Ten Ways Guest Posting Can Help Grow Your Online Audience
Guest Posting or guest blogging is one of the most respected digital marketing strategies. Simply put, the first step means creating an article or blog for your brand or product. The second step involves asking another website or blogger to publish it.
There are many ways and strategies through which you can do guest posting or guest blogging. In this article, we will discuss some important questions about guest posting like-
- How can guest posting help my online traffic to grow?
- Is guest blogging a viable digital marketing strategy for my brand?
- How should I proceed if I want to adopt a guest posting strategy for my brand?
- What are guest posting services?
- What are the charges if I want to do guest posting services?
- Will guest posting help my SEO?
- Is there a connection between guest posting and link building?
The above questions are important if you want to add a new digital marketing dimension to your brand.
Guest posting is one of the best ways through which bloggers and brands can build relationships. These relationships help them reach out to newer audiences.
Categories of people/individuals/groups who do Guest Posting-
- Individual Bloggers.
- Blog site owners.
- Brands and Businesses.
- Digital Marketing Agencies.
For the purpose of this article, we will concentrate on how brands can use guest posting services to grow.
I feel guest posting or guest blogging is one of the underrated strategies that brands should adopt.
The world of guest posting in a blogger to blogger world is fairly well established. The biggest losers in the guest blogging have come to be branded.
Table Of Content
What is a Good Guest Post?
There is some truth to the addendum ‘everyone can write’. However, there is also truth in the fact that not everyone can write great quality guest posts.
So what should a great guest post look like?
1. Guest posts should be well written:
In other words, your grammar, sentence construction, language and everything else should be on point. Will you be able to take advice from someone who is poor in explaining something? I guess not.
2. Guest posts should be on-topic:
There is no need to beat around the bush and start the crux from the fourth paragraph. You need to ask the right questions at the start of the article itself.
3. The content of your guest post should serve a purpose:
To put it differently, it should solve a problem, be informative, and contribute to the reader’s knowledge.
4. You always need to have compelling headlines for your article:
Listicles (Top Ten Lists, 5 Ways to, etc.), and Questions (How to Solve, Why you should, etc.), work well.
5. Be selective about the links:
As a rule, you can place one link for every 500 words. However, your article should not have more than 2 to 3 links. It is also important to have external links to authority sites. This is very important.
The above five ways to compose a guest post stands true for bloggers, writers, brands and businesses.
You want to create content that is so useful that people share it on their social media profiles.
Benefits of Guest Posting Services for Brands:
For brands, guest posting serves the same benefits as it does for individual writers and bloggers.
I seriously feel like the social media revolution, guest posting should become second nature for brands.
Businesses that have been quick to see the potential in guest posting are aggressively opting for it.
More and more bloggers and affiliate sites are coming up every day. However, there are certain misconceptions about the benefit of guest blogging for brands.
Read more: 10 Steps for Starting the Perfect Guest Blogging Strategy
For brands, guest posting serves the following advantages-
1. Building Reputation:
A great guest post for your brand is one of the most credible reputation management tools. It can do wonders to your credibility and service.
If your guest post is able to reach the right audiences, you can be sure that your perception will change.
Think about some of the biggest brands in the world. Do you see them venturing into social, political and cultural issues?
Why? They want to be authority voices. Guest posting can help you with being a voice of authority in your industry.
3. Drive Traffic to your website or Landing Page:
If you want to score well on your SEO and metrics, guest posting is one of the best ways to do so. By reaching out to newer audiences from the same industry, you can drive a significant volume of traffic.
Read more: How To Generate Website Traffic Through Link Building
4. Gain High-Quality Links:
If you are guest posting on a high authority site (high metrics), you will start performing well on metrics.
Links, when followed from authority sites to your site, will increase your DA, DR, Traffic, etc.
5. Make Actual Sales:
You have released an awesome new product, but you want to reach newer audiences.
You can guest post on the tech blogging sites, and drive traffic to your product landing page.
Guest Posting serves a lot of benefits for brands if done right. However, multiple problems are associated with guest posting or guest blogging.
Problems of Guest Posting Done in a Wrong Way:
In 2014, Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Web Spam Team, proclaimed that ‘guest posting is dead’!
This announcement sent shockwaves throughout the digital world. However, after his announcement, there was a severe outcry. It was only after Matt Cutts came out with a clarification that things settled down.
He stated that guest posting done only with the intention of link building will be severely dealt with. Google and others came down hard on guest posting or guest blogging as a tool for link building. Read more: 10 Best Backlink Checker Tools
However, genuine guest posting, with great quality content was alive and kicking. In other words, guest posting for increasing brand awareness, increasing new audiences, creating forums and making sales will continue.
This problem of creating spammy links through guest posting had become a million-dollar industry and continues to be so.
Google has started penalizing the actors involved. Issues like reduced metrics, lesser search, and de-indexing have been reported from all over the globe.
Many brands face technical problems when they want to go in for guest posting. They read the benefits of guest blogging, but do not know about the right approach.
Because of this, they find their links on spam sites amidst lousy content.
Their links are in content pieces that have more external spam links. These spam links lead you to adult sites, gambling sites, and other non-justifiable businesses.
It is essential that brands and businesses adopt the right approach to guest posting. The right approach will guarantee the benefits and weed out the disadvantages.
The Right Approach to Guest Posting for Brands:
This section can also be looked upon as ‘best practices’ for guest posting or guest blogging for brands. A frequent question that keeps coming up is how to start and approach guest posting for businesses. I have also stated that no brand has the right amount of expertise or resources to manage a guest posting strategy on their own.
1. Select the Right Digital Agency Partner:
If you are a brand looking for guest posting services, your best bet is working through credible digital agencies.
Yes, you can set the parameters, and be aware of what is happening. However, it is quite difficult to manage it all- brands simply cannot commit the resources.
Selecting the right agency solves a number of problems. Select one that shares the ethical values of doing guest posting.
2. Relevancy is the key to Guest Posting:
Always remember that you should know where your mention is and where your link is. Relevancy is the new keyword.
Ask your agency to make a list of the top industry related bloggers. If you are a tech company, do not look at fashion bloggers, or food and diet bloggers.
If you are a tech product company, select the top tech blogging sites.
Read more: How To Choose The Right Blogger For Your Brand
3. Create Quality Content:
Any blogger worth his grain in salt is not going to publish your content if it is not great. Brands should heavily invest in quality content writers.
If you do not have an in-house team of writers, ask your digital agency for their best writers.
If you have great content is an even fantastic site, you cannot imagine the traffic it can drive.
Read more: SEO Content: A Step-By-Step Guide
4. Be Aware of where your Links are:
For most brands, this is where the battle is lost. They do guest posting, they have a digital agency, but they do not know where their links are.
You need to be aware of all the places on the internet where your brand’s links have been mentioned.
It is always a good idea to ask your digital marketing agency for an excel sheet with the live URL.
If you are not keeping a tab on this, your digital marketing agency can seriously manipulate you.
5. Test a Sponsored Content Platform:
Some serious individuals are doing great innovations in the field of guest posting. The rise of transparent, ethical, and meaningful sponsored content platforms is the future of guest posting.
This platform eliminates the agency and connects brands directly to quality bloggers and publishers.
Brands can simply go on the platform, choose their publisher, vet his metrics, and place an order for a fair price.
Personalized dashboards, escrow payments, 24×7 customer service, and money refunds make sponsored content platforms a great bet.
6. Avoid Blog Networks:
When brands try to avail of guest posting services manually, they fall into the vicious trap of blog networks.
I request brands to stay away from Facebook communities and groups promising guest posting services.
They are not genuine and can cause huge problems for your brand. It is always a good idea to stay away from them. The best publishers in the industry do not work with blog networks.
7. Stay Away from Link Resellers:
This single category of individuals has created the biggest mess on the internet.
They are the rotten apples that do not care about brands, publishers, or anything in the world.
All they care about is money and manipulation.
Link resellers have destroyed companies and corporations on the internet. Please maintain a distance of at least 100 miles from such individuals or companies.
8. Prioritize Traffic and New Audiences rather than Link Building:
You should always fix an expectation from guest posting. This expectation should be ethical and help your brand prioritize the best practices of guest posting.
If you fix your ideal as reaching newer audiences, you will ensure that quality is your forte.
I have seen that when brands opt for guest posting with the intention of link building they start compromising.
9. Be Patient for the Results:
It is necessary that you give guest posting some time to grow and evolve. This is where your agency can really help you.
The ideal time after which guest blogging starts showing results in three months. In three months, you will start seeing a marked improvement in traffic.
You will also start experiencing better metrics and performance markers for your website.
10. Do not settle for Publishers below your Standard:
Your digital agency will spin an elaborate tale of why a certain publisher is great. He is so great that we should work with him at all times.
These are warning bells, and you should be on the lookout for them. They might have some under the table understanding.
Settle where your links will be with your agency at the very outset. See DA, DR, PR, Traffic and other metrics. Settle for a top line and a bottom line.
It is up to you to ensure that no compromises will be made by your agency.
How Brands can do Link Building through Guest Posting:
At the very outset, I want to state that you can do link building through guest posting. However, there is always a right way to do things, and there is a wrong way.
Most brands are doing link building through guest posting in the wrong way. It is not about just getting a do-follow link to your website, it is much more than that.
You can do link building the right way only if-
- The blogger’s site is of high quality in terms of metrics (DA, DR, Traffic, etc.)
- Your content is original, plagiarism-free and of high quality.
- Your content ideally is of long format (1000+ words and 2000+ words).
- You have not more than one or two do-follow links on one website.
- Your content is informative, problem-solving and is on topic.
If you are attentive to the above five points, there is no problem when it comes to link building. I always tell clients that link building cannot exist in isolation.
It is subject to many factors. Always remember, you can never outsmart Google. No matter how smart you are, if you leave stale breadcrumbs (bad practices), Google will find you.
Read more: Top 10 Link Building Techniques You Should Try
Guest Posting: The Final Word
Blog networks, resellers, and agencies have made guest posting communities have made a mess of the practice.
They have complicated it to the extent that brands are shying away from it. The intent of this article was to educate brands and businesses how they can extract maximum value from guest posting.
You always need to have the right reasons for doing guest posting. If the process is transparent, ethical and just, you will only see the benefits of it.
If you need any more information on guest posting, you can reach out to me at [email protected]. You can also drop me a comment in the comments section below.
Until then, I wish you all the success.
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