If you’ve been around the block from some time, you would know that guest posting is a very controversial way of improving your blog’s SEO.
Depending on who you ask, people would say that either guest posting is dead as far as SEO is concerned, or it’s very much alive and well.
There are two conflicting schools of thought regarding guest posting. I’m not going to say that it is completely dead. What am I going to say is that if you do guest posting in a very spammy way, expect to get penalized.
Google can see right through guest posting schemes and industrial-scale guest posting. They know when you’re harvesting links through guest posting.
What is Google’s view on guest blogging for links?
With that said, there is a way to do guest posting where you can benefit on many different levels.
I’m not just talking about SEO.
Even if we leave out SEO for a minute and focus on other benefits, guest posting is worth doing.
To put it in a nutshell, guest posting helps give you direct traffic, access to niche audiences, establishes a name for your blog, and helps you develop a solid online brand.
The SEO benefits are really an added benefit. It’s just gravy on top or a cherry you put on top of an ice cream sundae.
The real benefits are more immediate. In fact, there are so many benefits to proper guest posting that it’s really hard to find a negative.
The keyword here is “proper.” Too many people do guest posting in a very spammy way.
These are precisely the people you come across on SEO blogs and marketing forums that are trying to convince everybody that guest posting is dead.
Is guest posting dead?
It is far from dead.
It’s only dead to the people who use it as a cheap way to get backlinks. If you are going to do guest posting the right way with the right attitude, you need to do guest posting every single day.
This is why you need to be consistent with your guest posts.
It’s not something that you do every once in a while.
It’s something that you should add to your regular blogging activities.
Just as you would do regularly on your own blog, you should try to do several guest posts every week. If you make it a habit, you can position your blog to gain a competitive advantage.
The sad reality is that most of your competitors are probably not guest posting. A lot of them are probably bought into the lie that guest posting will only get you penalized by Google.
Make no mistake about it, their loss is your gain. They’re leaving money on the table for you to snatch.
It’s really important for you to have a game plan so you maximize the benefits you get from guest posting. Here are just some of the things you need to think when trying to make a decision on guest posting.
Blogs do not exist in a vacuum
If you do not guest post, chances are other blogs are not going to link to you. At the very least, they’re not going to link to you right when you launch.
When your blog launches, your blog will be very lonely. People haven’t heard of you. You’re not on the radar of established blogs in your niche.
This is why it’s really important to hit the ground running before you launch.
Before you even put up your blog, start approaching established names in your niche and pitch them ideas regarding guest posts. This way, when you start guest posting immediately right after you launch, you start getting backlinks.
At the very least, you start getting direct traffic from people who are interested in the niche topics that you are covering. Most importantly, you will be on the radar with influential bloggers in your niche.
You’re not just this unknown blog that popped out of nowhere. People can start evaluating you and going through the process of figuring out whether they can trust you.
Blogs require SEO context
When other blogs link to you through your guest posts, you establish a context. At the very least, you establish which niche you’re in.
It’s easy to think that Google is a very smart piece of software-it is. There’s no doubt about that.
However, it’s only so smart. It doesn’t know everything. You need to still spoon feed certain pieces of information for it to do its job properly.
One of these areas are context detection.
By getting guest posts out there to link to your blog; you establish a contextual relationship between the niche or sub niches those blogs are in and your topic coverage and expertise.
The more you do this, the more context you build.
The more context you build, the easier it would be for Google to classify your blog a certain way and rank you accordingly.
A lot of your target audience members are visiting blogs in your niche
So many bloggers worry about generating traffic. They think that traffic generation is their biggest problem.
I agree with them.
If you want to make money online, if you want to be successful online, you need to know how to drive traffic.
However, the problem is overblown. In fact, the solution is easier than we think.
The solution is already out there. Whatever niche you’re in, your target audience is already hanging out at certain websites.
In fact, many of them are hanging out at targeted forums dealing specifically with your niche. They are already out there.
By reaching out to other blogs and getting your brand in front of your target audience members’ eyeballs, you are giving them a way to access your site. This is one of the most crucial reasons why people should guest-post.
Forget about SEO or reaching out to influential bloggers. Focus on chasing after where your target audience members are.
They are already at other blogs related to your niche.
Instead of trying to generate these audience members organically through search engines, you probably would have a better return on your effort by simply going to where they are already and pitching guest post or contributed content to these blogs to get your brand noticed by your target audience members (Pooh long sentence :-) ).
Influential bloggers are always in need of free quality content
Even the most influential people in any kind of niche are pressed for time. In fact, the more successful their business becomes, the less time they actually have to write their own materials.
This is a golden opportunity to up-and-coming niche bloggers such as yourself to produce a win-win situation. You produce high-quality expert content for them, so they can maintain their high level of credibility and authority with their audience members.
At the same time, they link back to your site, so they can give you brand awareness as well as SEO and direct traffic benefits.
Everybody wins.
This win-win situation can only take place if you produce quality. This is the key.
This is the one thing that many spam guest posters completely miss out on. They think that as long as they come up with original content regardless of how poorly written it is, they’re doing their job.
That’s completely wrong. That is the kind of behavior that Google has been cracking down on.
All win-win relationships are based on a bedrock of quality content.
You have to put in the time, effort, and energy to produce quality content. Otherwise, guest posting is not going to work out for you.
Your brand needs more exposure
A lot of bloggers fail because they don’t look at their blogs as brands. They look at their blogs as simply this elaborate digital filtering devices that convert traffic into cold, hard cash.
While this is true, you have to think in broader terms. You have to look at your blog as your brand and as a collection of values that people can identify with so they can come back again and again.
This is how they build a community. This is how you get your visitors to talk to other people and evangelize your blog through their social networks.
It’s all about brand and perceived value. You have to first strategize a winning brand concept for your blog and do guest posting to communicate those brand values.
This is the best way to maximize brand exposure.
The reality is that the best SEO is only possible through maximum brand exposure. Google is on the record as saying they are going to pay more and more attention to brands because they know that serious businesses work to develop serious brands.
Fly-by-night operators, scammers, and spammers don’t care about brands. It takes too much work and too much money.
This is how Google is trying to filter serious online publishers from publishers who are simply looking to exploiting Google.
You need to act accordingly and focus on your brand.
Guest posting is a crucial part of building a solid blog brand.
Depending on who you ask, people would say that either guest posting is dead as far as SEO is concerned, or it’s very much alive and well.
There are two conflicting schools of thought regarding guest posting. I’m not going to say that it is completely dead. What am I going to say is that if you do guest posting in a very spammy way, expect to get penalized.
Google can see right through guest posting schemes and industrial-scale guest posting. They know when you’re harvesting links through guest posting.
What is Google’s view on guest blogging for links?
With that said, there is a way to do guest posting where you can benefit on many different levels.
I’m not just talking about SEO.
Even if we leave out SEO for a minute and focus on other benefits, guest posting is worth doing.
To put it in a nutshell, guest posting helps give you direct traffic, access to niche audiences, establishes a name for your blog, and helps you develop a solid online brand.
The SEO benefits are really an added benefit. It’s just gravy on top or a cherry you put on top of an ice cream sundae.
The real benefits are more immediate. In fact, there are so many benefits to proper guest posting that it’s really hard to find a negative.
The keyword here is “proper.” Too many people do guest posting in a very spammy way.
These are precisely the people you come across on SEO blogs and marketing forums that are trying to convince everybody that guest posting is dead.
Is guest posting dead?
It is far from dead.
It’s only dead to the people who use it as a cheap way to get backlinks. If you are going to do guest posting the right way with the right attitude, you need to do guest posting every single day.
This is why you need to be consistent with your guest posts.
It’s not something that you do every once in a while.
It’s something that you should add to your regular blogging activities.
Just as you would do regularly on your own blog, you should try to do several guest posts every week. If you make it a habit, you can position your blog to gain a competitive advantage.
The sad reality is that most of your competitors are probably not guest posting. A lot of them are probably bought into the lie that guest posting will only get you penalized by Google.
Make no mistake about it, their loss is your gain. They’re leaving money on the table for you to snatch.
It’s really important for you to have a game plan so you maximize the benefits you get from guest posting. Here are just some of the things you need to think when trying to make a decision on guest posting.
Blogs do not exist in a vacuum
If you do not guest post, chances are other blogs are not going to link to you. At the very least, they’re not going to link to you right when you launch.
When your blog launches, your blog will be very lonely. People haven’t heard of you. You’re not on the radar of established blogs in your niche.
This is why it’s really important to hit the ground running before you launch.
Before you even put up your blog, start approaching established names in your niche and pitch them ideas regarding guest posts. This way, when you start guest posting immediately right after you launch, you start getting backlinks.
At the very least, you start getting direct traffic from people who are interested in the niche topics that you are covering. Most importantly, you will be on the radar with influential bloggers in your niche.
You’re not just this unknown blog that popped out of nowhere. People can start evaluating you and going through the process of figuring out whether they can trust you.
Blogs require SEO context
When other blogs link to you through your guest posts, you establish a context. At the very least, you establish which niche you’re in.
It’s easy to think that Google is a very smart piece of software-it is. There’s no doubt about that.
However, it’s only so smart. It doesn’t know everything. You need to still spoon feed certain pieces of information for it to do its job properly.
One of these areas are context detection.
By getting guest posts out there to link to your blog; you establish a contextual relationship between the niche or sub niches those blogs are in and your topic coverage and expertise.
The more you do this, the more context you build.
The more context you build, the easier it would be for Google to classify your blog a certain way and rank you accordingly.
A lot of your target audience members are visiting blogs in your niche
So many bloggers worry about generating traffic. They think that traffic generation is their biggest problem.
I agree with them.
If you want to make money online, if you want to be successful online, you need to know how to drive traffic.
However, the problem is overblown. In fact, the solution is easier than we think.
The solution is already out there. Whatever niche you’re in, your target audience is already hanging out at certain websites.
In fact, many of them are hanging out at targeted forums dealing specifically with your niche. They are already out there.
By reaching out to other blogs and getting your brand in front of your target audience members’ eyeballs, you are giving them a way to access your site. This is one of the most crucial reasons why people should guest-post.
Forget about SEO or reaching out to influential bloggers. Focus on chasing after where your target audience members are.
They are already at other blogs related to your niche.
Instead of trying to generate these audience members organically through search engines, you probably would have a better return on your effort by simply going to where they are already and pitching guest post or contributed content to these blogs to get your brand noticed by your target audience members (Pooh long sentence :-) ).
Influential bloggers are always in need of free quality content
Even the most influential people in any kind of niche are pressed for time. In fact, the more successful their business becomes, the less time they actually have to write their own materials.
This is a golden opportunity to up-and-coming niche bloggers such as yourself to produce a win-win situation. You produce high-quality expert content for them, so they can maintain their high level of credibility and authority with their audience members.
At the same time, they link back to your site, so they can give you brand awareness as well as SEO and direct traffic benefits.
Everybody wins.
This win-win situation can only take place if you produce quality. This is the key.
This is the one thing that many spam guest posters completely miss out on. They think that as long as they come up with original content regardless of how poorly written it is, they’re doing their job.
That’s completely wrong. That is the kind of behavior that Google has been cracking down on.
All win-win relationships are based on a bedrock of quality content.
You have to put in the time, effort, and energy to produce quality content. Otherwise, guest posting is not going to work out for you.
Your brand needs more exposure
A lot of bloggers fail because they don’t look at their blogs as brands. They look at their blogs as simply this elaborate digital filtering devices that convert traffic into cold, hard cash.
While this is true, you have to think in broader terms. You have to look at your blog as your brand and as a collection of values that people can identify with so they can come back again and again.
This is how they build a community. This is how you get your visitors to talk to other people and evangelize your blog through their social networks.
It’s all about brand and perceived value. You have to first strategize a winning brand concept for your blog and do guest posting to communicate those brand values.
This is the best way to maximize brand exposure.
The reality is that the best SEO is only possible through maximum brand exposure. Google is on the record as saying they are going to pay more and more attention to brands because they know that serious businesses work to develop serious brands.
Fly-by-night operators, scammers, and spammers don’t care about brands. It takes too much work and too much money.
This is how Google is trying to filter serious online publishers from publishers who are simply looking to exploiting Google.
You need to act accordingly and focus on your brand.
Guest posting is a crucial part of building a solid blog brand.
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