Article Submission Review

Guest Posting To Expand Site Traffic (With an SEO Twist)

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When it comes to getting traffic to your site, we tend to focus on SEO tactics – that’s our bread and butter. However, there are many ways that you can bring in traffic besides SEO and you should continue to expand your comfort zone and branch out into some of the others. Writing guest posts for related blogs in your niche can be a very good way to get this ball rolling – see my guest post today on DailyBlogTips.com. But before we talk about that, let’s look at a few of the other ways you could branch out and get more traffic.

I’m not going to go into deep detail here because many of these are not our area of expertise and we’re not going to BS you into thinking that we do it all. On the contrary, we firmly believe that trying to “do it all” will lead to failure. We are SEO specialists and that takes a lot of time as it is. We simply can’t be specialists if every form of traffic generation and neither can you. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of other traffic strategies or outsource the efforts. For example, even guest posting could be outsourced (to someone like ArticlesOnTap.com for example – LOL – sorry, couldn’t resist the personal plug there).

Additional Traffic Strategies

Briefly here are some other strategies that you could/should also look into.

• PPC or Adwords – This is probably the most common so I’ve added it to the top of our list. We’ve not done a lot with it because in our particular niche competition is fierce and pricing is through the roof. Unfortunately that is true in many niches nowadays and PPC in general can be a very costly strategy – especially if you’re not a specialist. If you’re gonna go this route we suggest you find someone trustworthy to outsource it to otherwise you’re likely to spend way too much. We have used and recommend you use PPC in small doses such as we mention in our blog post Use Adwords and PPC to Boost Your SEO Results.
• Paid Advertising – This is probably one of the best approaches. Though again it can be costly, if you target the right sites that are highly related to your niche you can generally get some good quality traffic coming in.
• PPV (Pay Per View) – This is more than likely not a great source of traffic for small business sites. PPV is more commonly used in the Internet Marketing niches or to CPA (cost per action) offers, etc… This can, however, be highly targeted traffic and may warrant some investigation on your part.

Now, obviously that is not an exhaustive list, but just a couple of additional traffic getting strategies that may make sense for you. What we really want to focus on today, however, is guest posting.

What is Guest Posting?

Guest posting is just a way of expanding your exposure and participating in the “community” that is the Internet. No matter what niche you are in, there are likely dozens or more blogs in that niche. Bloggers make their money by providing interesting, related and timely information related to their niche and bringing traffic into their site which they monetize via advertising. So guest posting is the practice of contacting related blogs in your niche and offering to write some free content for their site in exchange for being able to drop a link or two back to your site.

This can be an effective source of traffic in time because you are leaving “hooks” out there in various other sites that link back to your site. You are also participating in the bigger picture – the vast Internet community – and this is something that is kind of a karma thing. The more you give, the more the community tends to give back. Guest blogging, however, like any strategy can be done or done right – so pay attention.

Understanding the Guest Posting Approach

When you use guest postings you have to understand that this is a give-take relationship. The blog owners know that you are going to take away some traffic and they’re okay with that as long as you follow the rules (both spoken and unspoken). So why do blog owners agree to guest posts? The fact is that it is a service to their readers and helps them as well.

Blogging takes a lot of time. Most bloggers will have a minimum of one post per day that they publish on their site and many do two or three posts a day. So having guest posts allows them to fill in some of that writing volume and ease their burden a bit. But most bloggers love to write, so there is generally another reason that is more important – their readers. You see, by involving a rich set of quality guest posts they get a lot of different opinions and perspectives and that helps keep their readers engaged by giving them fresh viewpoints and different writing styles to digest. Variety is the spice of life and guest posts add that variety to a blog.

So make sure you play the game the way it’s intended to be played and you’ll have a very high acceptance rate when you solicit guest posting opportunities. If you don’t follow these guidelines, however, you’ll likely come to the false conclusion that guest posts just don’t work or are too much trouble.

Following Directions

The first thing that you have to be aware of are the requirements for guest posts on the site that you are posting. They may or may not mention guest posting on their site, so you may just need to contact them via their Contact Us on the site. However, if they do have established guest posting procedures on their site, make sure and follow them. For some odd reason everyone seems to think they are the ONLY ONE those rules don’t apply to – trust me, they mean you as well. And if you don’t follow their guidelines you can be assured your post will likely be rejected.

Tips for Effective Guest Posting

If you want to make sure nearly all of your posts get accepted (I have about a 95% acceptance rate on my guest post offerings) then follow this set of simple guidelines and you’ll likely be just as effective.

• Write It Yourself – Now if you’re not a writer and you need to outsource that’s okay, but you need to really make sure that the post is high quality. You’re putting your public face and image behind this content, so you want it to be quality and to attract readership. Always treat each guest post as if you were writing for your own blog – engaging and high quality content.
• Enhance The Blog You’re Writing For – Remember your goal – to get the post accepted. Don’t write a post first and then determine where you’re going to “shop it” to get it approved – that strategy is a recipe for failure. Instead, spend some time researching the blog you are submitting your guest post to and find a related subject or topic that you can provide good content to them on that they don’t already have on their site. You’ll only know this if you spend some time researching their site. Furthermore, when you choose your topic, make sure to find at least one, preferably two, other posts on their site already that are related that you can mention in your post.
  This does a couple of things. For one it shows the blog owner that you’ve done some research and are trying to contribute added value to his site and secondly it shows that you understand blogging. You see, he wants people to stay on his site and click those links that take people to other posts on his site. Added time on site, added average pageviews per visitor, etc… Following this one tip shows that ‘you get it’.
• Submit Your Post With Your Contact Email – We you contact the blog offering to do a guest post, include your guest post in the first email. Don’t waste the bloggers time. If you don’t include your post, you’ll likely not even get a response. Furthermore, I recommend that you treat your email to the site owner as a mini resume of your experience and drop a couple of links to some of your best blog posts so that he can quickly and easily “check you out”. I always tell them a bit about the site I am using in my about the author box as well and a bit of the philosophy of the site, etc… Not too much here, just a quick couple of paragraphs and then include your guest post. Make sure and point out that you researched the post specifically for their site and have no intention of offering it to anyone else as a guest post. Also make sure to mention that you’ve included a couple of links to other related content on their site in the post.

If you follow those three guidelines above I am sure that you will have a very high acceptance rate as we do. It really comes down to respect. If you want to get a slice of this blogs traffic, then you need to show that you respect them and want to enhance their blog as well. As always, give to get – it makes the world go around.

Finding Blogs To Submit To

You want to find top blogs that are related to your niche – either directly or indirectly. Remember the point of all of this is to increase your branding as well as the exposure of your blog. You want to draw in more visitors and so you should be very specific about the blogs you target. The more related they are to your blog the better of an impact your post will have.

You can simply do a google search for “blogs on YOUR NICHE” or “YOUR NICHE blog”. You can also go to Technorati.com and search them for top blogs in your niche. Now once you find a blog, how do you determine if you should submit content to it? Well, the first thing you want to look at is just the impression that the blog gives you. Is it a quality site? Or is it something that you would be embarrassed to have your name behind? Because there is an implied endorsement of this blog if you submit your content to them.

What I generally suggest is that you “look up”. By that I mean, submit to blogs that are bigger and more influential than your own site in terms of traffic, page rank, Alexa rating, etc… If you have a PR5 site with 25k links and an Alexa rating of 8,500 well, submitting guest posts to blogs that are PR1 with 2k links and Alexa ratings of 353,000 just really doesn’t make much sense. Generally you’re looking to “step up” and grow your site and you should do that by seeking the implied endorsement that a guest post implies from larger and more authoritative sites than your own.

Plan of Attack

Okay, so now you know what to do and how to do it – the rest is on you. Easy enough to say, right? But seriously, with the information in this post, you’ve got lots of ammo that you can use to get yourself lots of guest blogging posts out there. What we recommend do is to be efficient at this. Do all of your research in one sitting and come up with a list of 50 or so blogs that would be good candidates for you to submit your guest post to. Now that you have this list, just do one or two submissions a week and work your way through the list over time. This is the most time effective strategy because you don’t keep wasting time researching “where” to submit your post. The fact is, that list won’t vary very much anyway.

One Last Strategy – Continually Revise Your Blogging Resume

Don’t forget that as you get published on other blogs, make sure to drop those links into your initial contact email as examples of your work. If the current blogger you are offering a guest post sees that you have already been published on several top quality related blogs, you’re almost guaranteed to be quickly approved (as long as you follow the guidelines listed above).

What If My Post is Rejected?

First of all, don’t take it personally. Some bloggers go through phases where they accept a high percentage of guest posts and then at other times they simply don’t. It doesn’t mean that your post sucked or that you’re not a good writer – they just didn’t have a need for it at the time. Just thank them for their consideration and inform them that you will be revising the post for publication on your own blog as they are not going to be using it and add them to a follow up list. Then in about a month or two, come back and submit them a new fresh blog post and give it a shot again.

It’s important to note, that if a post is rejected, you’ve not really wasted that time or writing effort. You can either choose to submit it to another site, use it for SEO distribution or post it on your own site. Personally I don’t recommend you submit it to another blog. The reason is that the original blogger may see that and conclude you were just shopping it around anyway. Besides, if you followed my advice above, the content will likely be optimized for the original site. What I would recommend is that you go ahead and publish it on your site and leave one of the links pointing to the original blog intact. Yep. Give the guy who rejected you a link. I know it sounds odd, but it does a couple of things for you.

For one, it gives you involvement in the community by linking out to another site and Google is paying more and more attention to that (so take note all of you PR hoarders out there – you need to link out). But secondly it shows a spirit of respect and gratitude to the original blog and that can go a long way towards getting your second submission accepted. It also affords you the opportunity to shoot them an email (after you publish it) and say, “Hey, I know you didn’t feel this article was a good fit for your blog, but I just wanted to let you know it’s live here (give the link) on my blog and I even left the link intact to your blog. Maybe in the future my next submission might be a better fit for you”. Using that strategy you are much more likely to get your second submission approved. The best bet would be to include a new post with your email about the first one so that you can perhaps get your second try approved right then and there.

Getting Some SEO Benefit From Your Guest Post

Now, after you’ve implemented all of the above and have a few guest posts out there, do yourself a favor and consider the SEO benefits of those links (whether DoFollow or NoFollow – it doesn’t matter). These links will be from high authority sites and will be great links to have pointing at your site. So, let’s ramp it up and make it better! Give them some link love and start linkbuilding for those posts on the guest blog site. Let’s say, for example, that you were able to get a guest post on a PR5 or PR6 blog – that’s a great link to have. Now by building links to it, over time, you can easily build that page up to a PR3 or maybe even higher and that will be a permanent high PR link from a high authority site – great stuff… So you can see that you can take these guest posts and use them to create a circle of trust and high authority incoming links as well as bring some referral traffic. As Depeche Mode says, “everything counts in small amounts” and really that is the essence of SEO. Taking consistent small steps forward.

Summary

Well, that about wraps it up. Guest blogging is not the best way to build long term traffic, but it certainly does help and can be a very useful tool. Like anything it takes some effort and a little practice and definitely some time and patience to be effective, but give it a shot – you may be very pleased by the results.

 

Tags: getting exposure with guest posts, guest blogging, seo benefits of guest posts, using guest posts wisely