Guest Posting is writing a blog or an article and posting it on someone else’s website, indicating that you are a guest posting on that website, and through it, you are introducing yourself to a new section of audience, potential customers, and the market.
This is one of the content marketing strategies to expand your market and gain potential customers for your brand. In return for your posting, you will be given a backlink for your website from the host’s website.
This is a very credible strategy if you gain backlinks and a new audience from an established and reputable brand.
This can also open a new line of opportunities for work, networking, growth and expansion if the guest posting is done professionally using the right strategy and by serving the needs/interests of readers on the host’s website.
Importance Of Guest Posting
It is important to guest post frequently. But why?
The answer can be divided into 2 ways – immediate benefits and long-term benefits.
Immediate Benefits For Guest Posting Frequently
It helps your website’s SEO. When you guest post on another established brand website, you can always acquire backlinks. These backlinks are highly valuable to both your users and you.
Google recognises these backlinks as ‘votes of confidence’ from reputable brands, attesting that your content is trustworthy, credible, relevant and useful in the market. So your website gets ranked higher in the search engine.
This is useful as your website is now more visible to your audience and more likely to be visited by them.
Using the proper on-page links leads them to other useful pages, and they interact more with relevant web content, establishing the website’s authority in the market.
It will bring a new set of drive-in traffic to your website, which increases your brand visibility and brand awareness.
Whenever you guest post on other websites, their audience trusts your content and reads it as they trust the host website.
Being new and unknown to your brand content, their audience, once familiarised with your content, will begin to frequently engage with it and then share it in their circle, on social media, conduct discussions and produce more inspired content from your content.
This expands the scope of brand awareness, enhances domain authority, improves networking and transforms the culture.
Long-Term Benefits Of Frequent Guest Posting
Established professional network – The formation of professional networks of peers, mentors, coaches and advisors take time. It takes time to build rapport, trust and good camaraderie. It takes time, energy and work to build and to maintain networks.
The long term benefit of guest posting is having high value, professional network you can count on. This would also gain you high value followers and audience who will be faithful and active to you, your vision and your content.
Together, this will build a highly informed, professional, skilled, driven and faithful changemakers’ community impacting the culture and expanding well with goals, concepts & ideas across platforms & borders.
You become leader in your market. This is a long term process. Everyone wants to make it quick and short time. A leader shows direction, takes result-oriented actions and leads other upcoming followers and leaders.
Their knowledge, achievements and contribution is very inspiring. This is when you can sit back and focus on inter-disciplinary, experimental, novel content.
This is when your flavour and uniqueness begin to shine.
Your posts matter, your opinions are heard, your work gets researched by newbies and for studies, you set trends, you are approached by other guest bloggers and influencers because ‘you know it’, you are their solution provider.
Your guest posts and guest bloggers approaching you make a difference when your name is attached.
9 Tips To Build Smart Guest Posting Strategies
1) Have a Well-researched, Well-defined Vision, Mission and Goals
Be as specific as possible. Define your 5Ws and 1H. This is the first and the most important step.
This is what will give you sense of direction and stays as your guiding light during times of confusion, strong writer’s blocks, unproductive brainstorming sessions, and especially, during your ‘I am not a good blogger’, ‘this isn’t working’, ‘I’m done, I tried everything’ days. This step is for you, not for others, not for displays and bio.
This step will help you narrow down your focus, efforts and time required to reach your milestones when done properly.
You will be taking the right necessary actions and progress well despite delays and obstacles. This step is also very crucial to evaluate you success or failures and learning curves.
2) Research, Research, Research
Research your market, your target audience (their demographics and psychographics), the high-achieving guest bloggers and your equivalent competitors (their strategies, their performance, their results, their impact in the market, their 5Ws and 1H, their audience, etc.).
This will help you to refine your strategy, your approach, your methodology and your faults.
Learning from others’ mistakes makes your journey to success shorter and smarter. This step also maximizes the short-term benefits like search engine authority, high quality SEO, referral traffic, strong visibility, website credibility, etc.
A well-researched material brings in high-quality work and creates scope of positioning you to the level of your researched personas.
3) Prioritize Your Content Well
Determine your content style, the tone, relevant topics, methods to convey them, order of posts, and platforms to use.
Your content and its positioning sets your online personality replicating the depth of your knowledge, your style & manner, your mindsets and your character.
Your website and your content makes the first impression about you.
They can either open doors or close the doors of opportunities coming your way. They determine how your audience perceive you and how much they can take you & your content seriously.
The choice and the manner of content also sets you as a professional and becomes your credibility factor to attract collaborations and partnerships.
4) Have a Well-structured Website
Having a well-structured website is an elementary factor of web development. This enhances the effectiveness of guest posting and maximizes the benefits of guest posting.
This will also be helpful while navigating a search in the website and also for effective building of internal links and backlinks.
This crucial step prevents orphan page creation and seamless content categorization by developing systematic sitemaps giving your website an organized appeal and creating impressive first impressions.
A well-organized website acts as your portfolio as it showcases your excellent work while pitching to others and establishes credibility and trust in the viewer’s mind.
Building a professional and well-structured website attracts high quality guest bloggers to your website and creates a win-win situation. You will also appear skilled, organized and confident while pitching to high profile content creators.
5) Promote You Content Well
This is yet another very crucial step that requires meticulous planning. Get your 5Ws and 1H well-defined. Plan a promotional mix. Reason out your choice of platforms to promote you content and the modes of marketing and promotions.
Before executing your plan, ensure your website is excellent technically and aesthetically and is error free with proper content segregation, strong UI/UX and SEO, quality content and strong CTA in appropriate places enabling easy navigation, visual satisfaction and good loading speed.
Once, your internal system is ready and is effective with good customer engagement. Carry it forward into a wider market and reach out to more media, collaborations, servicing. Make your brand known everywhere in your market spectrum.
6) Research The Brands You Are Interested to Guest Post Before Pitching to Them
Do not pitch for guest posting without knowing them. This is a big turn-off. Such mishaps show your disinterested-ness, lack of professionalism and unpreparedness.
Profitable brands won’t be willing to share their web space with you as they can’t rely on your carelessness.
So know them first, what they stand for, why they are here, their vision and their mission, what they belief, their market and expectations from the market.
Search them in the social media platforms, interviews done by them, kind of content they post, etc.
Make sure their values and ethical standards match with yours so that both of you can resonate well and your blog in their website gels well. Your blog content must merge with the their entire content and should not appear standalone, calling all attention to itself.
7) Create a Relevant ‘Guest Blogger’ Profile
If you are a beginner, your profile information, your pleasant photos, your whys, what’s, when’s and how’s, things that tick you and things that cause a frown, what do the website and your content mean to you.
Why you are so passionate about your content, etc., invites right people to approach you and causes wrong people to avoid you.
The success mantra for a successful guest blogging is resonating well with the host and his/her content. The host must come to this after reading your profile and your content.
For experienced guest bloggers, this would establish your expertise and brand authority which would attract high quality hosts and audience increasing you website traffic just by your professional, worth-establishing profile.
8) Pitch Sincerely
To gain success over a first few pitches, it is important that you research on the targeted person and target website and its content. Point out how your post will be beneficial to the targeted website.
Find the gaps where your article can fit well and unnoticeably reduce the gap.
Send a clear, concise, crisp and personalized email stating the gap you noticed and asserting the value your content providers to the market. Show them the sample of your past works and the results obtained.
You can also write a small, interesting short up with a compelling title syncing with the rest of the content.
Assert yourself, assert your work, assert why they should consider you (your USPs). Give them whys rather than talking about yourself and focusing on you interests.
If the potential host rejects your offer. Understand it is the processional industry, it happens, do not take it personally, and move on.
9) Once You Are Established in Your Field, Go For The Niche
From generalist, as your guest posting opportunity increases, go deeper, learn specialist stuffs and serve your niche audience.
Google recognizes niche topics and niche content and pushes the website in the search engine rankings.
Niche website SEO and UI/UX also hit a different note and sometimes, instantly establishes brand authority. Financially as well, guest posting on niche topics has been so rewarding.
This takes the website on a whole new upgraded level where your content takes precedence over experience, expertise, etc. and gains significance. Niche writing is for someone knowledgeable and passionate about that niche.
Key Takeaways
- Define your motive, intention, goals, and milestones-to-achieve as a guest blogger. Define what kind of topics and websites you love to explore. Get your vision & motive very clear and detailed.
- Develop a well-structured website in the proper format with organized content and aesthetically pleasing. All the elements of good website must be in harmony and convey only one message.
- Research on the targeted website well. Never approach the host website without preparations. Give them the reasons why it is profitable to have a guest post written by you. Assert your expertise.
- Go for guest posting on niche topics.
