If you have any experience at all with promoting your business online, you have certainly heard about guest posting. You have probably even tried it out. However, the very fact that you are reading this article means that your current guest posting strategy either does not work at all or does not bring sufficient results. Alternatively, it may bring you an occasional influx of new visitors as a result of recent posts but does not affect your search engine ranking in the long term.
However, it does not have to be this way. You can successfully use guest posting for SEO purposes – you just have to approach this job the right way. In this article, you will find some tips that will help you in this endeavor.
1.Develop your customer’s buyer’s persona
When you write guest posts, you should aim them at people who are likely to be interested in the products or services you sell. Therefore, before you start looking for blogs to work with, you should define who the person you are selling to is. If you sell to (or write for) everyone, you do it for nobody. You will not go anywhere without determining your niche.
2.Find relevant blogs to collaborate with
Where are you likely to find more people who are close to your target audience? You can find answers to this question in multiple ways. You can directly ask your existing customers (e.g., by running a survey) what they read. You can Google a few keywords your customers are likely to look for and set aside influential blogs that crop up. If you already have a social media presence as a business, you can use audience intelligence tools like Twitter Analytics – they will show what the members of your audience are interested in and whom they tend to follow.
3.Pitch your posts smartly
Simply writing a cut and dry pitch letter with an offer of a guest post to the blog owner or webmaster just does not work these days. If the blog is influential, the owner receives dozens of such letters every day and probably deletes them without reading or even opening. If it is not, there is no point in wasting your time and effort writing for it.
Establish a relationship with the blog owner through other means, comment on the blog, mention the blog in your own media, prepare the ground for future collaboration – and only after the owner starts seeing you as an individual, try offering him/her a guest post.
4.Promote your guest posts
One of the widespread reasons why businesses get a discouragingly little result out of guest posting is because their marketers believe that their jobs end as soon as the post goes live. In fact, nothing can be further from the truth. Even a first-rate post will not gain much traction if you just leave it hanging there. Moreover, taking into account how much time and effort goes into finding a target blog, pitching your post, doing research, writing the post and creating the accompanying content, you should make every effort to squeeze every ounce of potential out of every guest post you land. Therefore, you should promote it. Some Technology blog posting services can help you out with it, but usually, you have to do it yourself.
Write about the post across all your channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, blogs, corporate websites, etc.). If your partners or employees have industry-relevant blogs or other media, ask them to refer to the post. Be present in the comments section, engage with readers and contribute value to the discussion.
5.Find a trustworthy guest posting service
SEO is already a complicated industry in its own right and a rapidly developing one at that. To keep track of all the changes that happen in it, one has to follow industry-related publications, keep in touch with experts, look over all the new tools, software and services useful in this sphere and do dozens of other things. To do it well one has to do it full-time, and if it is not the core competency of your business, your efforts are better applied elsewhere. Now, guest posting as related to SEO is just as time-consuming and requires as much if not more attention to detail. You have to maintain relationships with dozens of individual webmasters and blog owners, pitch your posts to them, promote and support your guest posts and so on (you can find a well-written guide to the entire process on Ultimate tech news.com). It is a much more viable decision to delegate it to a professional guest blogging agency. These will take most of the load off your shoulders and already have connections in the industry. Although you still can do some precision work yourself, you can rest assured that your guest posting agency will not let your strategy falter while you are not looking.
6.Keep a list of all your guest posts
Whenever possible, try keeping your guest posting to evergreen topics – i.e., topics that will be just as interesting to read about in a year’s time as they are today. If you do it, you can potentially keep your posts alive for a long while and continue getting value out of them. Of course, you should not retweet them every couple of weeks; but whenever you publish a new post in your blog or land another guest post elsewhere on the Net, look through the list of your previously published posts and pick a couple of them to refer to wherever relevant.
7.Create valuable content, both on and off your blog
Learning even the basics of SEO may look like a daunting task, especially considering the rapid rate of change in the industry (Google admits to introducing over 3,200 changes to its algorithms over the last year alone). However, there is no need to feel intimidated. Knowledge of SEO helps, but valuable content trumps it every time, while SEO without content will not get you anywhere. Google algorithms may change, but one thing always remains the same: they look to promote high-quality content. Strategically using keywords in your blog and your guest posts will help, but first, both of them should offer something interesting and unique to readers.
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