What is Guest Posting? – Learn Everything from Scratch

If you are not yet using this method to promote your blog, product, or service, this means that Google continues to consider your site, to put it mildly, not too worthy of attention. Your potential audience generally agrees with its opinion since they know neither about your site nor your brand, offers, values, etc.

It is urgent to correct this situation. More guest posting allows you to solve several of your needs at once. This long article tells you everything you need to know before, during, and after creating publications for guest posting.

Guest Posting Definition

So, since this article aims to guide you along the path of creating the most effective articles for guest posting, it would be wise to start with a definition.

A guest post is an article that you post on a third-party resource. Here, you can ask a logical question – why can’t I limit myself to articles on my blog and not add work on creating articles for guest posting? Everything would seem logical; however, this time-consuming but effective promotion method has some more, not apparent, advantages, which we will discuss in the following paragraphs.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Guest Posting

Guest posting solves several problems simultaneously (we discuss this in more detail later).

  • It is a long-term investment. Creating high-quality material for guest posting once (especially if it is always content, for example) allows you to continually attract new subscribers from a third-party platform to your website.
  • It is effective in terms of building trust. When users see the mention of a website or brand on a platform they use constantly and trust, it is automatically perceived as a recommendation worthy of attention.
  • You will have to work hard to create enough quality material.
  • Publications on the most popular sites are quite expensive.
  • The creators of the most popular websites are very careful about the choice of articles to be published. Website editors have their own subjective opinions about what content suits them and their visitors. You must go through their publishing guidelines.

Everything about guest posting

Why Do You Need Guest Posting?

Here are a few fundamentally important reasons.

Backlinks

Backlinks are the primary goal that site owners pursue when creating materials for guest posts. As you know, when evaluating a site’s reliability and usefulness, Google takes into account many indicators, the descriptions of which would be enough for several more separate articles. This is the usefulness of the content, which is evaluated through behavioral factors, keywords that search engines find on pages, their relevance to user queries, and backlinks.

Backlinks indicate that your resource contains useful information, so users share it voluntarily. Guest posting is, in a sense, an artificial way to create a backlink, but Google has nothing against it since this is just a site indexing mechanism and not an in-depth verification of the source of the link.

Therefore, guest posting is the first and one of the most reliable and correct ways to collect link mass to improve the site’s position in Google.

Target Audience Expansion

Each platform has a well-established target audience that visits the site continuously. If you choose a platform for placing your article correctly (we will discuss this a bit later), you automatically have the ability to capture another part of the target audience. Your article and your product or service can be potentially useful. For you, this means additional traffic to the site, plus the ability to turn interested visitors into qualitative leads.

Brand Awareness Improvement

Yes, and that is also true. When a certain segment of Internet users occasionally sees mention of your site or brand in the articles that they read, this information is stored at a subconscious level. Thus, your site becomes more recognizable among competitors, even though users learned about it using a third-party resource and did not directly get to your site.

New Orders

We have already said a few words about the ability to turn visitors who came after reading a guest post from random users into qualitative leads. If you use lead generation methods on your sites, such as lead magnets or subscription forms, then this is a way for you to expand your contact list using data from people who may be interested in your proposal. As a result, you can receive new orders, but here, you will need to build further communication with new subscribers.

How to Find Guest Posting Sites?

Here is the most important thing you need to find guest posting websites to post the article. Your target audience and the target audience of a third-party site must have common ground. Otherwise, your post simply will not find a response and will not make sense, except for getting a backlink. Therefore, killing several birds with one stone at once is certainly better.

Choosing websites for guest posting

Three Types of Platforms You May Face.

Also, those websites you find yourself can have different levels of popularity among users.

  1. Newly created sites are happy to receive guest posts because it is an opportunity to start progressing regarding SEO. In this case, you will hear the main requirement—your article must be SEO optimized.
  2. As a rule, Platforms with an average level of popularity consider building trust with users their priority. In this case, be prepared to work with a demanding editor asking you to correct the article several times until it finally loses its original appearance.
  3. Finally, the most popular sites make money by granting permission to publish an article. Here, the demanding and meticulous editor takes the editorial fee you must pay.

With all these subtleties taken into account, it is very important to choose the site correctly. Of course, you can ask Google to show you the results for “best sites for guest posts,” but most likely, you will get the most popular results (which in this case means a high editorial fee, and you won’t get guarantees that your target audiences have common interests. Therefore, it is better to use a special service to select the most suitable service for publication. A few examples are:

TheHoth ClickIntellegence SeekVisibility Elite Consulting Services
OpenMoves WebFX Big Leap SEO Inc
SmartSites Boostability Inc Zoek Firecracker PR
Screaming Frog Services Mayple Ignite Digital BusinessOnline
Walker Sands WebiMax Hop Online 360i
Direct Online Marketing Scripted.com Square 2 Marketing Adsy

How to Negotiate the Editorial Fee?

In principle, we have already touched a little on editorial fees in the previous paragraph. Here, let’s discuss some more subtleties.

  • So, it makes no sense to bargain with websites that are highly popular among users. They still have a queue of people who want to publish an article, so someone else will pay if you do not pay them as much as they want.
  • To publish on the site from the middle segment, you must create high-quality material, carefully following all the website requirements. And convince the editor that this is just something that will be interesting to their users.
  • They will gladly accept your articles for free for newly created and yet unknown sites. At the maximum, they will ask you to mention their site on your website or profile on a social network.

The final choice is yours. By paying the editorial fees for publication on a popular site, you get a guarantee that the target audience will read it. In the two remaining cases, the coverage will be significantly less. However, you will get backlinks by investing only your work and time in writing the material. Next, we will tell you how to create cool articles for guest posts so that you will gladly accept any sites from the first submission.

How to Write A Guest Post?

So, as you already understood, high-quality, interesting, well-researched, and beautifully written material guarantees that your article will be accepted as a guest. Next, we discuss how to write a guest blog post with such a result.

Writing guest posts

Make A Target Audience Analysis

It all starts as usual. Any marketing move (and guest posting is also marketing to some extent) begins with analyzing the target audience. Even if it seems that you know everything about the audience, analysis is still necessary. In this case, you need to analyze your target audience and the target audience of the site you want to publish.

How to do it? It is very simple. Look at the latest (and best at all, if physically possible) publications on the site and determine what problems these materials are intended to solve.

Based on the problem, you can draw portraits of people who could potentially encounter this and make rough assumptions about how the material you plan to create can help them cope with their current needs.

For example, if you sell organic food, you can publish an article on a fitness blog and thereby help the audience pay attention to your products, their health benefits, and their potential for consumption during weight loss.

Perform Trend Analysis

As with creating any content, it does not make sense to write something if the topic is unpopular and does not find a response among the audience. The main rule is to write what will be read. It is better to put those ideas that users will not read immediately.

Therefore, before creating a publication, it is necessary to analyze trends. The most obvious is to go into Google Trends and write a few keywords. The most unobvious but more effective is to look at what is currently being discussed, for example, on Reddit or Quora, and analyze what questions users are asking. Based on these questions, you can understand where there is a gap in the content and fill it.

Hint! After publishing your article on a third-party resource, go directly to Reddit or Quora and leave links to your publication and website under relevant questions. Do not do it in the form of a bare link but in the form of a short but informative answer, plus a link with the invitation to find out more.

Choose A Topic

When the main problem has been identified, and you have an approximate portrait of the target audience of a third-party website, it is now necessary to choose a topic. You likely already understand which request will be most relevant and what you can advise solving the target audience’s problem. You just have to formulate the topic so that every visitor who visits a third-party site wants to click on your article and read it. Use two breakthrough tools for this.

The first of these is the Blog Posts Topic Generator developed by Hubspot. This tool allows you to get several options based on keywords you must enter in the appropriate lines. It’s better to use the paid version because, in this case, it will turn on the smartest algorithms, and you will get really non-standard but potentially interesting topics.

Now, you must check whether your topic’s wording is attractive in terms of perception and convenience for SEO promotion. You can use the Headline Analyzer to evaluate the headline’s attractiveness according to a scale and show the result.

Collect Research Material

If you remember when you were a student, now is the best time to imagine that you should write an academic paper again. No, they don’t give grades here and will not kick you out of college, but collecting relevant scientific data for your article is still necessary. Returning to our example, if you write about a healthy lifestyle, it will be appropriate to collect all possible statistics, rely on the latest research (not from competitive blogs but primary sources), and systematize the data.

At their drowning, you can develop a strong thesis statement. Yes, imagine today is the day this skill acquired in college is useful to you. Blog posts should contain the same strong thesis statement as academic papers since this is the skeleton of all your material and the starting point for further discussion.

Write An Article

It is also possible to devote several separate articles to this point, but we will try to dwell on the most important and consider the features of guest posting simultaneously.

Be sure to study the sites’ requirements for their acceptable articles. Typically, these requirements will include the optimal text size and SEO requirements, including requirements for meta tags, graphics, and ways to include links to your project.

Start by making a preliminary plan. If you have carefully analyzed scientific material and developed a strong thesis statement, your plan will include an introduction, a thesis, an argumentation based on science, and a conclusion.

Then, you just write the text. Write as you intuitively feel correct. Since your website’s target audience and the target audience of a third-party resource coincide at least partially, you should already understand what style you should follow to be understood correctly.

Include A Link to Your Project

So, the most important thing is to include a link to your project. Your link mustn’t be perceived as advertising but as valuable advice and a way to solve users’ urgent problems. Here are three basic ways to do this.

Article body

You need to find the most appropriate paragraph or sentence to include a link to your project so it does not look promotional. You can create a list of sites or services and put your brand in it or give an example with a link to your project. The main thing is a minimal obsession.

Author Bio

Bio is a short story about you as the author of the article. Your task is to create an attractive and trustworthy biography that would speak about you as an expert in a particular industry. It indicates that you are the creator of a specific project and describe its mission.

CTA

And here, you need to be careful. It is difficult to create a working call to action and even more difficult to add a link so that it does not sound like an advertisement. Therefore, completing your article with a call to action can stimulate users to learn more on your site or sign up for your newsletter to get something for free.

Important! It is possible to include your link twice, for example, in the text and the bio, but do not do it three times. Otherwise, you will ruin the veiled effect, and users will immediately understand that you wrote this article to sell them a product or service. And most likely, they will not like it because intrusive advertising has annoyed everyone for a long time.

Check Grammatical Errors

If your material contains explicit grammatical errors, the effect of an expert and non-ad article will be corrupted. Therefore, use Grammarly to avoid typos, extra spaces, and missing commas. After that, re-read your article yourself and return to it after a few days with a fresh look. If, in a few days, you will fix something again, then upload the article to Grammarly again, well, or activate the plugin and do not turn it off.

Hint! When you use a program rather than an automatic plugin, you get more tips on improving your text, even if you did not buy the premium version.

Check Uniqueness

Checking uniqueness is the final touch. However, if you wrote your article yourself, this is nothing more than an extra precaution. Sometimes, verification systems catch popular phrases or stable expressions, but this is not a bad sign if their number is small in your text. Even if the anti-plagiarism shows many such phrases, for example, “create a website,” your article is really useful for users. Then, the behavioral factors will still outweigh them.

Analyze Performance

After your article is published, it is necessary to understand how effectively this material attracts users to your resource. To do this, it’s enough to connect the analytics system to your site if you still haven’t done it and just keep track of incoming traffic sources.

It is also necessary to track and respond to comments. Since comments will appear on a third-party resource, you will have to do it manually from time to time, tracking user activity under the publication and unobtrusively encouraging them to visit your site.

Translation

Here are some more ways to take advantage of guest posting. Surely, your regular users will also want to familiarize themselves with your material. Therefore, announce the article

  • on your blog
  • on social networks
  • with the help of instant messengers
  • and allow reading the article in different languages.

Here, we will make a small remark. If the third-party resource is multilingual, it will be very effective to translate your article using a specialized service. So, you get even more opportunities to expand your target audience and attract them to the site. If your site is also multilingual at the same time, then this is just a mega win-win option.

Thus, guest posting is relatively not difficult but unequivocally effective. The most important thing is to create high-quality material and hit the target with a platform for publication. We have already told you about all this, so you can start acting now.

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