Boosting Your Blog’s Audience with Guest Posting: Practical Tips

Guest posting is widely believed to be one of the most effective promotional tools available to an online marketer – at least if you play your cards right. A strategically placed post with a high-profile blog in your industry can bring your website more traffic than months of steady SEO efforts. However, the results of even the best guest posts are often short-lived: they lead to a sharp influx of traffic for a few days but do not increase your blog’s audience by much in the long term. However, things do not have to be like this. Whether you write your guest posts yourself or hire a guest posting service, they can have long-lasting results – with a little help from you.

 

1. Route traffic where you want it

Linking your guest post to your homepage is not always the best idea. Write your guest post with a specific goal in mind – for example, lead the reader up to a solution to a specific problem, a solution covered in more detail in your blog or in an e-book available to your subscribers. Then the backlink in your bio can lead to the landing page specifically tailored for those who have read this post: it will tell more about this e-book, provide links to additional posts dedicated to the problem and offer the visitor to subscribe. Start bombarding visitors with value propositions the minute they set their eyes on your blog, and the likelihood of them subscribing is much greater than if you allow them to look through your blog on their own.

2. Make sure your blog has great content, to begin with

Guest posting is not the right approach for new blogs. Even if you write excellent guest posts for other websites, it will not do you any good if there is too little content on your own blog. After following you through the backlink, a visitor should see that there is a lot more to read on your website. Therefore, before you try guest posting, make sure you have at least a dozen high-quality, long-form posts on the topics relevant for the audience of the blog you intend to guest post at. Luckyposting, a well-known blog posting service, has a great guide on managing a business blog, you can find some great advice there.

3. Always place backlinks to your blog in your guest posts

It is non-negotiable. Some blog owners are reluctant to put backlinks to other resources in the post they publish, especially if they lead to relatively obscure blogs. If you encounter such a person, either try to persuade him/her to see your point of view or look elsewhere. There is no point in writing guest posts without backlinks. As links from high-authority websites accumulate, it will increase your own authority and Google rankings, therefore boosting your audience. If you hire a guest blogging agency, this is usually not an issue, because they already work only with blogs that accept posts with backlinks.

4. Be active in the comments section of your guest post

If you choose the blog and the topic right, comments will follow. Now it is your job to make yourself visible and heard in the discussion. Look for threads that may benefit from your input, follow them and participate. Make sure you do not do it for the sake of participation alone – your comments should offer value, help commenters solve their problems and show yourself as an authority in the subject matter.

5. Promote your posts across all your channels

Make the existence of each guest posts as widely known as possible. Mention it on all your social media, put links on other resources that belong to you, put links to it in other conversations you hold online, write a post on your own blog showing how hyped you are about writing for such a website, put the information in your mailing list. Create as much buzz as possible.

As you can see, effective guest posting is much less simplistic than simply writing great content and offering it to great websites. There is a lot of additional work to be done under the hood – but we hope that now you can handle it!

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