Thank you for following our lates blog posts – The Ultimate Guide to Guest Posting. Now we have visited many stages through the Ultimate Guide to Guest Posting, we wanted to do a brief recap of what we think are the most important points to take forward with in your guest posting. Take a look below:
Research
Look in depth into your brand/blog and decipher what is your main purpose for guest posting.
Consider the benefits of guest posting and how this is going to be relevant for your industry, audience, scale, current statistics e.g. DA
Analyse your competition in the market so that you can learn from their strengths and weaknesses through your own guest post journey
Create a list of potential websites or platforms that are relevant to you and your content that you would like to publish on
Creation
Create content that will be affective to share as a guest post, or to create a backlink to from your guest post article
Consider the different types of content you would like to share that will be relevant to your audience and the site you are going to publish on
Ensure that your article has good SEO to achieve the best results
Analysis
Use helpful tools that will allow you to track different aspects of your guest posts to make developments to progress your guest posting journey
Promote your guest post where applicable through things like social media and email marketing to help boost your web traffic further
Connect with possible collaborations who can help you action your guest post
If you would like any help in your guest posting journey, we would be more than happy to talk about some guest post opportunities at AI Guest Posts. We would love to share more information about our platform or our 12 individual brands that are available for guest posts.
Guest blogging remains to be a highly effective link-building technique and a great way to reach a wider audience, drive more traffic to your website and show your value as a thought leader in your niche.
However, the most important aspect about a guest post transaction is that it needs to be mutually beneficial to both the writer of the article and the owner of the site publishing the article. You should be providing as much value through either your content or the success of your site, that it is a good match.
Techniques to find guest post friendly sites
1. Define your purpose for guest posting
2. Decide on the right sized websites/blogs that will suit your content and blog
3. Create a list of websites that accept guest posts
4. Connect with similar websites/blogs on social media
5. Google your search terms to find guest blogging websites
6. Search for guest blogging websites in reverse
7. Use tools to help you find guest posting opportunities
Define your purpose for guest posting
With guest posting, finding the correct fit for your article can mean a couple of different things. Its best know exactly what you want to achieve from a guest post opportunity before you choose where to publish it.
Some of the options for this would be:
Some there suits the niche of your content perfectly
A site where you can achieve your goal or income, promotion or both
Somewhere that values your work
Decide on the right sized websites/blogs that will suit your content and blog
Be realistic in your choice of sites where you are wanting to post your article. If your content and link to your own website is much more developed then the site you are publishing on, the site probably will not have as much traffic as you would like to be generating. Likewise, if the site you wish to publish on is successful, you will need to keep in mind, that if these are paid guest posts the higher the traffic and DA, the higher the price.
Create a list of websites that accept guest posts
Start making a list of all the sites you find that have potential for your content. You can then keep the ones you do not act on immediately as reference to look back on and for potential collaborations at a later date.
Connect with similar websites/blogs on social media
Use social media as a helpful tool. Run a search on the actual social media platforms you use like: ‘guest post’ to see what different options come up. It could lead to an alternate route to some useful sites you may not have already thought or heard of. It will also be a good tool to find the most recent current information about guest posts.
Google your search terms to find guest blogging websites
Google is a great place to start in the search for guest posting opportunities. You can use any of the following keyword searches to find blogs that accept guest posts. Just replace keyword with keywords from your industry.
keyword “submit a guest post”
keyword “guest post”
keyword “guest post by”
keyword “accepting guest posts”
keyword “guest post guidelines”
Search for guest blogging websites in reverse
To successfully achieve reverse guest blogging and make it work for you. Here are some essential tips from Small Business Trends:
1. Figure out what you want out of a guest contributor. How often do you want them to contribute? Is there a particular subject you want discussed?
2. Make a list of all the authors you may want to feature. After you make a list, consider doing a few searches to find other writes who you aren’t familiar with.
3. Go out and try to connect with those authors and talk with them about this opportunity.
This process is not easy, so if it does not work out as planned, use the experience and find out who they are connected with and try to outreach with these too!
Using tools and skills to find
When you search for a website in your niche on Google you will get a vast array of options. However, not all these sites will be open for guest posts, so it’s best to narrow your search by including terms likely to be used by websites looking for guest posts plus your niche or topic. For example: Home Décor + “Guest Post”
Conclusion
The act of finding where you would like to publish your content will take time and errors, to learn what works best for you and your blog but by using some of these option above may help with focus on certain aspects!
Now we have discussed what a guest post is and the benefits, where to post and creating content, the next stage in the guest posting journey is to promote your content and make sure it is making positive results for you and your business.
Including useful content is the most important backbone of a successful blog, but it needs to be promoted in the correct way to reach your desired audience. Constantly assessing your SEO and adding content promotion to your guest blogging strategy will improve web traffic and results. For it to be successful, you need readers constantly accessing your blog and optimising your content can be a very important aspect of your marketing as it can lead to a huge increase in traffic to your website and business.
This process takes time to become established and many give up after a short while as it is doesn’t present the results they want. By setting realistic expectations of what you would like to achieve from your guest blog, will help the process, along with your time and patience.
To help your blog be as successful as possible, here are some of the most effective ways to promote your blog and grow your readership:
Email marketing
To encourage even more traffic to your blog post, you can add a link in any email marketing you are doing, such as:
Newsletter sends to any subscribers
Share your posts across social media, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook etc.
Encourage engagement with your blog posts through your audience
Using your existing audience, and engaging with them about a new blog article, is a great way to also keep them interested and upsell your business.
Follow good SEO practises
Ensure that your content you are going to be promoting is written well and has good SEO or search engine optimisation. This means that if your content contains good SEO, it will be ranked higher in the search engines, like Google. Making sure the keywords included are really going to be interesting to your audience and drive traffic and boost your content through the ranks. Ways to help this are:
Using online tools to help with keywords on sites like SEMRush and Moz.
Keeping your SEO in your content up to date, and analysing what can be updated and changed over time to ensure it stays current will also improve this!
Track performance
To be able to see how successful your post is, it is a good idea to track its performance and what traffic is generated, especially if you make improvements, or promote it across different platforms. Setting yourself targets whether this is the number of followers, monetary value or increase in web site traffic, this is an effective way to track your progress and use these metrics effectively. There are tools available to help with this like Google Analytics!
By monitoring content, and using these ways to promote and develop it, will keep your content current and interesting to your audience, leading to good traffic and allowing it to rise through the search engine ranks. Next in the Ultimate Guide to Guest Posting, we will be showing some of our most viewed guest posts of last year and why they were so effective!
Being the end of the year, we wanted to look at which articles across all of our 12 brands are bringing the most interest to our readers and if there are any common themes between them. So, we have put together our top 5 most viewed articles along with their amount of pageviews and why we think these are the most viewed!
To read any of the articles, simply click on the image for each one and it will take you through to the content!
5. GHP – 11 Benefits of Taking Vitamins
This articles comes in as 5th place and has reached at total of 51,262 pageviews since 1st January 2022.
4. LUXlife – Top 10: Sustainable Cities Around The World
In at 4th place is this article on sustainable cities around the world, has gain a total of 51,558 pageviews this year.
3. GHP – Revealed: The Travel Hotspots That Could Be Damaging to Your Health
With a large focus on health, this GHP article has reached a total number 52,022 pageviews since the start of the year.
2. LUXlife – The Top 7 Most Luxurious Hotels in the World
Coming in as the second most view article, this piece on the most luxurious hotels in the world, has reached 84,006 pageviews!
1. GHP – 10 Reasons It’s So Important to Stay Healthy
Here, in top position, is an article focused on why and how is it important to stay health and this has reached a large 130,024 pageviews since January 2023.
By looking at our top 5 articles, and seeing why they have been so popular with our audience is interesting. Are there are some similarities between them and things we could take forward to use within our own guest post articles?… From these top 5 articles, it seems that listicles are a good technique to help boost pageviews and bring in traffic.
Creating a listicle is known for being effective for readers as listing content allows our brains to digest information and make it easier to read. So, if our audience are seeing these types of pieces and are looking for quick information, they are clearly choosing these over a passage of text that may take longer to read or requires more concentration.
Choosing the right brand for your content also seems very important. All of these articles are very true to the brand guidelines they are published on. There is no point in publishing your content on a site which has no relevance to your content as it will not grab the audiences attention how you intend it to!
It is important to give your content some time to develop and create a strong online presence and backlinks. Some of these articles have been published for a number of years, and are now gaining traction and achieving the results they would like!
These are all easy things that you can implement within your own guest post journey and if you have some content you would like to publish, upload it now via our platform – www.aiguestposts.com
If done effectively blogger outreach can really elevate your business and help towards growing your exposure to new audiences. Blogger outreach is a cost-effective marketing technique that can help gain exposure with a more focused approach.
In terms of a strategy, it is good to help build relationships and bring several industries together. Not only this but it can also be a great way to include aspects of SEO and content marketing to your overall business strategy. Bloggers who share their interest in your business will then also help promote your service to the right audience. These types of bloggers have a dedicated audience who are trusted by their readers and alongside different promotions, will enforce your business to success.
Types of Blogger Outreach
There are many ways you can implement this into your work, take a look at our favourites below:
Guest posting – there are many platforms now that make it easy to publish your article on someone else’s website. This allows you to gain exposure to their exciting audience. You should research this before hand to make sure that you are showcasing to the right industry where your content will be effective. Take a look at AI Guest Posts, which has 12 established brand websites for you to choose from, making it easy to find somewhere relevant to your content.
Giveaways – giveaways are another key type of blogger outreach strategy, which work really well as these are beneficial for both the brand involved and the blogger. An example of this would be where the brands provide products and the bloggers to host competitions and engage with people who would like the free product. This can be done over social media campaigns, YouTube, blogs etc. This helps greatly towards brand awareness and exposure!
Creating Blogger Outreach
When looking to start this journey, there are some points you should research and consider to tailor your own business. This includes:
Outlining your goal
Define your criteria
Create appropriate targets
Know your audience
Identify you USP and structure your approach
Collect your outreach data of where you are going to publish and reach out to them
Analyse your results
Optimise your strategy to work
Blogger outreach best practices
With blogger outreach, this is a budget conscious approach to marketing but can sometimes be difficult to implement. Here are some of our tips to make sure you cover all basis:
Make sure you choose bloggers/post in the relevant niche – blogger outreach is only worthy if you choose relevant niches to your industry. If you do not select a relevant niche, it could have the opposite affect to your business, and bring in less or negative traffic.
Create a good pitch – writing a well-crafted email that grabs the attention above hundreds of other emails that go into the blogger’s inbox. Keep it concise and straight to the point as to what you are looking for and this will give a higher chance of them starting a conversation about what you are looking for.
Building a rapport – creating a strong relationship with a blogger or an influencer can directly boost your traffic. Creating a trustworthy relationship will enhance your blogging so it is a good idea to be clear about what you are wanting to achieve from the beginning.
Conclusion
Blogger outreach is important for every business, no matter the age or size. If blogger outreach is not something you have used within your marketing yet, it is highly recommended. It can bring many rewards and success for your brand and boost sales! By sticking to some of the point above will enable to you make the most out of it.
One of the most common goals within marketing is to rise through the ranks and be on page one of Google, Bing or Ask.com, but how is this achieved? With so many processes involved in bringing your content to the forefront of search results, it is understandable that stealing that prime position on page one is difficult!
There are certainly more than four stages to this process but breaking it down makes is easier to understand and implement into your own content marketing. Here are our 4 easy steps to understanding how your website gets ranked:
Crawling
Rendering
Indexing
Ranking
Crawling
When a search engine requests webpages from websites’ servers, this is called crawling. For example, if Google itself was searching through their own web browser typing in or clicking on a link to a webpage. Search engine machines all visit webpages similarly to how we do – when a search engine visits a webpage, it complies notes on the webpage of the content and the links. It will make sure to visit all of the links on that webpage and make a copy of them.
Most of the major search engines have their own technology to do the ‘crawling’ for them, and they are called ‘Googlebot’ for Google and ‘Bingbot’ for Bing. These search engine ‘bots’ can discover webpages’ links in some of the ways listed below:
When links are created back to their page
Through backlinks
Social media posts
Documentation including links
URLs found in written text and not hyperlinked.
In some instances, it will depend on how accessible the links and other information is to the bot, and it can affect how the search engine interprets the webpage. Therefore, showing the importance of creating strong backlinks and doing this in different and creative ways, such as guest posting.
Rendering
Once the search engine crawls a webpage, it will then ‘render’ the page. Rendering involves taking the HTML, JavaScript and cascading stylesheet (CSS) information to generate how the page will appear to the user on a desktop or mobile.
Search engines will store compressed files of how these pages will appear. Some will only keep a shorthand version of the webpages in a much more simplified formatting, i.e. just the text.
Indexing
The next step in this process, is to determine what the content of the page is about and whether it will be stored in the index. Similar to an index of words found at the end of a book, the search engine index works in the same format.
A search engine index contains many keywords and keyword sequences that are featured on the webpage, and it then associates them with a list including where the keywords are situated.
Indexing is also like a master database look up table, allowing to easily find exactly what you are looking. Of course, this is now much more advanced – when you type in your keyword to google it lists all of the URL’s that would be of interest to you based on the keywords across a huge scale. Search engines like Google are keen to keep this search engine as effective as possible so there is a chance that any content that is of low quality, will not become indexed and make it high in the ranks!
Ranking
The most popular step in this process, ranking. Once a search engine has a list of all the webpages associated with a particular keyword or keyword phrase, it must decide an order that all of the pages relating to those words will appear. Ranking is a very complex step which so much time and investigation has been spent on because getting it right is the difference between success for some businesses.
Most people who work within the SEO industry will know or have heard of the ranking process and the ‘algorithm’ in how it works. Different algorithms can include number of pages, views, clicks, comments, likes, shares. With new pages and links added every day, Google’s method to rank these is done quite quickly allowing an opinion to be made about the authority and usefulness of the page with its hundreds of factors included in the algorithm.
Simply understanding these stages to a search engine ranking, can help your content marketing preparation by including some of these points to achieve that no.1 spot!
