Are You Making These Guest Posting Mistakes?

Guest Blogger Wally Brown

Are you blogging passionately about your favorite subject in the world and you still don’t have any readers?

If you are great at what you do, but nobody is finding your blog, keep on reading to learn how to get some great exposure for your blog.

So how can you not only get some great links to your blog so that it starts ranking higher, but also get some legitimate traffic at the same time?

Guest blogging!

“But wait, Google says that guest blogging for SEO is dead!”

The type of guest blogging that I am going to show you how to do is not what the folks at Google are trying to stop. Before I get to it though, let’s talk a little about how SEO’s ruin everything on the internet.

I don’t think SEO people mean to ruin everything, they just get greedy.

The second that an SEO guy or gal figures out the newest trick to rank a website, they package their method up, sell it to 10,000 other SEO’s and flood the internet with junk. After a period of time Google catches onto this and puts a stop to it, and then another SEO finds a new loophole and the process repeats endlessly.

And this is exactly what has happened with traditional guest blogging. In the early days of guest blogging people would write for other blogs to gain exposure, share information and get new fans. The link that they would get to their website in exchange for the post was certainly valuable, but it was not the only motivation for guest blogging.

Those days are mostly gone now though. SEO firms and so-called guru’s have set up networks of junky websites advertising “guest blogging” opportunities and everyone seems to be jumping on board. The major problem with this method though is that it is not going to last. 

What I am going to show you is not junky guest blogging for SEO. It is publishing real content on real websites for real exposure for your blog. Sure, you will (at least you should) get a link back to your website, but in reality you should be getting so much more than that.

If you are truly passionate with your guest posts, you can get recognition, new fans and notoriety. So how can you make sure you are finding some great blogs to guest post on? This can be tricky, but using some tools and some common sense will really help you a long way in your efforts.

So let’s get to it already…here is how you can find some great places to guest blog.

1) Search For Blogs 

There are many phrases you can search Google for to find guest posting opportunities, and this is my favorite. Simply substitute “your niche” for whatever you are wanting to write about. If you are a fitness expert do a search for ~fitness expert “write for us”

What you are searching for here are blogs that are actually looking for guest writers. While some of these are going to be garbage sites, you can find plenty of truly great sites to submit a guest post to. With the phrase “write for us” in quotes you will easily be able to find blogs looking for guest posts from you!

Once you select a few, it is time to take a closer look at them.

2) Due diligence

As I stated before, you do not want to just start writing tons of guest posts to go on any old site, you want real websites with real audiences reading them. So how do you make sure you will be writing for great sites and not junky websites? You can do a little bit of research and get a really good idea of who the better sites are and which ones may just have been set up to make money by charging people to publish their guest posts.

3) Majestic SEO (Or the tool of your choice)

For our needs today, you can sign up at www.majesticseo.com for a free account to get all of the metrics you will need to study your guest posting prospect.

Majestic SEO is a great tool for looking at website metrics. As with anything there is never a guarantee, but you can get a really good idea of the quality of your site by looking at these metrics.

3.1) Trust Flow/Citation Flow 

You can learn more about what these metrics mean at the Majestic SEO website, but they are basically measuring website trust and quality in a sense. If you look at the image above you can get some really valuable information about the popularity of the site.

These numbers are on a scale from 1 – 100 with 100 being the highest, and with Google itself being a 99 in both trust and citation flow, and with the Huffington Post being in the high 80’s for both. You may not find many sites quite that high, but look for a trust and citation flow metric above around 20 or 30.

3.2) Backlinks/Referring Domains

To further see what kind of a site you are looking at posting on you want to know how many other websites are linking to them. Low quality sites may have very few links and high quality sites will typically have many links and referring domains.

Personally I would look for at least 40 referring domains and a few hundred links in addition to the trust and citation flow metrics from above. This is not foolproof, but it will give you an indication that you are going to be writing a guest post on a blog that may have some authority, both in Google and among its readers.

4) Social Signals

This is really important, and maybe even more than looking at any metrics. Go visit the site that you are wanting to post on. Do the articles have social shares? Do they have comments and interaction? That is really what you are looking for. Sites that have a lot of interaction have a passionate audience, and that is going to work for your efforts.

There is nothing quite like spending hours on a really great guest post and having it published on a website that nobody reads.

5) Read The Rules

When you do your initial search, the results will typically send you to the “write for us” page on the site in question. Most every site I have ever seen that is looking for guest contributors wants you to be very clear on what they want and what they do not want.

Some sites are more relaxed than others, and some will really want to make sure you are paying attention so read carefully! If you spend a lot of time on your post and forget to add your bio, some sites will simply not reply to you and your hard work will be for nothing.

6) Write And Submit 

Write your best content here! There is no reason to hold back and write a sub-par post when you could really have an opportunity to impress some people and bring them over to your blog as new fans, so let loose and have fun!

And there you have it! Guest blogging is not dead unless you do it in a spammy way. If your goal is to provide the very best content you can write there is not a single thing wrong with guest blogging on some great blogs to get more traffic, fans and even some links for your SEO efforts.

Guest Blogger Wally Brown owns Vexcom Solutions marketing. He enjoys helping local businesses and website owners find more traffic on the web using the safest white-hat techniques possible so that they can grow their brand. (Sue Anne: “By the way, I have used his services and he does a great job!”)

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