How Guest Posting Can Help You Grow Your Blog

I am still surprised why many bloggers have not embraced guest blogging as a way of growing their blog. Truth is: average bloggers write and wait for visitors to come to their sites while successful bloggers write and proactively look for audience in form of guest blogging, social media outreach, and email marketing, among others. Guest blogs are one of those things that will get you a massive readership and following if done correctly. Well, sometimes this might not be that easy to do, but with determination and consistency, you should be able to see massive results if you can get to post your blogs on the right site.

Implications Of Penguin & Panda Updates

First of all it is important to take into consideration the fact that the main focus in guest blogging is quality. If content is king, the quality content is the emperor. In the aftermath of Penguin and Panda updates by Google, the online community’€™s focus has been focused, to a larger extent, to quality content strategy and guest blogging. Google’s Panda updates are meant to filter sites which have poor quality content/thin content. For instance, on 6th August, 2013, Google introduced new research results algorithm that will help users find in-depth article results that promise to give in-depth information to users looking for the information. This means that if you want to engage in successful guest blogging campaign, providing in-depth, quality posts will so much play in your favor. Panda update affects about 12% of search queries. Google’€™s penguin on the other side, affects sites that employ black hat techniques including link spamming, keyword staffing. In short, Google’s aim is to help in improving the quality of content, at the same time providing better and more relevant links among sites. So, whichever way you want to look at it, there are no two ways to it: you have got to provide quality guest blog posts with working links; otherwise, you risk achieving just the opposite in PR. If you want to stay ahead of the game, you have got to stay updated on Google’€™s penguin and Panda updates because the algorithms are bound to change from time to time.

What Guest Posting Is Not

First things first: guest blogging is designed to grow your site/blog, but it is not designed to be a marketing or advertising campaign. It is very easy and tempting to mix the two. It is understandable why this is a very common misconception, but Google PR won’€™t tolerate it. A good example on why engaging in article marketing campaign in disguise of guest blogging is the fact that many content mills (article marketing sites) have since been demoted. Your main aim as a guest blogger is to provide quality content; it is supposed to reach a real community of readers and provide quality content rather than just pasting content across the web. That being said, guest blogs are also not advertorials. Advertorials are journalist pieces of information that are advertisements in nature. In other words, advertorials are paid advertising. A guest post that is advertorial in nature is actually not a guest post and Google would not tolerate that. A guest post that is backed up by charts, data, and statistics is more valuable than a personal opinion ranting. When people browse the internet, they are normally looking for useful information to solve a particular problem; they are not looking for people’s opinions, except if you are really famous and people want to hear what you have to say. Your job is to give them useful information. You are an entrepreneur of information or simply an “infopreneur”.

Submit To Quality Sites

Once you have written your guest post, and ensured that it if up to standard, the next thing is to make sure that you place your guest posts in relevant sites. Just because a blog owner has allowed people to post their posts does not necessarily imply that you can go ahead and post your post irrespective of the relevancy. If the information you are posting and the guest blog’€™s niche are not compatible, you are wasting time because you will not receive quality inbound links to your site. The site/blog you are posting your post should also be a quality site with genuine readership. Also, link your stories, facts, and findings to credible sources. You don’t have to necessarily link it to your home page because it will look as if you are practicing black hat SEO techniques, needless to state the consequences. A couple of months ago, Matt Cutts (the head of Search Quality Team, Google) released a statement that bad guest post hosting can harm you site. Consequently, guest blog hosting webmasters are now keener on the type of guest posts they accept.

Write For them; Not For Your Ego

If you are not writing for your readers, you have no business being a blogger. Sounds harsh? No, it isn’t because that is the reality. A guest blog post isn’t going to add any value to your site or blog if it is not written for the readers. Remember that readers will not just click on your link mechanically. They will click on the link because they feel that they got connected to your information, so they are looking for more. If we can put it this way: a guest blog should act as an appetizer, but the appetizer should not be too brief and incomplete as to signal inadequacy. It should give useful information, yet leave the reader convinced that they stand to gain a lot if they follow your link. Your work as a guest blogger is a delicate one because you have to balance the two if you are looking to grow your site. When you are guest blogging, you are introducing yourself to the larger community out there. You are interacting with other professionals as well. Therefore, it is not just about you; it’s about them. If your blog is fairly new and you have submitted your post to a more established blog, you will love the feeling of receiving comments from the readers. This is a golden opportunity for you to respond to the comments, answer their questions, provider further suggestions, and show them you really know what you are talking about. Many bloggers blow up this opportunity. They just make a post and disappear. Remember, this is your baby, and you have to take care of it at every moment of its growth.

You Are Establishing Good Relationship With Other Bloggers

The importance of guest blogging can never be overemphasized. Guest blogging is the only way you can establish good relationship with other bloggers. This way, you stand to learn a lot in terms of skills, how the industry works, and share useful tips, among other things. You can actually establish a network of blogs in the sense that you can also allow guest blogs in your site. This kind of synergy can cause wonders. To demonstrate this, if you have a network of 5 bloggers with 10,000 readers each, it means each of you can have 50,000 readers if you network to each other. Of course this is a simple example, but in real life situation, there will be more work involved to turn your network into a client magnet.

Follow Guest Blog Guidelines

Every guest blog host has its own submission guidelines. You have to follow the submission guidelines if you don’t want your guest post to be rejected. If you have already talked to the blog owner, you also need to follow his requirements. The biggest disappointment you can give to your host blogger is providing broken links. Guest blogs with many broken links is very bad for PR.

Closing Remarks

Getting yourself to perform well in the search engine is not an easy job, especially now that there is a very stiff competition in the blogging world, which is why guest blogging is indispensable if you hope to attract quality visitors to your site, and make your site grow. Guest blogging, therefore, still remains one of the easiest and effective methods of bringing useful traffic to your site. To be successful in guest contribution, you have to provide quality, useful, targeted, and relevant content. Once you have done your guest post, nothing prevents you from marketing your post and informing the world about it suing social media such as Facebook, twitter, YouTube, Social Forums, and Email.