The mere mention of ‘guest blogging’ is enough to spark heated debates among marketers. While some dismiss it as a futile exercise, others swear by its efficacy, treating it as an indispensable component of their marketing arsenal. The truth, as is often the case, lies somewhere in between. When executed judiciously, guest blogging can be a potent catalyst for growth, fostering brand awareness, building high-quality backlinks, and bolstering your SEO performance.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll delve into the intricacies of crafting a successful guest blogging strategy, tailored to your unique business goals and industry landscape. Whether you’re a seasoned blogger or a novice seeking to establish your online presence, this guide will equip you with the essential tools and insights to navigate the guest blogging realm with confidence.
Defining Guest Blogging: What It Is and Why It Matters
Guest blogging, at its core, is a content marketing tactic that involves writing and publishing articles on third-party websites. These articles typically feature your byline and are often highlighted as being authored by a “guest author” or “contributor” by the website’s editor. While some publications offer monetary compensation for your contributions, others provide non-monetary rewards, such as backlinks to your website or social media accounts.
The benefits of guest blogging (in 2024) are manifold:
- Establishing yourself as an industry expert and thought leader
- Growing your personal brand and audience (social followers, subscribers, etc.)
- Improving your website’s SEO performance
- Building authoritative backlinks
- Fostering relationships and driving new partnerships (co-marketing, job offers, etc.)
- Generating referral traffic
- Enhancing brand awareness for your company
- Acquiring new leads, users, and customers
With a well-crafted guest blogging strategy, you can unlock these benefits and propel your business to new heights.
Setting SMART Goals: The Foundation of a Successful Strategy
Before embarking on your guest blogging journey, it’s crucial to establish specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. These goals can be related to your business performance (e.g., generating more leads or clients) or your website’s performance (e.g., improving search visibility or referral traffic).
By setting clear objectives, you’ll be better equipped to select appropriate topics, identify suitable guest blogging sites, determine your posting frequency, and ultimately evaluate the success of your efforts. A SMART goal will serve as a guiding light, helping you determine whether guest blogging is the right tactic for your business and how much you should invest in it.
Here are five examples of measurable goals you can set as you begin your guest blogging endeavours:
- Achieve a specific number of referral visits (e.g., “Get X referral visits”) or increase referral traffic by a certain percentage (e.g., “Increase referral traffic by X% from your guest posts”).
- Generate a specific number of leads from referral traffic (e.g., “Get X leads from referral traffic”) or increase the number of leads by a certain percentage (e.g., “Increase the number of leads from your guest posts by X%”).
- Acquire a specific number of clients from your guest posts (e.g., “Get X clients from your guest posts”) or increase the number of clients by a certain percentage (e.g., “Increase clients from your guest posts by X%”).
- Improve your website’s SEO performance or search engine ranking position (SERP) visibility by a certain percentage (e.g., “Improve your SEO performance or SERP visibility by X%”).
- Secure a specific number of high-quality backlinks to relevant content from your guest posts (e.g., “Get X number of high-quality backlinks to relevant content from your guest posts”).
While clients and leads are undoubtedly crucial for your business, accurately attributing their acquisition to guest blogging efforts can be challenging. Therefore, setting goals related to referral visits, SEO traffic, and backlinks may be more practical, as changes in these metrics can be more easily traced back to your guest posts.
Choosing Topics That Align with Your Business Goals
Many guest bloggers falter because they prioritise the publications over the content, inadvertently serving the publishers’ goals rather than their own. To cultivate a successful guest blogging program, it’s imperative to select topics that directly support your ultimate objectives, whether they be referral traffic, SEO performance, lead generation, or client acquisition.
Begin by compiling a list of your top-performing website pages that you wish to promote through your guest blogging efforts. For each page, analyse your current status, such as monthly SEO traffic, and set a goal you aim to achieve within a specific timeframe. You can establish an overarching website goal as well as page-specific targets.
For each target page, identify an overarching topic relevant to your expertise and valuable for your target audience. Then, leverage keyword research tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs to fuel your bank of ideas for future guest posts.
As a meta-example, let’s consider building a guest blogging strategy centred around the topic of “guest blogging” itself. You could create various types of content under this umbrella, including how-to articles, thought leadership pieces, case studies, and ultimate guides. For each content type, you can uncover relevant article ideas using keyword research tools.
Finding Reputable Guest Blogging Sites
With your content ideas mapped out, it’s time to identify relevant publications and guest blogging sites. Start by compiling a list of target websites, using the following methods to discover guest blogging opportunities:
- Utilise Advanced Search Operators: Employ advanced search operators like “intext:submit a guest post” to uncover websites actively seeking guest contributions.
- Leverage Google Reverse Image Search: Take the headshot of a prolific guest blogger in your industry and use Google’s reverse image search to find places where they’ve published in the past. These publications are likely open to accepting guest posts.
- Explore Curated Lists: Consult lists of top websites that accept guest posts, which can provide a wealth of potential opportunities.
- Analyse Competitor Backlinks: Examine the backlink profiles of your competitors, as they may have secured backlinks through guest posting on relevant sites.
- Conduct Social Media Searches: Many bloggers and guest authors share their latest guest posts on social networks like Twitter. Searching for relevant hashtags or phrases like “guest post” can reveal potential opportunities.
- Leverage Guest Blogging Communities: Platforms like MyBlogGuest facilitate connections between guest bloggers and blog owners seeking contributions.
Once you’ve compiled your list, prioritise websites with a Domain Authority (or Domain Rating, if using Ahrefs) of 40 or higher, a Spam Score of 3% or lower, and a thorough editorial process. These factors will ensure that your guest posts are published on reputable, high-quality sites, maximising the potential benefits for your business.
Crafting a Compelling Guest Post
With the groundwork laid, it’s time to bring your guest post idea to life. This should be the easier step in the process, provided you’ve chosen a topic you’re passionate about and have expertise in. Set aside dedicated time to write, and consider the following recommendations for crafting a captivating guest post (or any type of post, for that matter):
- Write long-form, compelling content (at least 1,000 words).
- Break the text into small, digestible paragraphs.
- Optimise for on-page SEO.
- Include original images and graphs to enhance shareability (Canva is an excellent tool for novice designers).
- Incorporate quotes from friends and influencers.
- Link to your other published guest posts.
- Link to relevant content on your own website.
- Reference external sources: studies, data, thought leadership pieces, etc.
- Link internally to other articles from the publisher.
- Include your byline and explain your expertise on the topic.
When submitting your final draft to the editor, don’t forget to provide your author details: your full name, a concise bio, your social media links for reader engagement, a professional headshot, and your website URL.
Measuring and Tracking Results
The final step, and arguably the most crucial, is to measure and track the results of your guest blogging efforts. Ensure you consistently compare your metrics to your baseline established during the goal-setting phase (step 1).
Depending on your goals, you can leverage various SEO tools to monitor different metrics. For example, you can use Ahrefs to track changes in the number of backlinks, referring domains, organic traffic performance, or even the number of keywords for which the website ranks in Google search results.
According to a study by SEMrush, 53% of digital marketing specialists consider guest blogging (or guest posting) the most effective way to build a backlink profile. A similar link-building study published by Aira in 2020 showed that guest blogging is the third most effective backlink-building method, with 51% of respondents utilising it.
Guest blogging is such a popular SEO tactic because websites that accept guest posts typically allow authors to include backlinks to their own content or resources, provided they are relevant and valuable to the reader. These links are usually placed within the body of the article or in the author’s bio.
While editors may apply a “no-follow” tag to links from guest authors, Google has acknowledged that even “no-follow” backlinks are considered signals by their ranking algorithm, contrary to past perceptions of them being “lower-value” links.
Important: Avoid overdoing guest blogging solely for the purpose of building backlinks. If you sacrifice content quality and user experience, you risk hampering your SEO performance and damaging your reputation. While you can opt to hire guest posting services, the most crucial aspect is to write content that educates and entertains your readers, and you’ll see positive results.
Crafting an Impactful Guest Bio
The guest post bio is arguably the most important component for you, as it’s typically the only place where you can include self-promotional links back to your website, blog, product, service, book, or other relevant resources. The content of your bio should align with your guest blogging goals:
- Backlink Building: If your primary goal is to acquire high-quality backlinks, ensure your bio includes a link back to your website with your target anchor text.
- Traffic Generation: If your aim is to drive referral traffic to your website, consider creating a custom landing page tailored to the audience and subject matter of your guest post. This targeted approach can enhance the relevance and potential conversion rate of the traffic you receive.
- Social Media Growth: If your objective is to increase your social media following, include a line in your bio encouraging readers to follow you on your preferred social network(s), accompanied by the corresponding links.
Regardless of your specific goals, craft a concise yet descriptive bio that highlights your background, experience, and qualifications as they pertain to the topic of your guest post. Include information about your current projects or roles that may be of interest to the readers.
Promoting Your Guest Post and Engaging with the Audience
If your goal is to become a regular contributor or simply have the blog owner sing your praises as an exceptional guest blogger, be sure to promote your post actively across your own audience channels. Blog owners will appreciate your efforts in driving new readers to their site.
Additionally, make a concerted effort to respond to comments or questions left by readers on your guest post. This level of engagement will go a long way in establishing you as an authority in your industry and fostering a positive relationship with the blog owner.
Tracking and Attributing Results
When your primary goal is to generate traffic, it’s crucial to measure the results of your guest blogging efforts accurately. One effective approach is to create an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics.
By setting up an Advanced Segment using the “source” dimension with multiple statements for each domain on which you’ve guest blogged (up to 20 per segment), you can view all of your Google Analytics data based on referrals from your guest posts. This can help you determine the overall success of your guest blogging strategy in terms of generating traffic and driving conversions.
If you’re unsure how to track conversions, refer to resources on setting up goals in Google Analytics to ensure you’re capturing actionable data.
Reciprocating Guest Blogging Opportunities
Guest blogging can be a two-way street, and it’s essential to recognise that maintaining a consistent flow of high-quality content on your own blog can be challenging while actively guest posting on multiple external sites.
Consider extending an invitation to the blogs you’ve contributed to, inviting their authors to write guest posts for your site as well. This exchange not only keeps your blog fresh with new content but also provides an opportunity to gain insights into your audience and potentially attract new readers from your guest bloggers’ communities – a win-win situation.
Conclusion
Guest blogging on reputable sites is a powerful strategy for leveraging the success of already-established, popular blogs within your industry. To secure coveted guest blogging spots, you need to send engaging pitches that demonstrate your worth and value to the publication’s audience.
While guest blogging is an essential component of a well-rounded content marketing campaign, it’s just one piece of the puzzle. If you need assistance in shaping, executing, or tracking your content marketing efforts, don’t hesitate to seek the expertise of a professional agency.
Remember, the key to a successful guest blogging strategy lies in setting clear goals, choosing relevant topics, identifying reputable sites, crafting compelling pitches, and consistently producing high-quality content that resonates with your target audience. By following these principles and continuously refining your approach, you’ll be well on your way to unlocking the myriad benefits that guest blogging has to offer.
