How to Guest Blog Successfully

By: Kim Herrington

In the world of blogging, getting your name out there is important, but getting backlinks is just as crucial for the success of your blog. Guest blogging serves both motivations and allows you to increase your portfolio and stature to get better writing jobs later. To successfully guest blog, however, you need to do more than just think about the audience. You need to think about things like effective pitches, link bait, bylines, and promotion.

The Pitch

Pitching to potential blogs and online magazines isn’t as difficult as people think. Sure, you’re not going to write for a top magazine’s website out of the gate, but starting small should help you get your foot in the door and your feet wet.

When looking for opportunities, be sure that the guest posts you want to do are related to your blog’s niche. If you’re a fashion blogger, certainly don’t write about fast food franchises to get a link. Make sure the post fits your niche and attracts the right people back to you. Doing this first will help you find a more valuable place to guest post than will writing to offers on guest blog boards.

Next, contact the appropriate decision maker with a short message about your post idea and why it’s valuable for the website’s audience. Don’t attach the guest post until you get a positive reply back because not everyone out there is honest and you open yourself to someone stealing your work.

The Linkback

Including links back to articles on your own website is why you guest post. Between redirecting human readers and search engines back to your website, you’re building authority at other reliable websites for both you personally and your website. Writing guest posts about keyword topics that you target on your blog will help your website gain authority for those keywords in the eyes of search engines. It also helps readers understand what they can find on your website and attract their attention.

Creating content to pair with your guest post that you can link back to will give a natural and valuable link to your website as well as keep people from thinking you’re a spam-style writer. No one likes random links on random words and people never click on those types of links. Links are like votes of confidence from websites and, in the most simplistic sense, the more you have the higher up your website will be viewed.

Bylines are a good way to link back if you’re not allowed to do so in the content of the post. Not all websites allow links in content so bylines are important for building authority. Always ensure that the brief description accompanying your name is original for each guest post, otherwise the post might look like duplicate content in the eyes of search engines. This is also an opportunity to build up your Google Authorship, if the website you’re writing for uses it.

The Promo

Even if you search out a wildly popular website and get thousands of views and clickthroughs from your guest article, you’re not getting the full potential if you’re not promoting it. And you’re also not doing your job as a guest blogger.

Reach out to your regular networks and share it on social media. Do whatever you’d normally do. Then do more. Blogs and websites allow guest posts because they provide valuable content, but also because they allow the website to reach a new audience. Pay back your host by doing all you can to drive traffic to your article. While it serves them, it’s also completely self-serving because it’s your article. You’ll be able to tout these successful guest posts in future pitches to other websites.

After some time has gone by, check in with your host and ask them how the article is doing and if they’d share any analytics. Not everyone will offer up this information, especially large websites that are very busy. But learning what you can from the stats as well as being able to quote great stats in future pitches will help you go further in guest blogging and building your authority.

All in all, guest blogging is a vital tool for increasing both your search engine rank as well as your authority as a writer in your own niche community. Always make sure to write an article that’s worthwhile to readers and you’ll get the most benefit. Focusing solely for search engine benefits when writing your guest posts can backfire for your reputation with humans, despite that it might help your rank first in Google. Ultimately, guest blogging is still useful, despite many proponents of the decreasing value of guest posts, when executed with both humans and machines in mind.

Kim Herrington is a professional blogger and link builder for Haden Interactive and lives in Arkansas. She writes on her personal blog, The Made Thing, about blogging and SEO, food, and life in Arkansas.