Nice guest authoring tips from … our guest author today.
One of the best ways to build PageRank and authority for your website is to explore the guest blogging arena. A few years ago, article directories were seen as the ultimate solution. It didn’t take long for people—mainstream Internet surfers—to realize that article directories were boring, and that their so-called experts really didn’t have anything substantial to offer. That’s why attention shifted to guest blogging, content written by experienced bloggers who spend their careers and free time obsessing over the finer details of their craft or industry.
And so the Internet world decided that the best resource pages were coming from blogs—real people with a real following. Now the marketing world is enthusiastically venturing forth into guest blogging, hoping to buy off bloggers, get sales articles printed, and boost product awareness by pimping it to the “top blogs” on the Internet. That seems like the easy explanation, but that’s not quite how guest blogging works. Join along in our Guide to Guest Blogging to see how you can develop relationships that will be mutually beneficial.
Yes, the term relationship is the key here. Because two or three links won’t really amount to a hill of beans in this crazy Internet world as Humphrey Bogart might say today. However, establishing a professional friendship with a high PR site and exchanging quality links is worth the time investment. This gives you a chance not only to build quality links for higher search rankings, but also lets you build your authority with readers and associate with other successful people in your field.
Develop Your Guest Blogging Strategy
The most important aspect is that you devise a guest blogging plan before you start sending out mass emails to all the blogs you love. First, decide what your goals are for guest blogging. There’s no use spending time or money on a project without having ideas for profitability, branding and link building. Along with your long-term goals, you want to determine what types of blogs are appropriate to your product or services.
It might help to consider why most companies are willing to invest in link blogging—you know, the ones who actually have business goals and aren’t just trying it as a flavor of the month. These goals might include building quality backlinks for higher PR and search traffic, advertising your company (indirectly of course) for new leads, and establishing your name or brand name as an authority in your field.
It will help tremendously to study the blogs (at least for a few minutes!) before you start sending emails out, because not all blogs—even ones in or around your field of interest—are going to be worth your effort. Some blogs have a very enthusiastic audience, engaged and massive. However, because of the topic they might not be receptive to certain types of instructional or basic posts. They may want very different content than you are prepared to offer. Evaluating one blog at a time is really the best way to prepare for this type of campaign.
How Do You Find Blogs Open to Your Ideas?
Over at KissMetrics, they pinpoint some of the easiest ways to start finding appropriate blogs for guest blogging. First, you can conduct a keyword search and look for “guest post” or “guest post guidelines”, preferably with other keywords that define your market and industry. Create a spreadsheet of all the blogs you find relevant and interesting. Then filter out blogs that are limited in their value by asking these questions.
- Is this a general industry blog or a niche blog? (Niches should be priority compared to general blogs, which may not be considered relevant)
- Is the audience at this blog interested in your market/industry?
- Is there evidence of an engaged readership and a strong social media presence?
Another method of compiling blogs is to actually take an interest in the field or hobby, and start searching for the most successful blogs and voices via organic search. Don’t look up “guest posting” but look for keyword terms that customers and devoted readers of this field are likely to type. Conduct organic searches and learn some of the biggest names in the industry, from manufacturers to consultants to even local experts that work with these products. After you learn some of these names try to search by name and see if these authority figures have business blogs or personal blogs in which they talk about their business. You can also search for power players using social media.
One way or another, finding relevant blogs is all about doing the online “legwork” and compiling a list of business-friendly URLs for you to communicate with.
Starting Communication with the Blog’s Owner or Representative
By now, you’ve probably compiled an impressive list of guest blog URLs that might be a good match for your business. Before you start communicating with the owner or representative, it’s time to study not only the blog but the quality and tone of other guest posts that have been published. Spending a few minutes filtering out unwelcoming or mismatched blogs will save a lot of time in the long-run.
It’s also smart to read up on the owner so you can try to relate to this person rather than just sending a template based correspondence email. A simple written introduction, based on a blog owner’s profile, can go a long way in establishing a mutual respecting relationship.
Still, a great part of your communication will involve “listening” or in this case “reading” about the blog’s owner. Neil Patel at QuickSprout.com states that successful blog owners are getting “inundated” with requests from smaller websites. He personally received 931 requests and admitted to accepting zero. His explanation? They all read like SPAM—impersonal, form letter information, and amazingly, many with grammatical errors. In other words, these were people who didn’t bother to learn what guest blogging was, or what was expected from the guest poster.
Patel also recommends studying the comments of the guest blog so that you can see how people are responding and how much engagement these types of guest posts are receiving. Even if you do strike up a friendship with a blog owner, he/she will mostly be interested in your idea for a topic. Chances are, they do research and already know the type of posts that work.
If a week or so passes, it is acceptable to send a follow up email asking about acceptance. However, keep the email message short, respectful and casual—as in not begging! Remember to check back to see how well your guest posts performed. You might not see analytics information on the page itself but you can keep track of comments, likes, shares and other data. You can also reference your successful posts for future use.
Be sure to respond to questions or comments once your post goes live. If you find that your post isn’t getting much engagement, then it’s possible you are lacking in the “call to action.” Ask the blog’s readers for their comments, perhaps phrasing a relevant question to continue the discussion, rather than just asking for attention outright.
If you really want to solidify your relationship with a successful blog owner then do your best to bring him/her traffic. A personalized guest post request that also helps the blog owner generate traffic for his/her own site is simply hard to reject. You can direct your own following to read your guest post.
Making a Strong Personal Presentation
You have the obligation to present yourself as successful, approachable and personal to the blog’s readers. And really, all of this guest blogging is in vain if you don’t create an excellent bio page with a linkback to your website. In fact, most guest blogs will prefer it if you don’t “sell” on the guest post directly, but leave it for the bio page. The blog’s readers are not looking to buy anything—they want helpful information, the blog-quality stuff they can’t get from a commercial. Target your anchor text, choose a nice profile picture and choose the link page wisely.
Once you create and maintain the quality of your own profile, and develop some valuable relationships in the community, it’s time to start filtering out the blogs you don’t need. Pay attention to blogs that seem to publish anything and everything. These sites are ultimately going to wear down their own PR ranking because they’re not selective. Soon enough, they’ll have the same great reputation as an article directory. However, sticking with the most successful and picky of blogs in your field will be a good thing.
In our business it’s better to have one quality link than five cheap links. A guest post by Pratik Dholakiya on MOZ says that guest bloggers should be beware of associating with sites that over-publish content or that are too lenient with substandard material. He actually suggested that sites that rarely publish their own material but generate traffic solely on guest posts are also bad news. On the other hand, regular major publications like The Wall Street Journal or Entertainment Weekly have regular staff members and contributors. Ultimately those are the types of sites you want to emulate—not blogs that over-publish and have no sense of comfortable scheduling.
For instance, you don’t want a blog that will publish your stuff every day or even every week. You want consistent publishing and a definite schedule without the threat of over-exposing your brand.
Sites that have no contact information are also deemed risky, as are sites that have little or no social media presence. Naturally, low PR sites should be avoided and I personally recommend targeting blogs with a Domain Authority greater than 30. Of course, this is not a hard rule. You can make exceptions but only if there is something about the blog that is still advantageous to you—for example, a large “cult” or niche following, with active readers, is always advantageous if the content is a match. You might also be surprised to know that some blogs have “fake followers”. It really pays to stick around and observe, not only how many intelligent followers are leaving comments on these pages, but also what the audience is thinking about and why they find the page valuable.
This brings us to the next point, which is developing a post that’s going to be remembered.
How to Write a Great Guest Post
This process actually begins when you develop the theme for the post, which you pitch to the blog owner on the initial email. A great topic is what sells you, and proper execution of this subject, seals the deal. Now some blog owners will green light your project based solely on a great idea.
Others, however, (and especially the top blogs on the net who are on a mission to keep traffic up) will want you to write a trendy store, in similar fashion to the way a magazine might expect. You could volunteer a seasonal idea or take something from headline news. However, the best option might well be to study the blog’s choice of keyword phrases. This would make a great impression on the site owner who makes it a point to analyze new keyword developments. In you, he/she would be finding a keyword researcher in addition to a great writer—double the value!
You can easily research keywords trends, and the best keywords for the blog, using keyword research software. Google Alerts is another helpful tool that will keep you up to date on patterns or trends in the news involving popular or niche topics.
Now don’t assume that just knowing the right keyword trend is enough. The blog owner wants a writer first and a keyword researcher second. You have to use the keyword and make a title around it, making sure it sounds interesting. Have something new in mind, particularly if you’re going with the keyword pitch.
Coming up with great ideas is not necessarily a “creative” feat, though if you do tend to think outside the box, it is a major advantage. What’s required above all else is knowledge of the industry or the niche.
When it comes to creativity, it’s not that you’re creating great ideas out of thin air. Rather, you are taking insights from other fields and disciplines and using them in this particular niche, opening the readers’ eyes to new and valuable information. Creativity and idea pitching is just a matter of finding relationships between subject matter that others haven’t quite picked up on yet.
Developing Expert-Level Content
Now if you’re not a working professional in your industry but still have to come up with an expert-caliber article, then this may be challenging. When you naturally love your profession you write passionately and with authority. However, you can still learn how to blog like an expert even if you’re not exactly a PhD-level expert. For one thing, really good bloggers don’t just say everything that the blog community is thinking. The good ones, the “alphas” so to speak, take a stance that goes against the current of common thought. They introduce new concepts that help teach lessons. They also tend to be opinionated, emotional (at the right moments, the peak moments of the article), and funny whenever appropriate.
Remember that when you’re dealing with expert subject matter, you always want to verify your facts. Quote figures or point to a related scientific study to give your arguments more weight rather than just stating something “is” without discussion.
You can also use analogies or even anecdotes that happened to you, which demonstrate an important lesson. This is much appreciated by beginners as well as experts, who can better understand your position if they relate to the analogy or the personal experience. Ideally, you are writing for a different audience than just your own or the casual web viewer. You are writing for the blog’s audience. You must give them what they want, which is largely based on your opening comments, in which you state or infer something valuable that you are going to give them. One common problem we see in blogging is that some writers come up with such great content they figure it should be a series.
While this is a noble idea it has to be carefully organized. Because leaving part of your really good blog for tomorrow is not going to impress the readers of today. You must carefully organize multi-part blogs. In fact, most blog owners would tell you not to hold anything back but to mention all the key points in the first blog post. When you come up with additional ideas for a follow up article, you can post them later. But don’t sacrifice your best content just to space things out.
One of the most common errors in blogging is when a blog owner or guest writer tends to develop a great post and yet starts out with a boring title or introduction. The key to journalism is showmanship. So if anything, you want to mention the best part of the blog in the title and in the introduction, forewarning readers that there is a great payoff to this article if they read it.
Reply from a Big Shot Blogger
The first rule is a simple one: read and reread the guidelines set forth by the blogger. If you ignore their guidelines they will likely ignore your requests. If you know the competition is fierce for this site then create a strong cover letter which details your work experience, other popular pieces you’ve written, professional or personal (social networking) achievements, and other “foot-in-the-door” accolades that others might not have.
You don’t have to sound overly formal. If anything, blog owners appreciate down-to-earth yet respectful conversation, good humor, and knowledge of their domain. If you find that they are not very fast in response via email, there’s nothing wrong with contacting them through a social media site to pitch a topic.
Guest blogging is the ultimate adventure in building authority. With the proliferation of blogs, article directories, commercial websites and online magazines, there is an abundance of knowledge, and yet not enough quality writing. If you have the ability to produce quality content, you can take advantage of guest blogging and earn some powerful links as well as build authority.