Guest posting is widely considered to be one of the most effective and efficient SEO and promotional strategies in the current Internet landscape. Backlinks you build this way look natural and improve your search engine ranking, the audiences of the host blogs provide infusions of targeted traffic, relationships you build with webmasters and blog owners can be useful not just within the boundaries of the strategy but in the long term as well… These are just some of the reasons to try this approach out. However, there are things you should be aware of before you start investing in it – and this article is about them.
1. You should be extremely careful in your choice of host blogs
Six or seven years ago, using guest posting was easier – it did not matter much what you wrote and where you published it. The important thing was to scatter your posts across as many blogs as possible and make sure they all had backlinks to your website. Today this approach does not work – Google considers it spammy and is likely to penalize you instead of increasing your ranking. Anyway, even legitimate backlinks from low-authority websites are almost useless. If you want your guest posting strategy to bring results, you have to focus on writing a relatively small amount of high-quality, original posts and publishing them on high-authority, popular websites.
2. Guest posting is not easy
Guest posting may be an effective strategy, but before you attempt it you should understand that it is not going to be fast and easy. For this strategy to give a significant payoff, you have to be ready to invest a lot of time and effort into it. Looking for suitable host blogs, establishing relationships with their owners or webmasters, negotiating the details, writing posts themselves and promoting them afterwards – all this requires time and dedication. In this guide by guest posting service Luckyposting you can that even such a simple thing as pitching your post idea to the blog owner is a multi-stage process that requires your attention at every step.
3. Guest posting is not a quick fix
Sometimes brands using guest posting have breakthroughs, and a single especially successful post can cause a great influx of visitors, increase ranking and bring other advantages. However, it happens relatively rarely and, anyway, you cannot predict it. There is no surefire recipes for a perfect guest post. Normally you only start seeing results after a few months of regularly posting high-quality posts across numerous blogs. Taking into account the amount of work that goes into it, some marketers may find it discouraging.
4. You have to love writing
If you are not going to hire a guest-posting agency, be prepared to do a lot of researching and writing. It can make serious inroads into your core activities and free time. Therefore, if you intend to do it on your own, you have to be good at it and love it. Otherwise, even if you manage to gain momentum to begin with, you are bound to start losing steam sooner rather than later. If you have trouble updating your own blog and have to spend a lot of time thinking about what to write next, it may be a good idea to either hire a writer or delegate the entire process to professionals.
5. You have to be ready to communicate
We already said that there is a lot more to guest posting than meets the eye. You not just write articles and send them to blog so that they can publish them. A lot of – even the majority of – the work associated with guest posting happens behind the scenes. Accompanying activities, like contacting blog owners, establishing connections with them, discussing the details of future posts, engaging visitors in comments section and promoting the posts across your other channels and so on take as much time as writing per se. If the idea of constantly being in communication with numerous unknown and half-known people is not appealing to you, this job can be quite challenging.
Guest posting is rightfully considered a highly effective promotional strategy; but it carries with itself a number of caveats. It can be challenging and even off-putting for some people. However, it is an excellent opportunity to grow, and if you manage to weather it through, the results will not be long in coming!
