You get only 2 seconds to convince your visitors about your relevance. If you fail, the visitor clicks the back button and leave your site for good. Here’s how you can stop it.
Of late, I have read a lot about the benefits of guest blogging and its immense SEO benefits. According to some well-known bloggers, Google has shifted its focus from Article Marketing to Guest Blogging. They say Google no longer values the links you get from Article Marketing as it did until two years ago. As a result, if you are still spending most of your time submitting articles to Article Marketing directories, you might be heading in the wrong direction.
However, you can’t really write off the benefits of Article Marketing completely as many online marketers still rely on article marketing to drive classified traffic to their websites. Since Google changes its algorithm of weighing the links you generate from various campaigns, it’s extremely vital that you evaluate your online marketing strategies and streamline it from time to time. One of our previous posts offers 5 tips on how you can get more from your Article Marketing drive. Take a look and it may be useful for you.
Guest blogging still remains a potential method of generating valuable back links for your website or blog. Two years ago, I did my very first guest post for Malcom, a very talented copywriter and owner of Gill Media based in Canada. Guest blogging was probably wasn’t as widespread then as it is today.
How to Determine Which Blogs to Guest Blog for?
Although guest blogging is a potential tool to achieve Google-friendly inbound links to your website and establish your authority as a niche blogger, it is not as easy as it sounds. I mean if you want to reap the benefits of guest blogging, you should be targeting popular blogs instead of just any blog out there.
You can do a search on your niche and find out at least 50 best blog sites that have people (read potential traffic) frequenting them every once in a while. Make sure you want to guest blog for those blogs that have a decent traffic coming to it and have a reasonable page rank. You can make a list of blogs you want to request for guest blogging. This is because you want to improve your odds of getting a “yes” from most of them. Given that popular blogs receive more requests than they can handle, you should go that extra mile to improve your chances of being accepted for guest blogging.
Here are a couple of tips that might help your cause:
Proofread to Perfection
Popular bloggers know the importance of being perfect and hence, they make sure there are no issues with the post prior to publishing. If you want to make the first impression and improve your chances of being well received, make sure you proof read your posts for typos, grammar, syntax, facts and flow of writing. You may have to do little extra effort, but it’s well worth it.
SEO Optimized Posts
Popular bloggers don’t have the time to optimize your posts – so it leaves you with an opportunity to impress them by doing it at your end and saving them the pains. Use the keywords at proper places and make your posts SEO-friendly. Well-optimized posts bring as many benefits to their blogs as to your website.
SEO Optimized Images
It’s a no-brainer that posts with relevant and innovative images attract more eyeballs. It is important to consider adding some images to your posts before you send them to the bloggers. Moreover, try optimizing the images with keywords to improve their SEO value and you are more likely to elicit an entrancing response from the bloggers. But, make sure your images are not copyrighted as it might create unwanted issues for your blogger. Worse, you might lose your credibility in stead of gaining it.
Right Format
Popular bloggers are rather busy writing stuff and hard-pressed for time. Do them a favor by sending your guest posts in a format that help them to post quickly. You may ask them about the proper formatting of your text that might help them to post your blog entries without much hassle. For instance, you can format the headings and sub-headings using proper HTML tags. The bloggers will know that you care about their time and it will improve your chances of being well-received.
What more can you do to boost your chances of being published in your attempt to guest blogging? Any ideas?