Guest posting is one of the most powerful techniques to get people’s attention to your blog. In my opinion, every blogger should guest post on other blogs.
Guest posting has so many benefits, some of which are as follows:
1. Develops a good relationship with fellow bloggers with mutual benefit.
2. Free advertising for your own blog.
3. Improves your writing skills.
4. Makes you think out of the box, and makes you write for a different audience.
5. Increases your accountability.
6. Makes you feel confident and improves your credibility online.
7. Increases quality backlinks for your blog and improves your ranking in search engines.
Well, these are very few of the benefits of writing guest posts. There are much more. I simply enjoy writing guest posts once in a while, that makes me feel refreshing. Without making you to wait more, I will just tell you how to do it effectively.
Step 1: Find your stage
Find out A-lister blogs in your niche. You should look out for blogs whose readership is quite very big; it should be either quite bigger than that of your blog or almost of the same size at the very least. Find out the number of subscribers of that blog, or find out about the blog’s value with Google Page Rank finder and Alexa rank.
I have installed the SearchStatus Firefox plugin that gives me the rank details of any webpage. It may take a while to find out the right blogs, be patient. Do a Google Blog Search for keywords in your niche. Find out a handful of them and bookmark them. Spend 30 minutes every day to read updates of those blogs.
Now make a list of those blogs by name in the order of your preference. Type the list out in a word document and save it in your desktop. ‘Your preference’ can be any one of these (i) descending by relevance to your niche, (ii) descending by google page rank, (iii) descending by familiarity/popularity of the blogs and so on.
Step 2: Study and establish contact
Closely read those well-established blogs, leave valuable comments and develop a relationship with the blog’s owner if possible. Spend about one month in studying the blogs you have bookmarked, if you are going to do a guest post for the first time.
If this is not the first time, then you probably would have spent enough time in studying these blogs already and you can skip this step. During this time, learn about the style of posts in the blog, get to know the community and if possible cast in your voice with valuable comments or intriguing questions.
Don’t try to attract attention by being controversial. Develop a friendly relationship with both the owner of the blog and the community. Rather than just leaving comments to the blog posts, you can reply to comments already made by others. The readers of the blog will notice and identify you this way.
Step 3: Create killer content
Once you are comfortable with the information you know about the blogs come up with a killer article for submission as guest post. It should be a killer article literally and your best article. Put extra care and effort to write one. Do extensive research if needed.
While writing the guest article be more accountable for any information you share in it. Cite any books or other blog posts appropriately. Give credits to information used from other sources. Do not copy paste from any other site; however if you have to quote someone use their words in quotations and clearly indicate the same.
Give credits to any images and see that you don’t violate any copyrights.
Step 4: Format your killer content
Format your guest post carefully so that you make it easy for the blog owner to publish. Let him/her just copy paste it. Give them no more work. If possible send them the html format of the guest post. You can do this by typing the post in wordpress posts page, then switching to ‘HTML’ view (the default is ‘Visual’) and then copy what you see.
Use heading tags for subheadings. Don’t forget to leave an intro line with a link to your main page like ‘This is a guest post by [your name] of [your blog name hyperlinked]‘. Attach the necessary images in the format prescribed. Your author bio at the end of your guest post is your magic spot. Make it interesting, intuitive and attractive.
Use the right anchor words and keywords. Don’t just leave a link to the main page; rather leave a link to one of your killer contents in your blog or your RSS subscription link or link to your FREE Ebook page if you are offering one. Don’t use affiliate links, your guest post will most likely be rejected.
Once you feel that your guest article is ready, shoot out an email to the blog owner, starting from the top of your list of blogs you have found to guest post. If the blog has a ‘Write for us’ page read it carefully and check if your article complies with the guidelines. If you are not sure if the blog owner accepts guest posts or not you can contact them via the contact page to find out.
Step 5: Follow up
The least remembered and the most important step is this. You have given out your content to a different group of people and you receive their reactions. Intimate them that you are listening by responding to all the comments to your guest post. This way you make readers more and more engaged, you help them by answering their additional queries and you make friends too.
Be honest, modest and patient while answering. If there is a comment that triggers your anger, deal with it diplomatically. Let your comment smile on everyone. Okay I am done. Now it is your turn. Start guest posting.
