Guest Posting 101: An Introduction

I get a lot of questions to my inbox about guest posts. I actually do a lot of guest posting on behalf of a client of mine – I’ve help him build a great blog, and now I’m helping him spread the word through guest posts. Guest posting is a way to get some major traffic to your blog – if you do it correctly.

So, I wanted to write a short series here at BlogWorld about guest posting based on the success I’ve had in this area. This post is an introduction to guest posting – but scroll to the end to find other posts on writing, pitching, and promotion.

There are two main goals with guest posts:

Gaining traffic through readers who enjoyed your post and want to read more from you.
Gaining traffic through SEO by linking good keywords back to your site.

In my opinion, a good guest post considers both elements. If you write an awesome guest post, but don’t consider SEO at all, you’re missing out on traffic that you could have had without compromising the integrity of the guest post. On the other hand, if you write a crap guest post just for SEO purposes, not only will you have a hard time placing it, but you’re also losing traffic because potential readers won’t click through to your site. If you’re going to the trouble of writing and pitching guest posts, make sure they’re optimized for both types of traffic!

There’s a third benefit to guest post that is somewhat hidden and there’s no way to measure the benefits, at least not in terms of traffic numbers. I can tell you from my own experiences that it exists, though! The advantages I’m talking about is name recognition. As you begin to guest post other places, even if people don’t click through to your site, they start to recognize your name. If you want to be an authority in your niche, people have to know your name. Maybe they don’t check out your site after reading this guest post or that guest post…but if your name keeps popping up with blogs they do read, it is only a matter of time before their curiosity gets the best of them and they become a reader.

Don’t forget that guest posting, at the very least, puts you on the radar of the blogger who posts your work. Sometimes, this is the best way to make an a-list aware that you exist. They otherwise might not realize that your blog is awesome – but if you propose a guest post that is a good fit, they’ll head to your site to check out your other work.

I’ve even gotten jobs this way. People needing writing done in a certain area sometimes peruse the big-name blogs to look for contractors. It’s actually an ingenious strategy for finding up-and-comers to write for your projects.

I hope you’ll give guest posting a try. If you’re new it the idea, stick around – in the next post, I’m going to talk about penning the perfect guest post. When all of the posts in this series are live, you’ll be able to see them at the follow links: