I am sure you have heard many times before that guest posting is a great way to do SEO and that it brings you lots of benefits. But is it enough to just randomly find the blogs that would accept your post and submit it?
Actually, there is more to it than that. Guest posting requires thoughtful analysis, a strategy and a lot of work.
Think Things Through
Setting up a guest blog plan means that you need to establish the goals you wish to achieve and think of ways to measure your results. Every guest post you write must have a well defined purpose and it must be built in such a way that it will be able to complete its mission.
Let’s take for example Paras Chopra, the co-founder of Visual Website Optimizer, who did a very efficient online promotion for his company using strategic guest posting.
One of the most important steps that he did was to determine the communities he was interested in targeting. He found popular blogs for those communities and he wrote a blog post that was referring to specific problems of that audience.
Here’s how you can approach strategic guest posting:
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Determine the communities to target
To speed up your guest blogging efficiency, you must focus first on reaching a wider area of people, from different domains other than your own. This means that you need to find different professionals that are also interested in your product or service.
Paras is actually developing an A/B testing software. But to build up an effective guest blogging strategy, he went outside the circle of conversion rate optimizers and tried guest posting on SEO blogs, copywriting blogs and web designers blogs.
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Find popular blogs for those communities
You can settle for anything you can get or you can reach for the top. To make the most of your guest posting, you must do a little research and discover the places where your targeted professionals are active. In other words, find popular blogs to guest post. These will give your posts the exposure you need.
For his guest posts, Paras chose popular blogs such as SEOmoz, Copyblogger and Smashing Magazine. His posts received tens of comments and hundreds of retweets from the readers of these blogs.
The competition is indeed high on these blogs and you are required to write exceptional posts in order to be accepted, but that should only be an inceptive for you and not a drawback. Once you have managed to publish such an article, the rewards will be more than worth your efforts.
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Choose specific topics
For your guest posts to be valued by the communities reading them, you need to write about the topics of interest for these audiences. What works for one community may not work for others.
Therefore you must find answers and solutions for the common problems your audience is facing and provide them in your posts. Also you may want to adapt the language you use and the tone of your voice to make your copy both appealing and comprehensive for its readers.
Let’s take a peek at some of the articles that Paras wrote for his guest posting strategy. You’ll find an example of how you can adjust your knowledge to the interests of other professionals:
Lessons Learned from 21 Case Studies in Conversion Rate Optimization
This article was written for an SEO community and the author took several case studies to show the impact of design, call to action, copy and headline in conversions. With real examples, he pointed out what could be done for a website, from an SEO perspective, to increase conversions.The Guaranteed Way to Radically Improve Your Copywriting
Copywriters are not interested in efficient designs or buttons, but in efficient copy. And copy can be tested as well. This article explains in a common language what A/B testing is, how copywriters can test their copy, what to test and ultimately, how to create copy that works.The Ultimate Guide To A/B Testing
This article was written as a “How to” guide, with Do’s and Don’ts, lots of relevant examples of which are the best performing design items for a website and a list of useful resources and tools.
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Do not try to sell!
It is extremely important to maintain your credibility and try not to promote your product or service in your guest posts. The slightest sign your readers get of you being a salesman, would make them loose interest and compromise your entire guest posting strategy.
Instead, you should keep focus on your purpose: provide valuable information and gain authority. Traffic, conversions and revenue will follow.
Start Writing!
With a guest posting plan well set up, all you need to do is start writing. You will know what results to expect from your guest posts and you will soon be able to see and measure these results.
Wandering around and guest posting by chance won’t get you all the benefits that guest posting is promising.
So be wise and guest post strategically!
Surely, I haven’t covered all the things that make a guest posting strategy efficient but I’m counting on you to add your own tips in the comments section below. Can you share some of your experience with this?
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Strategic Guest Posting: Doing it Right
