Why you should be guest posting

If you’re trying to grow your online audience, one of the best ways of going about this can be guest posting.

People often don’t consider guest posting as part of their strategy because of the time investment. Sometimes businesses will have their own blog and are focused on producing content for that. They then have to set aside extra time to produce content for the guest post. Often, this just not a feasible option.

However, there are many benefits to guest posting:

Building relationships  

Guest posting is a great way to network and build relationships with those in your niche. You’re going to be producing good value content for someone else’s website. This is a great opportunity to build a positive relationship between the two brands.

SEO benefits

One of the main reasons for making the effort to write guests posts is the SEO benefit. However, you can easily miss out on the benefit altogether if you forget to mention one crucial thing in your initial email. It’s important to establish you would like to include a link to your website within the blog post. If the other brand isn’t willing to let you post a link, or will make it a no-follow link, then it isn’t worth the investment in time.

If you can get a website willing to let you guest post and include a link to your blog - great! This will increase traffic flow to your blog, while also raising the value of your blog to search engines. This can lead to your content having increased rankings on search engine results pages.

Gain a wider audience

If you’re writing a guest post for a website within your niche, then you’ll be exposing your company to an entirely new audience. If it is within the same industry, they will already have an interest in what you’re writing about and will be more likely to click the link through to your website.

However, to make a new audience interested, you have to make sure you’re writing the correct content. Make sure you’re not just selling your own company, products or services. Instead, offer something of value. Customers want to learn something and read insightful blog posts, rather than an advertisement for your business. Follow this, and you’ll be sure to find new fans.

Increased authority and trust

People will be more likely to read your content if you are perceived as an authority in your niche. You can help achieve this by including backlinks throughout your blog posts and backing up what you’re saying with facts.

Guest posts will also help to increase the level of authority and trust you have. The more frequently you guest post, the more times and websites people will see your name appearing on. You will start to appear as more relevant and trusted within your industry.

Before you embark on your journey of guest posting, there are some important things to remember:

Find blogs in your niche

You don’t want to write guest posts for every possible website. You need to narrow down your options. Make sure you’re pitching to people who are relevant in your industry. Chances are, businesses in other industries won’t be interested in publishing your content, and their viewers won’t want to read it.

Check their authority

So the website is within your industry, but is it worth writing for? Before contacting anyone, make sure to check a website’s Domain Authority and Page Authority. This 100-point score measures the power of a domain and page, and uses factors such as age, popularity and size. You want to make sure websites you contact have a good score, generally above 20. Anything below 10 is a good indicator the website is either very new, doesn’t get a high traffic flow or may not be trustworthy. You don’t want to end up writing for a website that damages your brand’s reputation. Nor do you want to write for a website that gets no traffic flow, or else no one will see your content and link. Before contacting any blogs, install the MozBar and keep track of the Domain Authority and Page Authority scores for each website.     

Research

You’ve found blogs in your industry, they appear to be trustworthy and you want to send them a pitch for a guest post. Before you do, make sure you research their website and content. In your pitch email, you’re going to want to include various guest post titles for the website to choose from. Make sure these are titles the website would be interested in publishing. Have a look at who the audience is for this website, what type of content they produce and what their style of writing is.

It can also be helpful to look at other guest posts published on the website. This gives you an idea of the standards and expectations the website has for guest posts. Doing some research before contacting a business can increase your chances of having a successful pitch and your guest post being published.

Check for any guidelines

Often, businesses will have a specific page on their website dedicated to guidelines around guest posts. This can sometimes state they do not accept guest posts, or will have a list of rules about what you need to include within the post. Sometimes businesses will not want a one-off post, but will want a larger commitment, and expect more frequent guest posts. Make sure you can commit to this prior to contacting these websites. Reading through a guidelines page can be very helpful, and can save you pitching to a website that is not accepting guest posts.

Once you have completed this, you’re ready to write your email pitch and begin guest posting! Just remember, you won’t always hear back from websites, and will often receive a rejection. Don’t get disheartened! Keep outreaching to relevant websites within your industry, and within no time you’ll be reaping the rewards of guest posting.