Guest posting has become one of the best Search Engine Optimization practices for websites, from small blogs to large corporations’ sites. A massive challenge for an online business is getting your messages heard by your potential customer in a noisy and competitive online space. Having a solid social media strategy will always be beneficial, but it can take a while to see the fruits of your labor whilst you build up a following and compete with algorithms. This is where guest posting can come in. Below you’ll learn what guest posting is and how it can help your bottom line:
First let’s answer the question: “What is Guest Posting?”
Guest blogging also called “guest posting” is the act of writing content for another company’s website. Generally, guest bloggers write for similar blogs within their industry in order to: Attract traffic back to their website.
It may seem counterproductive to spend time writing articles for other sites (that may be considered competitors) when you could be using that time to create content for your own site. But the opportunities that guest posting can offer you are significant for your SEO and sales goals. Here are some of the things that guest posting can do for your search engine optimisation and website performance in general.
Introduce you to a new crowd
Writing blog posts for other sites allows you to get exposure to their audience, thus raising your brand awareness to potential prospects who may be unfamiliar with your brand. A percentage of them will follow links back to your site or Google you after connecting with your message.
Increase Your Brand Trust
If you provide quality content, people will come back for more. It’s really as simple as that. Building authority in your industry goes hand in hand with building customer trust. Guest posting on other related sites allows you to display your depth of knowledge in your field. By appearing on someone else’s site, you are effectively being given their trust as an ‘expert’ and will be trusted because of this.
Help You Generate More Site Visits
A website without traffic cannot be profitable and is not generating value for your company. When your article goes live on another site, it can provide you with months or even years of free traffic, obviously, this depends on the popularity of the site that it’s posted on and how helpful your post is – but if you build up a catalogue of guest posts on related sites these will continue to generate traffic for you for years to come!
Generate Free Backlinks
One last advantage of guest posting is that it will generally generate a backlink to your website. Backlinks are a major factor in SEO ranking so you should try to generate backlinks at every opportunity. Why? Because backlinks are the foundation and backbone of SEO, generally the more high-quality links a website has pointing to it, the higher Google will place it in their search results.
How do you find Guest Posting Opportunities?
The first step is to find blogs that are active in your niche or industry. They must also have an audience that’ll be interested in what you’ve got to say. In an ideal world you’ll also want to find a blog that has loads of interaction and social shares because this will further increase the reach and generate more impact from your work!
Starting with a google search is the best place to start when looking for potential sites to share your work. You could try searches like:
keyword “submit a guest post”
keyword “guest post”
keyword “guest post by”
keyword “guest post guidelines”
Replace ‘keyword’ with actual keywords for your industry or niche, i.e. ‘Personal trainer submit guest post’. This will return pages where you can submit or at least discuss the possibility of a guest post with the site owners.
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