Guest Post 101 : A Guide to Promoting Your Website

 

What is a Guest Post?

Building and promoting your website is no easy feat, which is why you need to learn how to Guest Post. What is it you might ask? Well, as the name suggests, it is a post, either an article or a blog, that you write to be featured on someone else's website. 

Benefits of a Guest Post

Writing a guest post has several perks for your business. Not only are you promoting your content or reaching a wider audience, but also establishing relationships with other blog owners.

These relationships are quite beneficial when guest posting goes back and forth between you and other bloggers because you get to add fresh and high-quality content to your website.

In doing so, you are satisfying your audiences’ appetite with this new content, and consequently increasing your google ranking and domain authority.

Guest Post Guidelines

 

Writing a guest post is not only about the writing itself; quality research beforehand is quite vital as well. It is crucial to find the right blog to guest post for. As you may know, many spam blogs are running amok the internet and it is for your own website’s benefit to avoid being featured on them.

It is advised when searching for a blog to guest post on, to look out for their active followers and check whether they share their blogs on Twitter or Instagram. Not to mention of course, both your blogs/websites should share relevant content and interests, so your guest post won’t seem alien to their audiences.

Do not forget to keep your headlines short, relevant, and clear, the last thing you would want is for your audiences to be victims of clickbait, or your bounce rate will increase and your traffic will decrease.

To Link or Not to Link?

Some parts of the internet have abused guest posting by spamming blogs with links to force-feed audiences on their websites. You definitely do not want to get caught up in that fiasco or be thought of as a spammer.

Remember that your guest post writing is aimed at new audiences, so it is recommended you limit your links to one or two, depending on how useful and relevant they are to the guest post and the audiences’ needs.

If you do include links in your guest post, make you also reference other websites to show your audiences you have done your research.

Is Guest Posting Safe in SEO?
 

 

Some might have you believe that guest posting is dead due to the tremendous spam content on the internet and some comments from Google back in 2014. Experts however say otherwise.

Charbel Coorey, Digital Marketing Specialist, explains:

“Guest blogging remains a viable SEO strategy; however, it requires proper strategic planning, as cheap/spammy link building can actually harm SEO.

In 2014, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Webspam, wrote on his blog that guest blogging for the sole purpose of generating mass backlinks will result in Google’s algorithm penalizing your site. This remains the case today. In this context, successful guest blogging means providing readers with value.” (Source: upcity.com)

Find Your Guest Post Site

Finding the right website or blog to guest post on, as we mentioned earlier is a key factor. One of the simplest ways to search for such websites is to google your keywords, regarding your topics, and adding the following: 

• + “guest blog”/”guest post”
• + “write for us”
• + “submit an article”/”submit a guest post”
• + “contribute guest post”
• + “contribute to our blog”
• + “become a guest blogger”
• + “guest blogging guidelines”
• + “contributor guidelines”
• + “send a tip”
• + “guest post by”
• + “guest author”

You can also find websites to guest post on using online tools such as Find Similar Sites, and the Audience Overlap Tool. As their names suggest, they will help you in finding websites with similar audiences or content as yours. (source: Forbes.com) 

A Few Things to Remember

• Interact with your website/blog followers, to make your persona feel more alive.
• Aim for better or more popular websites than your own, a good feature on their website will increase your SEO ranking and improve your website’s credibility.
• Write for the sake of writing, you do not want to be branded as spam with low-quality content.
• Encourage your readers to comment their thoughts on your blog.
• Ask for feedback and be receptive to it.
• Share your blogs on social media sites.