Guest posts are blog posts written to be published for other websites. To put it straight, guest posts are a means to drive traffic on someone’s website by providing a trust factor to their services. Usually, you would find articles highlighted with bylines like ‘by the guest author’ or ‘contributor’ which signifies that it is a guest blog.
Guest Posts are a good way to monetize your writing skills. Although, the remunerations depend upon publications you are providing your services for. At times, guest post bloggers are paid in non-monetary ways like a backlink to their personal blog or to their social media accounts.
Benefits that you must reap by adopting to guest blogs!
Source: Sony SAB
Build a profile as an industry expert/thought leader
Grow your personal brand
Grow an audience (social followers, subscribers etc.)
Improve SEO performance
Build authoritative backlinks
Build relationships and drive new partnerships e.g. co-marketing partnerships, job offers
Drive referral traffic
Improve a company's brand awareness
Get more leads, users and even customers
6 Ways to Get Your Guest Posts Started
Set achievable goals: Know why you’re writing these blog posts. Set the target audience to whom you want to deliver the information.
Make it a realistic goal for the number of leads you could get in a day! Best practices would be referrals, SEO backlinks or traffic.
#How to find guest post target
Google Search Strings:
Write “keyword”+ “related term” for string search.
2.Google Reverse Image Search: Find a niche person in your category. For example, in marketing Noah Kagan writes a ton of guest posts
Find that person and select the image URL of the headshot of the author bio.
Select the URL and paste it in the Google images>Choose the 'camera' icon>Paste by image URL
3. Twitter Searches:
2. Choose business/industry oriented topics: Topics that are relevant to your business should be chosen by you for guest posts. Relevancy is essential in such a content piece. Guest posts must add value to your reader’s knowledge and time. Focus on what content the post blogger is getting to your business and not on which publication is covering it. Make sure the topic comes under an overarching umbrella.
3. Select a reputable blogging site: Once you’re ready with the content for your site look out for publications that are of good repute i.e. good domain authority, editorials and strong email marketing campaigns as this would itself pitch your content to your audience.
4. Good outreach: This time you will pitch those ideas that you have in your kitty. Pitching out those to publication means business and hence you need to be extra ready with it. Every publication has their own editorial process so you must first look at their guidelines and prepare your pitch accordingly.
5. Write the post: This the most easy part of the process. Write good quality content that will attract readers to share and comment upon. Writing a good post will definitely sell better and drive good results to your site eventually getting you a lead!
Here are some ideas for an impactful blog post:
Write long-form, compelling content (at least 1,000 words)
Break the text into small, digestible paragraphs
Optimize for on-page SEO
Use original images and graphs to make the content more linkable (Canva is a great tool for novice designers)
Add quotes from friends and influencers
Link to your other published guest posts
Link to your own, relevant content
Link to other publications: studies, data, thought leadership etc.
Link internally, to other articles from your publisher
Add your byline and explain what makes you an expert on that topic
6. Track your progress: Just check the analytics of week 1 with your current time frame and see how far you’ve come!
Tools that will help you with Guest Blogging
BuzzStream
2. Respona
3. Just Reachout
4. BuzzSumo
5. Ahrefs
6. Semrush
Guest blogs might sound like an age old practice but it still holds relevance to what we must do to reach out to the world. A good marketer will know the benefits of using such a tactic but a great marketer would know how and when to use it. Blogs that have been referred or have mentions from popular or high domain value sites are considered to be trustworthy, reliable and high quality content. This becomes easy to rank them higher on SERP as well as are most sought after blogs for references.
Make sure you make use of the tips and lessons we gave you above to build a successful blog journey and inspire people with your knowledge and insights.
Why Choose Web-StepUp?
To begin with, you need a helping hand and that's when you can turn to Web-StepUp. We will help you to curate content ideas and pitches so that you choose the right publisher to keep your opinion out there. Web-StepUp makes sure you customize your content as per the platform you choose as well as help you to research on topics that fit your niche category!