Internet, SEO

Tips for Efficient Guest Blogging to Increase Site Traffic

article-writingFrom its early beginnings as a personal online journal, blogging has truly gone a long way and has, over time, transformed itself from being something more of a hobby or pastime to one that can serve as a powerful tool that businesses can use to move more goods, increase sales, and bring in higher profits at a fraction of the cost of, say, traditional advertising. The secret? Guest blogging!

What is guest blogging?

In a nutshell, guest blogging is done when you contribute blog posts to other websites that fall within the same niche or market as yours - either by invitation whereby the owners of other blogs invite you to post on their site or you may personally inquire and send out an email to ask if they are open to contributions by others. So basically guest blogging is pretty much providing content to other websites that share the same audience as yours, in order to push more visitors to your site.

Why should I guest blog?

Now that we have given you an idea of what guest blogging is, you might be wondering - what’s in it for me? How can this benefit my business?

1. For starters, guest blogging is a highly effective means of driving more viewers to your website through inbound links that redirect to content on your site. These links can either be found on your author profile or in the body of the article itself or, better yet, why not on both?

2. Secondly, guest blogging can help build and fortify your Author Rank. Google takes into account the author of an article - the type of posts he/she makes and where - and how well it will rank in search engine results.

3. Thirdly, if the kinds of articles that you post offers information that is useful and beneficial to a greater number of people, then you can be sure to expect increased referral traffic to your website. Moreover, posts on popular sites that get a lot of readers have a bigger chance of receiving more likes on Facebook, get retweeted, and gain larger visibility on social media as a whole.

Get started with guest blogging!

Since we’ve shared with you the many advantages of guest blogging, you are now well on your way to contributing relevant posts to other websites. But before you do, allow us to share some handy tips from Lucy Colins of Techbuzzpro.

1. Publish a minimum of seven useful and original articles on your site

It is essential to have great content on your official site for impressing the readers, editors of other sites where you wish to post, and search engines. Your articles should be helpful, interesting, discerning, perfect in English and grammar, properly structured via headings as well as formatted, and must have visual aids such as pictures and videos In order to get some unique ideas, you can visit other blogs in your industry and find out what they are writing on.

2. Build social visibility

Optimize your online social presence by setting up a complete and precise Facebook page, Google+ profile, and Twitter account in case you have not done so already. Do so in such a way that your site has links to these social profiles and vice-versa.

3. Find out relevant and popular sites for contribution

Utilize to your advantage your existing connections such as those on LinkedIn. Apart from that, you can use the Google Adwords tool to know about the most used keywords for your industry. Once you get the keywords, Google them and examine the top 10-15 pages. This will help you track the sites appearing to be content publishers; not of the commercial companies, as the latter will not welcome guest authors. Some famous queries to Google for finding publishers in your niche are ‘[keyword] guest posts', ‘[keyword] submit posts', and ‘[keyword] guest blogger'.

4. Contact promising editors and start sharing

You will be able to find the e-mail address or a contact form to reach out an editor on his or her site where you want to post. When you contact them, convey that you are a passionate business owner who would be pleased to contribute to their site. Clearly describe the goals for contributing, which can reputation building or boosting brand awareness while providing organic and useful content to the group. In addition, do share the links to the best articles that you have posted on your site. When you get positive responses, contact the editors to find out acceptable topics and article formats.

Mel P. has been involved with new media for more than 15 years now. He is currently the content manager of Performancing.com which has recently started offering guest posting services for their clients.

One Comment

  1. It’s good when contacting editors/site owners to make sure that you have followed all of the directions and given them the confidence through the email pitch that you are guest blogging with integrity and have good purposes behind your pitch. If they see this, they will be more likely to look at your post. Use a little comedy in the pitch to keep them reading and help them remember you.

    Once your post is up, socially blast it. I try my best to spend about as much time blasting my post as much as it took to write it. If you do this, you’ll find that you’ll reap what you sow in terms of sharing and commenting.

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