Guest posting is the act of creating content for someone else’s website in exchange for visibility and a backlink.
Normally, you get to have a pretty-looking “About the author” section with every article that you publish on other people’s websites, and a link to your own blog or website.
Topflight loves to use guest posting as part of our Digital PR strategy, and we can vouch for its effectiveness in achieving traffic that is essentially free of charge.
Guest posting is effective
Let’s start off by saying this: guest posting is incredibly effective as a way to boost your SEO scores and effectively build backlinks.
For those who do not know what backlinks are, it’s when a trustworthy website with hundreds of thousands of visitors (such as news sites, peer reviewed journals and well-established blogs) puts a hyperlink directing to your website.
When a large website links to you, Google finds it to be a great indicator of your trustworthiness and elevates your online authority and ranking.
To get a backlink, there are many, many ways, but guest posting is considered to be the most accessible way to do so.
The advantages of guest posting
1. Cheap: unless you are using top-quality content marketing services, blogs are overall some of the cheapest forms of traffic, perfect for small businesses and start-ups. But be careful with the infamous low-cost SEO services!
2. Traffic-friendly: did you ever read more than one book published by the same author? The same thing tends to happen with content: if people find your content engaging, they’ll follow you to your own website.
3. E-A-T: Google uses an EAT score (Expertise – Authority – Trust) to indicate whether or not a website should rise through the top rankings or die burrowed in the mountains of content pushed out on the web every day.
Guest posting allows you to establish your presence as an expert in your field on someone else’s website, meaning that it already fulfils all three parts of a good EAT score.
4. Qualified Leads: there is always some confusion about what a “qualified lead” is. Imagine you are selling pasta-makers, and you are writing an article on a website called bestpasta.com.
You’ll then get traffic from people that are already interested in the delicacy that is the Italian cuisine since people found you through a mutual interest.
Now, who’s more likely to buy your tortellini maker: a lasagne aficionado or some guy that just found you on Google by accident? Isn’t it… pastastic?
However, you can’t just “write an article” and expect traffic. To score an effective backlink, it needs to be coming from a website that is more authoritative than yours.
Not as easy as it used to be
Now, don’t get me wrong when I say this, but guest posting is not as straightforward as it used to be.
Well, SEO in general, has changed.
A while ago, you could “cheat” Google into achieving the top rankings through shady practices such as keyword stuffing and creating invisible content on your websites.
And with the invention of backlinks, guest posting came to fruition. However, smaller websites deployed the “scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” strategy, also known as reciprocal links.
To shorten things up, Google realises if you are trying to “cheat” your way into guest posting, and will penalise you both if it finds out you are trying to send links to each other.
Furthermore, your content needs to be good, even if it’s a guest post. Google has strict guidelines on what makes content Google-worthy, and you have to follow it. These are the reasons why hundreds of businesses rely on content marketing and PR services in 2022.
However, it’s totally worth it.
Back in the days, building backlinks was just a matter of sending outreach emails. Nowadays, backlinks are evaluated using a broad set of metrics, such as topical authority, search intent, anchor text, contextual meaning, etc. This makes the entire guest posting process much more complex and risky, if it’s not done correctly.
What makes guest posting effective
The first rule of guest posting is that you can’t write for anybody.
An effective guest post ideally needs to be written for a website that is larger, topically-related, better established and more trafficked than yours, in order for Google to consider it a key signal.
Guest posting is particularly effective for those who:
- Have a blog where they post regularly.
- Rely heavily on content marketing.
- Work in popular industries that people are already quite knowledgeable about, such as finance and IT.
- Already have a well-established name for themselves (some people will even pay you for a chance to have you guest post on their blogs!)
- Have connections with publishers and PR agents.
Obviously, you don’t need any of these to be successful as a guest poster. But it certainly does help.
How do you start with guest posting?
You can hire PR services or backlink builders to do all the work for you. But these options are often expensive and may not be suitable for everybody, which is why guest posting is often seen as the most viable alternative for small businesses that may not have a large budget to invest in marketing.
Google “YOUR INDUSTRY OR NICHE”, followed by “write for us” or “guest posting”.
Make sure you keep the quotation marks, since it forces Google to search for the exact terms.
Therefore, you will google something like this:
Or this:
Obviously, you can search for just about anything. Since this is Google, even the most niche products ever will help you find popular websites within the industry that are looking for guest posts.
Other terms you can look for are “guest post”, “guest author” or “write on our website”.
After that, simply click away, read the instructions and deliver high quality content.
Getting started is often the most difficult part, but investing your content marketing strategies into guest posting really, really pays off.
What do we do to make guest posting even better?
As you know, we offer link building and PR strategy services. What you don’t know, however, is what we do to make sure that guest posting is three times as effective as it normally is.
Yes, we do every little thing I have described in this post: we contact trustworthy websites that offer guest posting, either for free or for a small fee, we create awesome content with a link that gets back to us and we reap the rewards.
But we do more.
And what I am about to tell you is literally what makes our Digital PR strategy more effective than anybody else!
Ok, enough with the set-up. It’s not going to blow your mind, in reality… We just love to use guest posting to set up our other PR efforts.
Imagine guest posting as the bacon in a burger: you can have either the bacon or the burger on their own, but when you mix them together? Delicious.
What other PR efforts do we use? Well, for starters, we take advantage of social media and update our feed whenever we get shared on a trustworthy website. That is the simple start.
Then, we target newspapers, radio outlets and other websites to get more coverage – rather than just using blogs for guest posting, we allow blogs to find us on their own and request content from us, which you can do too by contacting us today.
Finally, and this is our “jewel in the crown”, we use the full effectiveness of our reactive Digital PR campaigns to generate content that goes viral. Although this doesn’t benefit us directly, it benefits the website we guest post for, which in turn generates even more traffic.
To find out more, why not contact us today?
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