It is urgent to correct this situation. More guest posting allows you to solve several of your needs at once. This long article tells you everything you need to know before, during, and after creating publications for guest posting.
Guest Posting Definition
So, since the purpose of this article is to guide you along the path of creating the most effective articles for guest posting, it would be wise to start with a definition. A guest post is an article that you post on a third-party resource. Here you can ask a logical question – why can’t I limit myself to articles on my blog and not add work on creating articles for guest posting? Everything would seem logical; however, this time-consuming but effective promotion method has some more, not apparent, advantages, which we will discuss in the following paragraphs.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Guest Posting
Guest posting solves several problems at once at the same time (in more detail, we talk about this later).
It is a long-term investment. By creating high-quality material for guest posting once (especially if it is always ever content, for example), you get the opportunity to continually attract new subscribers from a third-party platform to your website. It is effective in terms of building trust. When users see the mention of a website or brand on a platform that they use constantly and that they trust, it is automatically perceived as a recommendation worthy of attention. You will have to work hard to create enough quality material. Publications on the most popular sites are quite expensive. The creators of the most popular websites are very careful about the choice of articles to be published. The website editors have their own subjective opinion about what content suits them and their visitors. You must go through their publishing guidelines.
Why Do You Need Guest Posting?
Here are a few fundamentally important reasons.
Backlinks
Backlinks are the most primary goal that site owners pursue when deciding to create materials for guest posts. As you know, when evaluating the reliability and usefulness of a site, Google takes into account many indicators, the descriptions of which would be enough for several more separate articles. This is the usefulness of the content, which is evaluated through behavioral factors, keywords that search engines find on pages, their relevance to user queries, and backlinks. Backlinks indicate that your resource contains useful information, so users share it voluntarily. Guest posting is, in a sense, an artificial way to create a backlink, but Google has nothing against it since this is just a site indexing mechanism and not an in-depth verification of the source of the link. Therefore, guest posting is the first and one of the most reliable and correct ways to collect link mass to improve the site’s position in Google.
Target Audience Expansion
Each platform has its well-established target audience, which visits the site on an ongoing basis. If you choose a platform for placing your article correctly (we will discuss this a bit later), this automatically means the ability to capture another part of the target audience. Your article, and therefore your product or service, can be potentially useful. For you, this means additional traffic to the site, plus the ability to turn interested visitors into qualitative leads.
Brand Awareness Improvement
Yes, and that is also true. When a certain segment of Internet users, from time to time, sees the mention of your site or brand in the articles that it reads, this information is stored at a subconscious level. Thus, your site becomes more recognizable among competitors, even though users learned about it using a third-party resource and did not directly get to your site.
New Orders
We have already said a few words about the ability to turn visitors who came after reading a guest post from random users into qualitative leads. If you use lead generation methods on your sites, such as lead magnets or subscription forms, then this is a way for you to expand your contact list using data from people who may be interested in your proposal. As a result, you can receive new orders, but here, of course, you will need to build further communication with new subscribers.
How to Find Guest Posting Sites?
Here is the most important thing you need to find guest posting websites to post the article. Your target audience and the target audience of a third-party site must have common ground. Otherwise, your post simply will not find a response and will not make sense, well, except for getting a backlink. Therefore, it is certainly better to kill several birds with one stone at once.
Three Types of Platforms You May Face. Also, those websites that you find yourself can have different levels of popularity among users. With all these subtleties taking into account, it is very important to choose the site correctly. Of course, you can ask Google to show you the results for “best sites for guest posts,” but most likely you will get the most popular results (which in this case means a high editorial fee, and you won’t get guarantees that your target audiences have common interests. Therefore, it is better to use a special service to select the most suitable service for publication. A few examples are:
How to Negotiate the Editorial Fee?
In principle, we have already touched a little on editorial fees in the previous paragraph. Here, let’s discuss some more subtleties.
So, it makes no sense to bargain with websites with a high level of popularity among users. They still have a queue of people who want to publish an article, so someone else will pay if you do not pay them as much as they want. To publish on the site from the middle segment, you will need to create very high-quality material, carefully following all the website requirements. And also convince the editor that this is just the thing that will be interesting to their users. As for the newly created and yet unknown sites, they will gladly accept your articles for free. Maximum – they will ask you to mention their site on your website or profile on a social network.
The final choice is yours. By paying the editorial fees for publication on a popular site, you get a guarantee that the target audience will read it. In the two remaining cases, the coverage will be significantly less. However, you will get backlinks by investing only your work and time in writing the material. Next, we will tell you how to create cool articles for guest posts to accept any sites from the first submission gladly.
How to Write A Guest Post?
So, as you already understood, high-quality, interesting, well-researched, and beautifully written material is the guarantee that your article will be accepted as a guest. Next, we talk about how to write a guest blog post such a result.
Make A Target Audience Analysis
It all starts as usual. Any marketing move (and guest posting is also marketing to some extent) begins with analyzing the target audience. Even if it seems that you know everything about the audience, analysis is still necessary. Only in this case, you need to analyze not your target audience but the target audience of the site you want to publish. How to do it? It is very simple. Look at the latest (and best at all, if physically possible) publications on the site, and determine what problems these materials are intended to solve. Based on the problem, you can draw portraits of people who could potentially encounter this and make rough assumptions about how the material you plan to create can help them cope with their needs at the moment. For example, if you sell organic food, then you can publish an article on a fitness blog and thereby help the audience pay attention to your products, their health benefits, and the potential for consumption in the process of losing weight.
Perform Trend Analysis
As with creating any content, it does not make sense to write something if the topic is unpopular and does not find a response among the audience. The main rule is to write what will be read. It is better to put those ideas that users will not read immediately. Therefore, before creating a publication, it is necessary to analyze trends. The most obvious is to go into Google Trends and write a few keywords. The most unobvious but more effective is to look at what is currently being discussed, for example, on Reddit or Quora, and analyze what questions users are asking. Based on these questions, you can understand where there is a gap in the content and fill it. Hint! After publishing your article on a third-party resource, go directly to Reddit, Quora, and leave links to your publication and your website under relevant questions. And do it not in the form of a bare link, but in the form of a short but informative answer, plus a link with the invitation to find out more.
Choose A Topic
When the main problem has been identified, and you have an approximate portrait of the target audience of a third-party website, it is now necessary to choose a topic. Most likely, you already understand which request will be most relevant and what you can advise solving the target audience’s problem. You just have to formulate the topic so that every visitor who visits a third-party site wants to click on your article and read it. Use two breakthrough tools for this. The first of these is the Blog Posts Topic Generator developed by Hubspot. This tool allows you to get several options at once based on several keywords that you must enter in the appropriate lines. It’s better to use the paid version because, in this case, it will turn on the smartest algorithms, and you will get really non-standard but potentially interesting topics. Now you need to check whether your topic’s wording is attractive in terms of perception and convenience for SEO promotion. To do this, you can use the Headline Analyzer, which will evaluate the headline’s attractiveness according to a scale and show the result.
Collect Research Material
If you remember when you were a student, now is the best time to imagine that you should write an academic paper again. No, they don’t give grades here, and they will not kick you out of college, but it’s still necessary to collect relevant scientific data for your article. Returning to our example, if you write about a healthy lifestyle, it will be appropriate to collect all possible statistics, rely on the latest research (not from competitive blogs, but primary sources), and systematize the data obtained. At their drowning, you can develop a strong thesis statement. Yes, imagine today is the day that this skill acquired in college is useful to you. Blog posts should contain the same strong thesis statement as academic papers since this is the skeleton of all your material and the starting point for further discussion.
Write An Article
It is also possible to devote several separate articles to this point, but we will try to dwell on the most important and consider the features of guest posting at the same time. Be sure to study the requirements of the sites for the articles that they accept. Typically, these requirements will contain the optimal text size and SEO requirements, including requirements for meta tags, graphics, and ways to include links to your project. Start by making a preliminary plan. If you have carefully worked out scientific material and developed a strong thesis statement, your plan will include an introduction, a thesis, argumentation according to science, and a conclusion. Then you just write the text. Write as you intuitively feel correct. Since your website’s target audience and the target audience of a third-party resource coincide at least partially, you should already understand what style you should follow to be understood correctly.
Include A Link to Your Project
So, the most important thing about this all is to include a link to your project. Your link mustn’t be perceived as advertising but as valuable advice and as a way to solve the urgent problem of users. Here are three basic ways to do this. Article body You need to find the most appropriate paragraph or sentence to include a link to your project so that it does not look promotional. To do this, you can create a list of sites or services and put your brand in it, or you can give an example with a link to your project. The main thing is a minimal obsession. Author Bio Bio is a short story about you as the author of the article. Your task is to create an attractive and trustworthy biography that would speak about you as an expert in a particular industry. It indicates that you are the creator of a specific project and describe its mission. CTA And here, you need to be careful. It is difficult to create a working call to action, and it is even more difficult to add a link so that it does not sound like an advertisement. Therefore, by completing your article with a call to action, you can stimulate users to either learn more on your site or sign up for your newsletter to get something for free. Important! It is possible to include your link twice, for example, in the text and the bio, but do not do it three times. Otherwise, you will ruin the veiled effect, and users will immediately understand that you wrote this article to sell them a product or service. And most likely, they will not like it because intrusive advertising has annoyed everyone for a long time.
Check Grammatical Errors
The effect of an expert and non-ad article will be corrupted if your material contains explicit grammatical errors. Therefore, use Grammarly to avoid typos, extra spaces, and missing commas. After that, re-read your article yourself, and then return to it after a few days with a fresh look. If, in a few days, you will fix something again, then upload the article to Grammarly again, well, or activate the plugin and do not turn it off. Hint! When you use a program rather than an automatic plugin, you get more tips on how to improve your text, even if you did not buy the premium version.
Check Uniqueness
Checking uniqueness is the final touch. Although if you wrote your article yourself, this is nothing more than an extra precaution. Sometimes verification systems catch popular phrases or stable expressions, but if their number is small in your text, this is not a bad sign. And even if the anti-plagiarism shows a large number of such phrases, for example, “create a website.” However, your article is really useful for users. Then the behavioral factors will still outweigh.
Analyze Performance
After your article is published, it is necessary to understand how effective this material is in attracting users to your resource. To do this, it’s enough to connect the analytics system to your site if you still haven’t done it, and just keep track of the sources of incoming traffic. It is also necessary to track and respond to comments. Since comments will appear on a third-party resource, you will have to do it manually from time to time, tracking user activity under the publication and unobtrusively encouraging them to visit your site.
Translation
Here are some more ways to take more advantage of guest posting. Surely your regular users will also want to familiarize themselves with your material. Therefore, announce the article
on your blog on social networks with the help of instant messengers and allow reading the article in different languages.
Here we will make a small remark. If the third-party resource is multilingual, it will be very effective to translate your article using a specialized service. So you get even more opportunities to expand your target audience and attract them to the site. If your site is also multilingual at the same time, then this is just a mega win-win option.
Conclusion
Thus, guest posting is relatively not difficult but unequivocally effective. The most important thing is to create high-quality material and hit the target with a platform for publication. We have already told you about all this, so you can start acting right now.
