Guest posting means writing blog posts and giving them to blogs. For each blog post you write, there’s an author bio with a link back to your site. After reading your post, readers click on the link to see what else you’ve got. For the blog owner, it’s free content; for you, it’s a good backlink that gets you both search engine attention and human eyes on your work.
The only trouble is that it’s time consuming. You’ve got to write the content, which for most of us takes an eternity by itself. Next, you have to find blogs with good traffic and submit to them. Communicating with blog owners can be tough because they may ask for edits. You also have to keep track of your submissions to make sure you don’t submit the wrong article to the wrong blog.
The traffic that you get from guest posting is usually not monumental, but this all depends on the blog. High-traffic blogs usually have stricter editorial guidelines. The stuff you give them has to be good. Lower ranked blogs accept anything because they want free content, but you won’t get as much traffic.
What happens is that the week or two after your post is published, you’ll get a surge of traffic from the site. After that, you won’t get anything. That means all the time you put into writing the post, finding the blog, and managing subscriptions doesn’t get you long-term traffic.
The way around this is to keep submitting blog posts regularly. Set it up so that you submit one weekly. Monday, you write your post. Tuesday, you contact a blog owner. By Friday, your goal is to have it published and drawing traffic. Now you can see how time consuming it is to make guest posting effective.
The backlink is the main bonus, but there’s another huge advantage as well. I submit guest posts regularly and I want to get the most bang for my buck since it’s such a chore, so this is what I learned. You not only get the traffic but you can leverage your posts to establish your expertise.
The way to do this is to use your guest posts as a kind of portfolio. For one thing, people are impressed that you’ve been published on somebody else’s blog. This tells them that you’ve got some expertise in your niche. When you have a profile on LinkedIn or some other social media site and it has links to all of these guest posts on blogs people know, you can really build authority.
If you want to make guest posting work with the minimal amount of work, here’s what I suggest. Like I said, get into a weekly routine of writing and publishing. You can outsource almost every part of the process. Hire a ghost-writer to do your content, get a virtual assistant to research blogs that accept guest posts and have a high rank for you, and you can even hire an assistant to contact blog owners. If you do it consistently, you’ll get steady traffic and soon you’ll have a huge portfolio of your work to boost your author status.
Tony
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