The Ultimate Guide to Writing Guest Posts That Get Published and Drive Traffic

Guest posting is one of the fastest ways to gain exposure online, especially if your personal or business brand is still growing. It gives you access to a ready audience by leveraging the already-established follower base the blogger has built.

Therefore, you want to ensure that your content is of the highest quality and that you are not just using it to promote your brand. The best blog posts are the ones that focus on delivering value to the readers. How do you ensure that you are achieving this? Read on to find out.

First Things First…

Before sending that outreach email, you must understand a few things about guest posting. First, determine what the aim of the blogger is. Most blogs are founded with a specific objective in mind and a specific niche they target.

Hence, the topics you pitch must align with the brand’s objectives. This will lead you to discover how the blog communicates with its audience.

Remember that your guest posting audience is not your typical audience. You have to meet them where they are and speak to them about how they are used to.

In addition, you need to establish who the blog’s audience is composed of; What kind of person would want to read a blog about motorcycles, physics, or Xiaomi smartphones? What are their interests and needs? What current affairs would they be interested in?

This is all to say that research is very important when guest posting. You cannot simply pitch a random topic or write funny content and expect it to succeed. Even if such is published, it will not deliver value to your website.

Attracting your guest posting audience to your website

Guest posts are important, but the ultimate aim is to attract the audience to your website. And there must be concrete ways to achieve this, even after writing high-quality content. Here are some of the things you should aim for:

a. Brand Mentions

Mentioning your brand in your blog posts can get the audience to check out what you do. You could highlight what your brand is all about, a new product or service you have just launched, or mention a resource your brand provides, such as a statistical report.

However, you must be aware of the blogger’s standards regarding brand mentions. Some bloggers do not allow guest posters to mention the brand they represent at all. Some would allow you to mention your brand provided you declare a conflict of interest.

Yet others would allow you to mention your brand unreservedly. Ensure you are not crossing any boundaries.

b. Author Bio

Most blogs display a short bio of the author of each post. Remember that one of the benefits of guest posting is that it helps you project yourself and your brand as authoritative in your field.

Your author bio must show this as well. It is not enough to write your titles; instead, you must have useful information about what you do or what your brand does. So do not write:

XXXXX is the CEO of xxxxx, a board member at xxxxx, and a former director at xxxxx.

Instead, write:

XXXXX is the CEO of xxxxx, an xxxxx company that does xxxxx using xxxxx to help business professionals achieve xxxxxx.

The former works too, but the latter example speaks directly to the audience and demonstrates the solution you can provide.

c. Links

This is perhaps the most popular reason why guest posting is done. When writing for a world-renowned blog like Forbes, even one link to your brand’s website is enough to make you win big.

Therefore, link-building is ideally done to target high-authority websites. However, if you get a backlink to your website, you must understand that there are different links.

• Follow links: These are ideally the kinds of links you should target. They transfer link juice to your website and directly impact your ranking.
• Nofollow links: These links do not transfer any link juice. However, they are still useful because some people will click on them. Plus, just a mention can get you far.
• Sponsored links: A nofollow link that does not transfer link juice. This is the kind of link you get if your guest post content is more promotional rather than editorial.

The Eye10 Backlink Checker tool helps you see the attributes of your backlinks.

The How of Guest Posting

Guest posting, as has been said, is a strategy. It’s not just about writing an article. You have to go in a specific direction. The following are the things you should do to succeed at guest posting.

1. Set Clear Goals: Do not just guest post without clear aims. Whether you want to establish your authority, gain exposure, or earn quality backlinks, be sure about what you want and set actionable metrics.
2. Guest Blogging outreach: This is the stage at which you reach out to editors to convince them about posting on their blog. You have to prove that you can provide value to their audience, and your pitch must show how you will do this through your content.
3. Landing Page: Since guest blogging aims to get more eyes on your brand, that whole strategy will fall apart if your landing page does not measure up. So, fix that before starting your guest blogging campaign.
4. Never pay for guest posts: Do not pay for guest posts or to earn backlinks to your site. Google and other search engines frown against this, which is one of the fastest ways to get penalized.
5. Track The Results: To ensure your guest blogging strategy works, measure the metrics you have decided to track. This includes referrals, conversions, landing page visits, etc. You can use the Eye10 Competitor Research tool to see how many referring domains are linking to your site and compare them with your competitors.

Conclusion

Guest posting is useful for driving traffic from high-quality websites to your website. So, you must be careful about how you implement it.

As guest posting is a link-building strategy, using the twin link-building tools by Eye10 – Backlink Checker and Backlink Monitor – can supercharge your guest posting effectiveness. More so, when combined with the Competitor Research tool, you can see directly how you measure up with leaders in your niche. And all these come for a single combined subscription. Register and join Eye10 from here.