So, You Want Guest Posts on Your Blog? Here’s How to Avoid Disaster

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Let’s start with this: inviting experts to create articles that you’ll post on your business blog is a smart idea. After all, your goal is to provide your customer community with topical, relevant, and original content, and this certainly fits in this strategy. Well, sometimes.

That’s because if you take a quick tour of the business blogosphere, you’ll quickly discover that all is not right in the state of guest blogging. In fact, for every article that informs and impresses, there are a handful (or make that two handfuls) that, frankly, fail to deliver. What’s going on? [Read more…]

5 Stealthy Tactics of Guest Posting

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SEO madness with excessive numbers of backlinks might have led to a temporary decline in popularity of guest posting services in content marketing (which didn’t last for long), but for bloggers guest posts always remained a steady way to get promotion and recognition. If you desperately wish to gain more readers or to reach new target audience, perhaps you should give guest posting a try. However, you’d better use certain stealthy tactics not to let yourself and your target blog down. [Read more…]

7 Tips to Attract Guest Bloggers to Write for Your Website

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Editor’s note: This post was written by Coby Stephens, content writer and marketing manager at Same Day Essays.

Getting guest bloggers to your site is a great way to add to your content without paying for it. The enticement for writers is that it gives them visibility and creates authority for their personal brand.

Here are some practical guidelines to efficiently attract guest bloggers. [Read more…]

The Art of Outreach: How to Build Relationships with Fellow Bloggers

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Success ladder

Blogging is a social activity. You’re not sharing your ideas or thoughts to a wall. The sheer act of publishing your post online opens you to opportunities of interacting with your readers and like-minded people. You can then build your relationships with them into something fruitful on a business scale.

That said, outreach skills are lost among bloggers. They are more concerned with launching SEO campaigns, which is not bad in principle. But devoting most of their time to this strategy prevents them from making a connection with their audience and influencers within their industry. Cultivating relationships can lead to more rewarding opportunities in the future.

If you’re not sure where to start with blogger outreach, below is a step-by-step process on how you can do it.

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Effective Ways to Get Relevant Traffic

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Heavy traffic in real life may be a bane to a commuter’s everyday life, but when you’re running a website, it’s gold. Having internet users visit your website is a really good thing, but for your website to be effective, the traffic needs to be looking for what you have to offer. They should be seeking the product or service of your website, be it a legitimate business or a simple blog site. Driving relevant traffic to your website can be done through effective marketing, and here are ways on how to quarry this valuable resource:

Relevant Traffic

 

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The Butterfly Effect of Matt Cutts’ Comments on Guest Blogging

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We may be well into the 2nd quarter of the year, but January 20, 2014 is a day which will live in infamy. This was the day that Google’s SEO and webspam aficionado, Matt Cutts dropped some comments that rocked the guest blogosphere. Fires were set, cannons roared, and chaos reigned. Digital marketers ran headlong out of their corner office windows in order to avoid the disparaging fallout to follow…

Matt Cutts
Image source

Luckily, they were on the first floor, but never mind that.

The point is the entire industry shifted, and further developments have only gotten juicier. Whereas it was once fairly simple to avoid being penalized or dropped from Google indexes, now there are a new set of standards to abide by within an entire genre of link building. Let’s begin our examination with a sobering view of what Google’s go-to SEO guru actually had to say on the subject of guest blogging. [Read more…]

Guest Blogging After the Death of Guest Blogging

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When Google condemns something publicly, or makes a sweeping statement like “guest blogging is dead,” anybody who’s got an interest in Internet culture tends to sit up and pay attention. Google’s decisions and changes throughout the years have been driving forces in the blogging world, so you can imagine that the purported death of guest blogging has both professional and casual bloggers alike bracing for sweeping changes.

Happy with Global warming?

So What’s the Story? [Read more…]

How to Find Blogs to Pitch Guest Posts

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Guest blogging can be a great way to grow your credibility and online presence (as well as giving links back to your website). Many potential clients and new acquaintances have connected with me through social media or my website after seeing a guest post I’ve written.  Besides connecting with readers that have read posts, it is also worthwhile to build strong relationships with the blog owners themselves.

By knowing several different bloggers that are in your industry, you can open yourself up to a variety of different possibilities– possible content for your own blog, sponsorship, partnerships, and more.

Finding Guest Posts

In order to find industry-specific guest posts, there are a string of search phrases you can use to find blogs. These include:

  • write for us + [industry keyword]
  • guest blogging + [industry keyword]
  • guest bloggers + [industry keyword]
  • contribute + [industry keyword]
  • guest post + [industry keyword]

These searches and related variations will help you find several different blogs that you can pitch to.

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How to Handle the 11 Most Common Scenarios in Guest Blogging

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If you’ve ever tried guest blogging then you know that it’s not always as easy as some people want you to believe it is.

For instance, there’s an awful lot of articles online talking about the importance of guest blogging and the benefits it can bring, which is all fine.

However, there’s lot less info on how to actually deal with guest blogging on the networking side (how to handle the common scenarios you can encounter when contacting people and sending your articles).

Basically, the idea of guest blogging itself is quite simple. You find a blog, send an article, and get published, but the practice shows that things often get a bit more complicated. Here’s how to deal with this.

Image credit: ScottieT812

The stages of guest blogging

Finding quality and relevant blogs where you can guest post is something you can surely do on your own, so I’m not going to talk about it here. What I am going to focus on is what happens after you decide to target a given blog.

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Guest Posting vs. Article Marketing: The Importance of Understanding The Difference

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Guest PostingIn the last couple of years, guest posting on other people’s blogs has become a solid marketing technique. At first, the idea of letting some stranger post their content on your blog seemed ludicrous. However, many bloggers realized the benefits of more fresh unique content, and the wheel has been rolling ever since. I have personally guest posted on many different blogs, and I have noticed that guest posting is sometimes clumped together with article marketing as if they are “basically the same thing.” They are NOT the same thing. There are many differences, and that is what I want to explore. Let’s start with the similarities of the two: [Read more…]