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.
Guest posting is always a great experience. You get to meet the owner of the blog better, you write on his blog which is something totally interesting, you get to be “listened” by his listeners, you express your opinion and you see the reactions. Guest blogging is a great method of creating your image in the blog World, you can make friends easy, you can achieve experience fast and also have fun while doing something helpful to you. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Liorl
You are definitely sharing some nice tips with us.A potential blogger always takes necessary steps while guest blogging on different blogs.i agree with you on the point that a site fluctuates on the basis of PR. choosing a blog site should be well thought.
All of those are valid however for me, I usually place an extra emphasis on how they treat the guest post itself. Most bloggers don’t even care that much about your guest post and oftentimes, they don’t even promote it as much as they used to with their own entries.
Its also important for me to have my guest entry have sufficient time to get exposure. Some bloggers publish too many posts a day and because of that the guest posts doesn’t maximize the traffic.
thanks for this, really inspiring…….we should consider guest posts, i can see the advantages!! need to put my thinking cap on and do some planning
Thanks, this gives me a lot to think about. I’ve been looking into guest blogging a little here and there but, like you said, I would like to optimize as much as possible when I do. Great article.
Guest posting can be very beneficial to any blog because it can lead to lots of exposure as well as it is a great legitimate SEO strategy. However, it can be difficult finding guest posters who deliver quality and relevant articles.
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. Most bloggers don’t even care that much about your guest post and oftentimes, they don’t even promote it as much as they used to with their own entries.
After reading this, I’ve now got in my mind to go find a good blog that has many readers who love to eat pizza, love top ten lists and who treat guest bloggers well. That will be a search indeed.
If I can’t find that, I’ll try to find a blog about blogging or social media and talk about my adventures in making my site better using social media or SEO techniques.
I never thought about the details on how a guest blogger is treated until reading this. What % of blogs would you say treat guest bloggers well. I have seen quite a few who have little blurbs about the writer and then there are others who even include two links in the author bio.
guest blogging is a very useful way of generating traffic, but its also important where we guest post like you say. I think the most important point here is “traffic potential” to see the possibility of how much visitors we can get from a certain post and we should post interesting topic
A lot of blogs these days have started offering guest blogging opportunities. Its becoming tough to choose. While the wide choice is good, it has its flip sides too. For example, some new blogs, for want of traffic, may be liberal on content quality in which case repetitive topics may find their way, in which case the only beneficiary is the blogger and the guest blogger, not the reader. Hence, not only is it important to choose a guest blog wisely, the converse is true as well. The host blogger should choose their guests wisely too…