What is Guest Posting?
Guest blogging or guest posting is the process of producing a blog post with the intent of submitting it to a good quality, well known blog for them to publish on their site. It is a great way to get in front of people that you want to speak to, connect with new readers, and get your name out into the world. Guest posting is, without a doubt, the most important strategy for significantly growing your blog’s popularity.
Many bloggers out there overlook this essential practice for growing a popular blog. Do not be one of those people! It is widely believed that writing a guest post on a more established blog is 5 times more beneficial than writing a blog post on your own blog. 5 times!
Please Note: If you have to make the choice between spending your time posting on your site or guest posting, you will be better off spending the time growing your site. If you do not have something for this new audience to chew on, then your efforts will not be as rewarding as they could be.
Here are 3 big reasons why guest posting should be a key strategy for increasing your blog’s traffic and popularity:
Why Guest Posting is the Answer to All Our Prayers!
1. Guest posting introduces you to new communities. You are able to step into an already established community, that you believe is a good fit for your blog content, and share your ideas with them. If you are bringing something new and exciting to the table, people will convert into fans and followers. The flip-side of that is that if you are constantly just trying to promote your own brand, business, or services, people will catch on. You do not want to be “that guy”.
Be the type of person that is selfless and giving. If you help people, they will come back for more help. Take the time to answer their comments. Slowly, but surely, you will find that you are winning.
2. Guest posting is great for search engines. One thing that you must require when writing a guest post for someone, is that they allow you to have a link, leading back to your own blog, built into the guest post. It is even better if it is located towards the top of the article and if it is surrounded by relevant content.
As your tally of guest posts increases, you will establish quite the collection of backlinks to your site. The more backlinks you have leading to your site, the more trustworthy and popular Google considers you to be since other sites are willing to link to yours. For more information on how you can make search engines start liking your site more, check out our Search Engine Optimization page.
3. Guest posting builds relationships with other bloggers. As you write quality content for more and more different webmasters, you will naturally start building relationships with other blog owners. There are mutual benefits that result from guest posting. The host gets quality content that they did not have to spend time creating and you get your name out in the public and generate inbound links to your site. It is a win-win situation for everyone. Every new relationship is a new opportunity!
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Quick How-To Guide: Guest Posting
There are a few steps that you should take after deciding you would like to start guest posting:
- Look for websites and blogs where you feel it would be beneficial to have links leading back to your blog.
- Create some proposals of what interesting information you can offer to the target blog.
- Start building relationships with the webmasters of the sites you are interested in guest posting on.
- Send requests to the webmasters asking them if you can guest post on their blogs.
- Write your guest post on a topic that you and the webmaster have agreed upon.
- Submit your guest post to the webmaster.
- Follow up with webmaster to make sure that your guest post gets published.
- Once it is published, check it out and make sure the link(s) to your site are working!
- Post a link in your blog to your newly published article and be sure to promote it on social media networks. For examples of this check out our Twitter page.
For more details on how to make a successful guest post, be sure to check back for the next blog post in this series on guest posting!
Guest Posting is Huge
Guest posting is the ticket to making your blog successful and well known. Whether you are doing it for the backlinks, the new audience, or to make connections with other successful bloggers, it is the Green Bay Packers of blog strategies (in other words: it is really awesome).
If you feel like complaining that your blog doesn’t get enough traffic and you have not been guest posting, then I have no pity for you! Get your name out there.
If you are looking for other methods to increase traffic to your blog, be sure to read our SEO page.
The Site Edge is a local web design group based in Minneapolis, MN.