The Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging

Guest blogging’s value in marketing has never been this resounding.

It helps establish a brand’s online presence through exposure and is by far the most effective way of building authority.

It won’t take long for people to recognize you as an industry expert through compelling and relevant content.

That’s what you’re getting from guest blogging.

While your industry may already be filled with solid competition, the demand for high-quality blogs offers the best chance to keep up.

But don’t misconceive guest blogging as a means to push affiliate links.

We’re talking about premium-quality content you write for known publishers and websites in your niche.

Why Should You Focus on Guest Blogging?

The purpose of any blog or content is to deliver information – it answers someone else’s question with persuasion.

But the problem with most blogposts is they’re riddled with links and full of rubbish.

There’s a reason why internet marketers spend time creating garbage content, but that’s meant for another discussion.

If you’re looking to build credibility for yourself and your brand online, you must let everyone know your expertise.

On the side, you take full advantage of having the privilege to guest blog by incorporating a link building campaign.

The reason to invest your time in guest blogging determines the type of content you create. It can be any of the following:

1 – Get High-Quality Traffic

The prime motivation to post content online is to gain traffic. It’s been that way since the beginning of internet marketing.

But the difference between generic and low-quality content to that of guest blogging is you’re getting high-quality traffic from the latter.

Anyone can easily lure thousands of visitors to their website over time.

But it won’t matter if it translates to a low conversion rate. It also doesn’t help if people spend less than a minute on your pages after realizing that nothing is interesting in them.

2 – Gain Followers or Subscribers

Again, there’s no sense in improving website traffic when it doesn’t stick. In contrast, guest blogging is more likely to convert readers into followers or subscribers.

It’s possible because you’re feeding them with relatable and helpful content, which happens to be published in a renowned or authority site. Your excellent content goes back to you through link building.

3 – Backlinks

Guest blogging offers the most effective way to build authoritative backlinks to your blog or website.

With the right target keywords, you’ll see a quick turnaround of your page’s rank on Google.

Since the content containing the link comes from an authority site, you expect to get over a thousand visitors each month. Building backlinks to your blogs and domain name doesn’t even have to be tedious since it all comes naturally with content creation.

4 – Get Exposure

The privilege of posting content to a well-known blog site offers the best possible exposure for your brand.

If your blog post is published on a site that lures at least 50,000 visitors per day, imagine what it can do to your blog or site.

Instead of wasting your time posting crap on private blog networks, guest posting assures relevant exposure since your audience already follow or subscribe to the site where you’re posting the content.

Your brand becomes familiar to your target consumers when your content consistently gets featured on the most prominent blogs in your niche.

How and Where to Guest Blog

You have to work your way up if you want to guest blog in your relevant niche’s top blogs and publishers.

It’s not like they’ll open their doors for anyone who wants to contribute content. For the most part, you submit your article and wait for them to approve and post it.

But it’s not as straightforward as you think. Four out of five submissions are either ignored or rejected.

Like we said earlier, guest blogging requires top-notch content. So, you can’t just run whatever article-generating content you have and send a price over.

Before you start writing, be sure to cover these:

Identify Your Audience

Commit to guest blogging if you wish to succeed – incorporate it into your marketing strategy. It’s not something that you do out of your free time.

First, figure out your target audience. It’s a crucial step because you’ll know where to focus and who to convince. Your audience is the focal point of your guest blogging endeavour.

Study how to develop consumer personas and profiles; obtain information about your target audience from social media and website analytics.

Know Your Objective

The way to guest post differs from one situation to another.

Your objective dictates how you should approach this endeavour.

For example, there’s a difference between guest posting in the hope of increasing the number of people signing up for your newsletter and that of guest blogging to get high-quality backlinks.

You’ll be creating different types of content for the two, as well as the type of blogpost and page to link. You can’t proceed to the actual writing process if you don’t identify your goal.

Formulating a Strategy

Guest blogging happens on two opposing fronts: quantity and quality.

In a perfect world, you’d go for the two, but it’s more efficient to focus on either quality or quantity.

Your preferred strategy depends on what you want to achieve in a specific period or timeframe. But remember this: the emphasis on quantity doesn’t necessarily mean creating low-quality content.

Identifying your target audience, objective, and strategy is just the first step, sort of a preparation for what lies ahead. At this point, focus on the following:

• Find worthy blogs and publications
• Scrutinize for content quality
• Analyze the type of content they accept

Search Blogs and Publications

Like how you search all things online, go to Google and use relevant guest blogging terms. Use a preferred niche keyword and add any of the following:

“guest post + niche.”

“guest blogging + niche.”

“guest blog submission + niche.”

“contribute article + niche.”

“submit guest post + niche.”

You get the drift.

Aside from a good, old Google search, blog directories and publications are an also worthy prospect.

You probably don’t know it, but you can search for blogs similar to other sites you want to guest post. Just go to similarsites.com or similarweb.com.

Don’t worry if there are only a few blogs in your niche. It’s just a matter of improvising your search.

First, determine the umbrella category of your niche; use it to look for relevant blogs. For instance, if you’re looking for blogs about puppy weaning but can’t find enough prospects, you may target dog training or animal welfare blogs.

Inspect Content Quality

There’s more to find out a blog’s content quality than just domain authority. It’s no secret that some sites are moonlighting as having high DA, when in fact, they’re trash.

See to it that you weigh other factors, i.e., guest post ratio and organic traffic. Remember that you could end up hurting your campaign if you don’t scrutinize and end up posting on a shady website.

Know What Content Works With Your Audience

Even if you’ve found the blogs and publications for guest blogging, you’re still not done since there’s no guarantee if they’ll accept your content.

So, how do you increase the chance of having your article published? The solution is to study the type of content they consider as “irresistible.”

Browse every blog and publication on your list and dig up a pattern; see if there is a trend in the articles, like how they’re written.

Furthermore, emulate content from the site’s most popular articles. If you notice a common denominator in the articles, it means that the editorial staff loves that type of article.

But be sure to maintain the “uniqueness” factor because your article won’t be accepted if it reads and sounds like another published content on their site.

Final Thoughts

It won’t matter if you spend countless hours reading tips on how to guest blog; if you don’t start immediately, you won’t see results.

It takes less than a day to learn the ropes, and since you’ve had enough in this post, it’s time to get things started.