs, which can drive traffic to your website. Most of the time, I get more than 1,000 visitors for writing a single guest post on a reputed blog.

When it comes to getting a lot of visitors from guest blogs, I am not only talking about the volume of traffic, but also the quality of traffic.

• Build online reputation

When I talk about building an online reputation, I would like to tell you that I am not talking about experience or authority. I am talking about how many people you can influence. Whether it is positive or negative, you will impact a lot of people with your guest posts.

Guest blogging on others’ blogs can have a great impact on the lives of others. You can be in their memory for the rest of their life. You might think — what if I do the same thing in my blogs? Well, by combining the audience of other bloggers with that of yours, you will get an extra benefit.

• Improve writing skills

When you write for your own blog, you may not take much care of the grammar and vocabulary. Your blog will be published, even if there are a few mistakes in it. However, when you do guest blogging — you will take care of everything like — quality, vocabulary, grammar, tone, language, etc. You will try to give your best work when you post on other’s blogs.

It doesn’t matter how great and inspirational the content is — it is of no use if others can’t read it. Guest blogging is a way to know what others think about your writing and helps you take the right steps to improve your writing.

• Enhance visibility

The biggest advantage of guest blogging is that it increases your online visibility and exposure. At the same time, it helps you build your brand. For example — let’s say you wrote a guest post on a blog with 10,000+ visitors and your post was viewed 5000 times a day — it means you have been exposed to 5000 people.

You will start seeing more people visit your blog, as your name is seen online many times and they are very curious about what you give.

• Build a strong subscriber base

Besides getting huge traffic, another benefit of guest blogging is that you will get an opportunity to build a strong subscriber base. Subscribers are none other than people who love your posts.

The more subscribers you get, the higher are the chances that they turn into potential customers. Guest blogging works great when it comes to building a strong customer base.

• Improve your social media profile

Guest blogging is an effective way to build social media presence. There have been many stories of people who improved their social media profiles with the help of guest blogging. People are likely to follow you on Facebook and Twitter in a guest post. You may get as many followers in a single day if you do guest blogging on a regular basis.

Whether you are a newbie or an experienced one, guest blogging serves as a great platform that motivates you to give great content each and every time.

How does guest blogging work?

Now, you have understood the benefits of guest blogging. Let’s see how it works and how it helps in driving huge traffic to our website.

When blogging made its transition from roots as an online journal to respected means of communication, it was just a communication tool. Guest blogging gave bloggers an opportunity to interact through commenting and build a large audience base. This made it possible for people to monetize through their blogs and become professionals.

At that time, guest blogging was the most guaranteed method for building your own audience and promoting your business. You could reap the benefits of labor, give a boost to sales and retrieve more from the content you write.

Guest blogging has slowly become a popular strategy for optimizing SEO. Today, it is considered as one of the effective tools for content marketing, as it allows individuals to drive traffic to their website. As long as you are looking at your guest blogging efforts to introduce yourself and your ideas to a new audience, you are going to get benefitted from the work.

There are thousands of high-profile blogs that accept guest posts. By submitting high-quality content to these sites, you are giving readers the real value of the time they spend consuming the content. Guest blogging can do wonders for your inbound marketing efforts if you start with the right expectations.

How to start guest blogging?

Before you start pitching your guest post, you should do a lot of research. Do some old-fashioned research that will help you in long run. Here we will have a look at how you can start guest blogging and make the best out of it.

Step 1 — Determine the goals of guest blogging

Before you start guest blogging, your first step should be to know — what is your purpose of guest blogging? Why do you want to achieve from guest blogging? Basically, there are three main goals of guest blogging — 1) Driving traffic to your website 2) Building backlinks to your website, and 3) Enhancing your online reputation.

You can do all these things by posting the right content on top blogs. Find blogs that have a good number of engaged audiences to accomplish goals #1 and #3. If you just want to build backlinks, you can just pinpoint blogs with strong root domain authority. Determining your goals in advance will help you choose the best blog to submit your guest posts.

Pick a suitable headline that people are likely to use when searching on search engines. You want the headline to be enticing and fun. You should make use of ‘Headline Analyzers’ to create a title that strikes the emotional and intellectual level of the reader.

Step 2 — Find relevant guest blogging opportunities or platforms

Once you have determined the goals of guest blogging, the next thing to consider is finding suitable opportunities. When looking at places for guest posting, find sites that are relevant to your industry. By looking up the blogs or platforms that fit your niche, you are targeting the audience who are interested in your business.

For example — if you are into the seed selling business, you should find gardening blogs with an engaged audience of gardeners. To find the best guest blogging opportunity, you should do a Google search. Start typing the keyword or phrases such as — “submit a guest post”, “guest post guidelines”, “want to do guest blogging” etc.

You will get a huge list of sites with links to the guest post submission page or guest post guidelines page. All you need to do is go through the guidelines of guest posting and start developing appropriate content.

You can even search for prolific guest bloggers in your industry and follow their posts regularly. If you know a guest blogger in the industry who can introduce you to the owners of blogs they have guest posted upon, don’t let the opportunity go.

I started guest blogging by finding real people to connect with and not a business or site. I received direct emails from a few reputed blogs to which I responded immediately and was introduced in 24 hours.

I recommend you to look for blogs that have great domain authority and are treated as leaders of the industry.

Step 3 — Prepare to do guest posting

Once you have filtered the list of sites where you are going to post, the next step is to pick a hot topic and develop appropriate content based on the guidelines. There are a few things to do before you pitch a guest post. It is important to know the content of the targeted blogs such as — what level of audience they have? What type of audience read their posts? What type of content do they focus on? And so on.

The next thing is to see how posts of other guests are performing. Many blogs have guest posts and check if the guest bloggers are getting as much as comments and social sharing. If the audience is more interested in the blog owner, you won’t do well.

Some guest bloggers accept posts for certain types of people over others. Go through the bio of a few guest bloggers to see if they follow any particular pattern. This will help you introduce yourself as a blog owner for your blog.

To make sure that your posts are accepted by the target audience, you should pitch blog owners with topics that perform well. To get some idea of what topics will work, use blog title generator tools. Get some recognition from the blog owners to increase your chances of getting accepted by the audience as a guest blogger. Make sure to include your username on social media sites, so that the target audience won’t treat you as a stranger.

Step 4 — Know the best times to post the content

Guest posting is something that should be done in a timely manner. You will not always have the golden opportunity to pitch the guest post. However, you can take advantage of it by choosing the right time. You can pitch a guest post when the blog specifically advertises they are looking for a guest post. When the blog owner mentions you in one of their posts or on social media, you can think of pitching a new post.

Read the guidelines of the blog before you post your content. As a blogger, you may receive hundreds of emails — requesting you to post content on any particular topic. You can choose a topic based on the number of requests.

If the blog owner wants you to pitch an idea or submit a full post, you can do so. Remember that some blog owners allow only guest bloggers to submit guest posts on their sites. In such a case, you should introduce yourself as a blogger and not a guest blogger.

Be sure to include why you want to be a guest blogger and add a few links o posts you have published elsewhere.

Step 5 — Submit a great guest post

Take a look at other posts on the blog to get an idea of the tone and quality of content. Make sure that the post is similar to other elements to match other posts on the site and it syncs well with other posts. If you want to mention any specific products, be sure to link those.

Do in-depth research, rather than scratching the surface. Guest posting is something that shows your authority, and you can’t reach your goal with some general posts. You need to present the most useful and valuable content in a better way. You should have something that really teaches the audience and prove your worth.

Your post should sound professional and come out like a perfect presentation. It should be free from clichés and slang that distract the readers. You can be more conversation by adding a few idioms and phrases, without disturbing the flow of content.

Don’t consider the readers as novices, as they are already aware of the gist of basics. Look for statistics that support your content and publish the stats directly from the source by providing relevant links.

One of the common doubts people ask me about guest blogging is what type of content should I submit. Well, you should submit the best content whose quality is much more than that of content on your personal blog. The best guest post is not about your businesses, products, and services — but it should be a valuable source of information.

It is OK to include memories and share your experiences occasionally. However, the main objective of your blog should be to provide valuable information. It should not look as if you are promoting your business.

Include a call to action at the end of each post for comments. This will help you generate the best blog ideas and content.

Step 6 — Craft a perfect guest bio

Guest bio is one of the important elements of the guest posts. This is the place where you can include promotional links back to your website, blog, product, or service. The content of this section depends on your goals of guest blogging. If your goal of guest blogging is to get quality backlinks, the guest bio should have a link back to your website. If your goal is to get traffic, you can insert a link that sends traffic to a custom landing page, product, or service.

You can increase the followers of your social account by adding a line at the end of the bio that says — follow me on (whatever is the social media site). This way you can craft a perfect guest bio based on your goals. Don’t ever approach a site for guest blogging, if the site doesn’t have bios published on the author articles.

Remember that it is an important element of guest blogging, and one should never leave the guest bio blank. It surely helps you in enhancing your online visibility and at the same time, it drives quality traffic to your website. People will ‘no more’ consider you as a stranger and recognize you wherever they see you across the web.

Step 7 — Get guest bloggers for your blog

Guest blogging helps you increase brand awareness and achieve online marketing goals. If you want to become a regular contributor to a blog, be sure to promote your post to popularity through your own audience. The blog owner will appreciate your involvement and passion for blogging.

The blog owner will like your attitude of sending new readers on their way. Be sure to reply to the comments in a timely manner so that readers know that you are active. Readers and blog owners trust those who are active on social media and other sites.

You should always track the results of guest blogging, as it helps you determine where you are and how far you reached. You can use Google Analytics data based on the referrals from guest posts. This will help you determine the success rate of your guest blogging strategy.

Conclusion

Guest blogging can do wonders if it is done in the right way. It can return 10, 20, or even 100X returns on your investment.

Follow the basic rules and guidelines of guest posting to succeed in it. Ignoring the guidelines posted on the site will result in an automatic delete of your account.

Avoid writing generic content, as readers and blog owners are interested in something — which they are not aware of. Don’t be monotonous in selecting blog titles, as it kills the interest of readers.

Always be relevant and conversational to the person you are approaching. Give the blog owner insight into your blog, business, products, or services, so they know who they are working with.

By giving the guest blogs something unique and informative, you might get invited back to post again in the future. This helps you in achieving your guest blogging goals.

As an experienced Freelance SEO Consultant, I have utilized a guest blogging strategy to gain a large chunk of organic traffic. I provide quality content on other sites to boost my authority in the industry. The entire process of guest blogging is to get exposure — as I believe that it takes one conversion to generate huge sales.

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