Not only can guest posting do all of these things, and do them very well, but they can also help provide natural links to your site or the guest post (which juices up the link). Guest posting – especially post-Panda – is one of the best things you can do for your website Internet marketing wise.
It can also be a challenging task however, especially if you are trying to perform the campaign on any sort of level of scale in a certain amount of time (which is why many people hire professional guest posters for link building services these days). Here are seven tips for keeping quality in your guest posts when you are working with any sort of volume.
TIP 1: Your Search Methods are Clutch
Once you get good at guest posting, you really begin to see what will and can happen every time you come into contact with a web site. You will be able to tell which sites are going to pan out for you, and you will be able to eliminate a lot of websites from the table when it comes to picking and choosing who should guest post for.
Using the advanced operators with Google search is the best way to find guest posting opportunities. My favorite search method is to use the phrase “Keyword + intitle:”write for us”” where “keyword” will be whatever niche you are searching for. For a detailed list of other great search operators for guest posting search queries, click here.
TIP 2: Use Web Sites That Are Created For Guest Posters
Sites like MyBlogGuest.com and BloggersLinkUp.com were created for the sole purpose of helping people find places to guest post on and vice versa. MyBlogGuest, founded by Ann Smarty, is one of my personal favorites as it not only allows you to find blogs to guest post on, but it allows you network with many different people as it is set up in a forum style.
One of the really cool things about this site, is that you can upload your articles – articles that can be about anything you want them to, which makes it very easy to have high quality in everything you write – to the articles gallery part of the web site. From there, site and blog owners can bid on your article (their bid is their web site) and you can either choose to reject or accept their offer.
TIP 3: Personalization
Personalization is very important. Many guest posters try to scale up as much as possible when they are link building. But unlike many other forms of link building, you actually have to work very hard at providing quality for the web to even give your link a chance to go live.
Unfortunately, when you begin to scale up, that means you try to automate as much as the link building process as possible so that you can actually focus on one thing: your writing. But a lot of the times this will actually end up creating more work for you. And even if all you have to do is write articles, you will find that will not be as high quality as possible. That is because you will be able to wrap your head around what you will be writing about if you take part in the full process 100%.
For example, you may be using template emails, and not even taking the time of day to check out a website before you begin emailing them. This system does work, but it will ultimately end up devaluing your articles. Because you will not be able to:
- gauge the blogger’s audience
- find related topics to what the blogger has been posting lately
- actually learn something from the blog
- get to know the blogger better (style, personality, and everything else the blogger wished to reveal through his/her blog)
- Your conversion rate and chances of getting the blogger to say yes will decrease if you do not personalize the emails as best you can
TIP 4: Linking Structure
Links are what most people guest blog for these days. There is a lot of traffic that can come from white label guest posting (and outsourcing to an SEO company that provides link building services) but for a lot of people these days, the point of a guest post is to build and gain more links.
However, you still shouldn’t allow this to affect your writing whatsoever. In fact, you should keep the link building aspect of it totally out of your mind when writing your article and then just find a way to plug it in when you are finished writing it.
You will want to mix up your anchor texts when you are building contextual links. You want to have some that are highly targeted in terms of what keywords it is that you are trying to rank for, and you want to have many different variations of this keyword phrase with some added and subtracted words sprinkled in every now and again You also want to have a small percentage of your links with anchor text such as “click here…” or “studies show…” Basically you want to make sure that your anchor text strategy looks natural.
You also want to make sure that you are referencing all the information you obtained for the article you are writing via links to the sources. Not only does this look good in the eyes of search engines (as long as the sites are good) but it will increase the quality of your article because if the reader is unsure about something – they can just click the link to get the information they need on the topic.
TIP 5: Link Building Software
Data entry is one of the most tedious things you can do as a link builder. In fact, when you are trying to operate on any level of scale, you may find that you will spend more time actually doing all of the data entry and organizing than you will actually doing all of the actual link building.
For this reason you should look into link building, (or sometimes even public relations) software that can help you organize everything automatically (with the click of a button). There are many of these types of software out there and all you have to do is do a quick Google search and a little bit of research.
TIP 6: Choosing Blog Requirements
The rule of thumb here is that page rank, and pretty much all other metrics, are not a magic number, and you shouldn’t choose to build a link on one blog because it meets a specified criteria. One belief that many SEO’s share is that if you think that a link is going to get you traffic, then you should probably put the time in the build the link.
If you are building links that are built solely for the purpose of getting traffic then you can be sure that these links are going to benefit yourself in many more ways than one. This is the reason why links were created before search engines even recognized them as a valid way to build them, and is how they should continue to be built.
TIP 7: Dedication and Determination
The “two D’s” will get you a long way in the link building department. Link building campaign can get messy, and can be very time consuming. Make sure that you have the right tools and the right mind set when going into them. And make sure you are doing nothing but providing quality on the Internet. Not only will this help you build links in the form of guest posting, but it will also help you build many natural links.