What is Guest Blogging?

These articles include your byline and, often are highlight by the editor of that website (or publication) as a “guest author” or researcher”. Depending on the publication, you may pay for your guest blogging efforts. However, this is not always the case. Some publications will offer non-monetary rewards for your post, instead, a link to your personal website or social media accounts.

How to Become a Successful Guest Blogger:

Set Specific, Achievable Goals:

The first step to starting a successful guest blogging process is to set achievable measurable goals. These goals may relate to your business performance (such as getting more leads or clients) or your website performance (such as improving your search visibility or your referral traffic). Whatever your goal is make it smart. When you have a clear goal, it becomes much easier to choose the topics you write about, the blogs you want to publish on, how often you writ and so on. Most importantly, a SMART goal will tell you if this strategy is right for your business and how much you should invest in it in the future. If you’re just getting start, here are five examples of measurable goal you can set: 

• Get X Referral visits from your guest posts or X% increase in referral traffic from your guest posts.
• Get X leads from referral traffic from your traffic from your guest posts or increase the number of leads from your guest posts by X%.
• Get X clients from your guest post or increase clients by X% from your guest posts.
• Get X number of high quality backlinks for relevant content from your guest posts.

Strategies to Get Published:

Clients and leads are obviously more important ta business and can be influenced by guest blogging, but accurate attribution can be a challenge.   

It’s a good strategy to ensure you get publish, but it serves the publishers’ goals rather than yours. For a successful guest blogging program, choose topics that meet your ultimate goal— whether its referral traffic, SEO performance, leads, or clients. Whether you’re a seasoned blogger or just learning how to start a blog, you should create a successful guest blogging program by choosing topics that meet your ultimate goal, whether its referral traffic, SEO, be it performance, leads or clients.

Start by making a shortlist of your top website pages that you want to promote and include in your future guest blogs. For each page, analyze your current status, such as your monthly SEO traffic and set a goal yours blogging. You may have an overall goal for the website and specific goal with the page. For each target page, choose a broad topic that relevant to your expertise and useful to readers. Then you can start using keyword research tools like SEM Rush and Ahrens (just to name a couple) to fuel your bank of ideas for future guest posts.  

Let’s take a Meta example and say we build a guest blogging strategy around the main topic of “Guest blogging”. We can create a variety of content under this topic umbrella: how to articles, thought leadership, case studies, and definitive guides.

Track Your Posts’ Result Over Time:

You’ll want to make sure you always compare your result to where you were at the beginning of the process (in step 1. Goal setting). You can use a tool like Ahrens to check everything from the number of backlinks, referring domains, organic traffic performance, or even changes in the number of keywords that a website is marketing for in Google like Beroyalextreme.com