The Fine Art Of Creating a Guest Posting Strategy
When was the last time you created a guest posting strategy? How carefully do you choose the host sites for your content?
Guest blogging (content placement) is one of my favorite ways to build good links, expand a company’s reach, build authority, and bring more traffic to a site.
Guest posts can also be a smart alternative to paid links — many believe the links acquired through guest posting are worth more because they’re located in the content, rather than in a sidebar, or list of links. They’re less likely to disappear; they have a one-time cost, and give you the most bang for your buck.
If you want all this, however, you can’t just drop guest posts on the first site you come across. You have to choose the destination sites very carefully.
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Find Authority Sites To Guest Post On
Social Media Today recently published a list of the 10 Places To Find Blogs To Guest Post On. In it, the author listed several places that maintain collections of authority sites. This is excellent advice. It works well, but you can’t rely on this alone.
First, use search to find the ones the lists above have missed. Advanced search queries are a powerful way to find good guest posting opportunities.
You can find out more about advanced search queries here:
- Google Search Basics — Google’s Web Search Help
- Link Building Search Queries Collection — Search Engine Journal
- 21 Link Builders Share Advanced Link Building Queries — Search Engine Land
- Long List of Link Searches — SEOmoz
- Link Building Tools and Content-Based Link Opportunity Analysis– Ontolo
- Link Search Tool — Solo SEO
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Sort the Great Guest Posting Opportunities From the Good Ones
Finding the best places to guest post involves more than just locating authority sites on a related topic. In fact, if you focus purely on the link value of guest blogging, you’re missing out on the real SEO and marketing value this tactic can generate.
You need to find a spot to guest post that matches your goals and attracts your specific target audience. It should reflect the skills or strengths of your business, and open the door to future opportunities.
Being a copywriter, you’d think I’d post mostly on copywriting sites. This isn’t true. Instead, you’ll find I frequent SEO, social media, and Internet marketing sites, as well as various industry-specific sites. Why?
While there are plenty of authority sites in the copywriting industry, these sites have very little value for me:
- I’m rarely hired by other copywriters.
- My customers don’t read sites focused on copywriters.
- My business and I are painted into a corner. If I only post on copywriting sites, I’m perceived as being strictly a good writer. And while I do have excellent copywriting skills, I’m much more than that. To be a great copywriter, you need to know about more than just spelling and grammar. In reality, copywriting online involves SEO, social media, conversion optimization, branding, business, marketing, usability, buyer behavior, and much more.
- There’s no opportunity for growth, if I stay in the copywriting niche.
- I have more competition within the industry. This isn’t to say other copywriters disappear once you leave the industry, but unless you’re willing to get out there and stand out, you’ll blend in.
When I guest post, I focus on helping others see the value in quality copywriting and how to use it to their advantage. I help others understand how to integrate content into their businesses and websites, how to create winning content strategies, and how to achieve and surpass their goals because that’s what my products and services do.
In return, my guest posts have earned award nominations, become a recommended resource for governments and university professors, generated clients, and opened the door to opportunities I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. This is all in addition to the buzz, traffic, and additional links the practice initially created. This would have been much more difficult to accomplish if I had stayed on my own blog.
I would say these benefits are worth the time invested in choosing guest post destinations, and far more valuable than a $2,000 paid link. Don’t you think?
You can and should do the same with your guest posting strategy. To get started:
- Make a list of authority blogs and content-based sites.
- Study their style, direction and audience.
- Make connections with the site owners.
- Craft and publish your content.
That’s it!
Do you have a guest posting strategy?
October 7, 2010 at 10:02 am | Marketing | 2 comments
I am just now starting to think about scratching the surface on guest posting. I have plenty of experience with Article MArketing but I do believe guest posting is so much more valuable!
Interesting that you’d think article marketing is more important when most of the links you generate are lessened in strength because of a duplicate content filter. Also, the links are located on pages with tons of other links, and as you know, the more links on a page, the less ‘power’ each of those links have. There’s very little user value associated with article marketing, not to mention the negative impact it can have on your business brand, if done properly. Finally, if you only ever use one method to build links, it leaves your site vulnerable if and when Google and other search engines make changes to their algorythm. While it’s ok to use article marketing, I’d never once suggest it as a primary link building source.