How To Do Guest Blogging?

What is Guest Blogging?

“Guest Blogging” is the most popular yet underutilized methodology of SEO. You might have heard people saying – “We are doing a guest blog post for our website and it is very effective?”

This guest blogging guide will give you all the required information.

In simpler words, writing and publishing articles in other blogs or websites as a guest author.

You might think, why should I write great articles for other websites, generate more traffic for them, make them grade higher on the eye of search engines and ultimately bring them more money. And all of this for free!

Stop those thoughts right there!

The whole world of SEO works on building credibility in your niche by getting votes from other websites in the form of links. Think about it. Through guest blogging, you are obviously writing content for third-party websites, but it is up to you include a link back to your articles smartly and earn a link as well as referral traffic from those websites.

Isn’t it smart? You are basically capitalizing on the marketing work of other websites and navigating their traffic to your website. In return, you are writing great content for them. So, it is a win-win situation.

The crux point is you have to do it for the right website.

How to determine the right website for your efforts of guest blogging?

The single most important point to keep in mind is – write articles for such websites whose target audience is similar to yours. This way, you get relevant traffic to your website and ensure link relevancy which is the most important thing for search engines.

For example,

If you are a wedding photographer, then you can choose websites such as; wedding planners, wedding costume designers, wedding makeover or salon or any website writing articles which are in and around the wedding. The only thing to keep in mind is the article you are linking to on your website should increase the value for readers.

How to find Guest Blogging Sites?

Once you know on which type of websites you should guest blog, the next steps are pretty straightforward.

There are 3 major ways to find guest posting opportunities.

Keyword Search

The next step is to find those websites which offer guest posting opportunity in your niche.

So, you have a wedding photography website. You have decided to target the Wedding Planners website, you can use the following keywords to search for guest blogging opportunities;

# Wedding Planner Guest Post

# Wedding Planners accepting guest post

#Submit a guest post in wedding planner websites

And many more combinations!

You can replace “Wedding Planner” with your keyword.

Known Guest Bloggers

As a marketer, you should be well aware of the industry experts in your niche who contribute to various valuable articles in your niche. Once you know such personalities, the next step is to know where they guest blog.

You basically need to search for “Guest Blog by XYZ” in search engines. Replace “XYZ” with the content contributor of your niche.

This will give you a lot of opportunities to contribute a guest post.

Competitor Analysis

What is much better than getting a guest post published on the website where your competitor has published?

You might think, how will you surpass your competitor, if you get a link from the same domain where a competitor has got!

That’s a valid point! But first, let’s capitalize on the work done by competitors. So that you are equal to your competitors, then by following other methods earn much more valuable links.

So how do you find out competitors’ guest post? There are 2 methods;

#1. Analyze Backlinks

Download backlinks of your competitor from one of the SEO tools. Then, analyze the backlinks and categorize guest posts among them. This might be a time-consuming process, but it is worth it.

#2 Aid of Search Engine

The power of the search engine is enormous when you use the right keywords.

To unleash the guest posts of your competitors, you can use keywords such as “Guest Posts by Competitor”. Replace competitor with your competitor name.

That’s it! You will get many guest posts contributed by your competitor as result.

How to pitch to Bloggers?

Finding the guest posting sites is the easiest step of this whole process. The crucial step is to pitch the right way for bloggers and get the consent to write articles.

Before you pitch to bloggers, you need to know your target website well. Few tips to know the target blog;

The depth of article – Surface level, medium or in-depth
Type of article – General topic, a specific topic or series of articles
Target Audience – B2B or B2C

Know how much readers are engaged to blog in terms of comments and social shares. This will help you to know the popularity of the blog.

Read the other guest posts and know the bio of guest authors.
Once you have this information, it is easy to draft the pitch.

There are two ways to pitch

#1 Read the guideline & pitch

Most of the guest post accepting websites has crafted their own guidelines. In such case, it is easy to draft the pitch as you know clearly their requirement

#2 Draft an alluring E-mail pitch

If you have no idea about their requirement, then it’s time to get creative and use your research. You can include the following points in your email pitch;

Make it personal with bloggers’ name
Introduce yourself as a blogger irrespective of position you hold
Give a link to your previous work
Suggest article titles based on the understanding of the target blog

#Pro Tip – Before you pitch your blog, be familiar to blogger by commenting valuable information on their blogs and sharing it on your social media handles for a few weeks.

How to write alluring Guest Blogs?

Once your pitch is accepted, it’s time to write the great guest post which will pave for the long-lasting relationship with other blogs.

Following are some of the tips to write awesome guest posts;

Remember it is not a promotional blog, it should be an informative blog.
Ensure the formatting is similar to the target blog standards.
Include few internal links of the website you are blogging to.
Include a link to your website occasionally only when it seems suitable. It’s ok even if you don’t include any.

Write great author bio and this is the place where you can promote your business and include links.

How to track the effectiveness of Guest Blogging?

There are 2 main objectives of guest blogging; earning a link and getting referral traffic. So how do you measure this success?

Earning a link can be measured by analyzing your link profile periodically and boost in your rank of the linked page after earning the link.

Referral traffic can be easily measured in Google Analytics by check referral traffic.

Guest Blogging Case Studies

Mob.is.it Guest Blogging SEO Success

Founder of Mob.is.it, Silvio Porcellana embraced guest posting to improve his search engine presence.

He started guest posting aggressively and posted 44 articles in a span of 5 months and the results were great;

Search traffic increased by 20%
More and more referring domains
Ranking of keywords went up significantly
Better Ahref’s rank

Buffer

There is hardly any digital marketer who hasn’t heard of the buffer. Such is the popularity of buffer. But, do you know, in the initial day’s buffer, its co-founder Leo Widrich did nearly 150 guest posts to gain the popularity.

Buffer grew from 0 to 100k customers in a span of 9 months.

Conclusion

Guest posting is obviously one of the best ways to establish your credibility in the market by earning valuable link and relevant traffic. The world knows the success stories of guest blogging. The sheer perseverance and patience will get your articles up as guest bloggers and let you enjoy the benefits of increased traffic.