This is a guest post by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a company that offers conversion services in psd to xhtml. Lior also consults for an international company that specializes in Targeted Cancer Therapies.
As almost any blogger knows, guest posting can be one of the most valuable tools for promoting your site and building your brand. It can help you reach new audiences, build valuable inbound links and expand your presence online.
However, guest blogging, if done right, takes a fair amount of time and not every guest blogging opportunity is created equal.
Though sites such as MyBlogGuest and Blogger LinkUp are filled with blogs waiting for your guest posts, this doesn’t mean you should jump on every potential opportunity. Instead, you should take your time to find guest posting opportunities that are right for you and can maximize the benefit you get for your time.
Here are a few of the factors to consider:
Traffic Potential
The SEO benefit in a particular link will likely fluctuate over time. A PR 5 site can be downgraded to a 2 overnight, but a PR 1 can grow into 6 very quickly. Instead, it’s better to look at the potential traffic you can get from a link, in particular the latent traffic that will come daily from the link weeks, months even years after the post is live.
A steady stream of visitors from a guest post can and will mean far more than even a high-quality SEO link in the long run, especially as Google’s shifting landscape may wipe out any gains.
Check and see if the site has a good built-in audience and if that audience seems to be growing, holding steady or shrinking.
Quality of Content
Look at the other content on the site, how good is it? You would rather be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with great writers and thinkers than just another voice in a sea of garbage content.
Sharing screen real estate with respected bloggers and authors can greatly boost your brand, reputation and presence online. Appearing on a low-quality site may actually hurt you by making your inbound link appear spammy.
Relevancy
Would readers of that site likely be interested in yours? If not, then they aren’t likely to click and your link’s appearance on their site may not have much SEO benefit.
You need to make sure that your site is a good fit with theirs and that cooperation between the two of you makes sense. This means ensuring that your websites aren’t competing but that the audiences have similar interests so that readers might wish to follow both.
This also helps sets the stage for other cross-promotional activities and possibly working together in other ways in the future.
How They Treat Guest Bloggers
Finally, how does the site treat its other guest bloggers? Does it take the content and just post a tiny author box at the bottom or does it work tirelessly to promote and generate interest in guest blogger content?
A small or medium-sized site that pushes and promotes guest bloggers vigorously can be much more valuable than a large one that buries their posts and hides their attribution.
If the site treats its guest bloggers well, you will most likely find that the time spent writing the guest post is very worthwhile.
Winding Up
All in all, it’s important to remember that the end goal of any guest blogging effort is to get more well-targeted traffic for your site. While guest posting is definitely a win-win that helps both the host site and the guest, as the one doing the writing, you need to make sure your benefit is maximized.
However, that benefit comes from a variety of sources including direct traffic, SEO and brand awareness. It’s not as simple as finding the highest PageRank or the best-trafficked site you can write for.
It’s important to weigh all the factors carefully and decide which opportunities offer the greatest overall benefit, and not just trying to find the site with the biggest numbers.
Hey Liorl,
Google keeps changing its crawling algorithms and many of SEO techniques have gone kind of obselete because of this. Guest Blogging has seriously turned out to be one of the best way to increase traffic.
Thanks!!
These are certainly good tips. You really have to look both ways–the potential reach of the site you’re posting and your own capability to add value to that site as well. Like, you have to think what else can you offer that will can generate traffic for both that site and of course to your own. These days, everyone has a say in everything…just remember to make your post as personal as possible to surely make it different, but make it relevant of course.
I agree that you need to consider traffic potential more than just PR. I also will guest post on blogs with no follow status if the traffic potential is there. Plus you need to mix in no follow links in to you backlinking stratagy.
Every potential opportunity should be studied and weighed for the relevance to your own site. The problem is when your interests are so diverse that you tend to forget you are also promoting your blog. Sometimes you can get carried away when the post is more to your passion as a writer than the business you do. Women, I think, are more prone to this than men.
I agree with you that its must to think firstly that how much more new readers and customers you will get by writing on specific post. that is must to consider while writing guest post for any blog.
Without the right kind of approach, guest blogging won’t bring you results that you actually expect. Apart from knowing what ‘guest blogging is’, you should also know ‘what it’s not’.
Guest blogging is not like article submission where you can crank out posts one after another without caring a dime about the quality. If you do it wrong, you can easily ruin the reputation of your brand or business.
Thanks for these tips, Lior!
I’ve seen many people having great success with guest blogging, and i intend to start making use of this strategy by the next month. However, as you said, it all comes down to the audience and blogs you’re targeting. Thanks
M Mark
I never used guest posting as a tool for traffic building. But I have seen a lot of bloggers doing this to make traffic, and their blogs are receiving a huge traffic and good traffic ranks.
So I think this is the time to start Guest posting. Thanks for the great post.
Great post, i agree that guest posting is a great idea, the only problem is that most blogs are having a “no follow” it will help to get more authority for your site, but no “link juice” i really believe in writing a guest post, and not publish the whole part, but just some content, and if readers want to read the whole post, they should go to your site…
Nice article, Lior. Very helpful information, thank you for taking the time to share with us all. Guest blogging has been both beneficial and detrimental to my website but it is also difficult sometimes to find the best writer for the job at hand considering I am in the legal industry. I am too busy to write enough for myself and finding somebody that can write from the legal perspective and that has and education to be able to do so is sometimes difficult. Are there any good resources you can recommend for finding writers like this?