Guest Blogging: Where to Start

Guest blogging the right way is important, because doing it wrong can cost you. It can cost you viewers, respect, and Google love. The wrong way is to post a generic post, with generic links, to generic blogs without any thought to your goals or audience.

The right way to guest blog is to do all of the following.

Know Your Goal in Advance

Your content should bring them to a specific page – not your home page. Have a plan in place to capitalize on the blog post by sending viewers of the blog to a very special and specific page.

Provide a Special Giveaway

Don’t just contribute a blog post, contribute a special giveaway that is targeted to the specific blog audience you’re writing the guest blog post for. This will not only appeal to the blog audience, but also the owner of the blog, because they’ll like being able to give away something special.

Create Follow-Up Content

Once you write and publish a guest post, you want to write follow-up posts about similar content on your own blog. It will help to relate the new content to the guest post too.

Treat Guest Posting as a Long-Term Strategy

Don’t work for the immediate results but rather the long-term results that guest blogging can provide today, and tomorrow. A properly done guest post can pay off years down the road if you play your cards right.

Ensure that a Guest Post Boosts Your Credibility

When writing a guest post you want to ensure that it makes you look good, and that it makes the blogger for whom you’re posting look good. The point of a blog post is to give you the appearance of authority, knowledge, and someone in the know.

Link to Your Guest Blog Posts

Within other content that you write on your own website and blog, be sure to link back to that blog post from time to time. It will make the blog owner happy and it makes the search engines happy too.

Answer Comments

For at least the first couple of months (if not forever), answer the comments that appear on the blog post. You can also use these questions as fodder for new blog posts, in which case you can answer the blog post with a link to your new blog that answers their question.

If you do these things, you’ll not only make each guest post pay off for you, but also for the bloggers you guest post for. You’ll soon be sought out as an expert in your niche and perhaps even command pay for guest posts because your posts do so well in terms of numbers and return on investment.