The guest post, or the publication of a blog article as a guest author, is a fabulous strategy that brings many benefits to online businesses and blogs seeking to gain authority and improve their presence on the Internet. Do you know what it’s about? Here I show you what it is about and how to get the most out of collaborations between blogs.

Do you know what a guest post is? Have you written a guest post on a blog? A guest post, or guest article, is a great content marketing and Off Page SEO strategy that helps raise the authority of your brand and improve your reputation; it is about publishing an article of yours, written as a guest author, on a third-party blog. Also, in the same way, it is about asking other authors for collaboration so that they publish on your blog.

There are many benefits that writing or receiving guest posts brings you and, therefore, today I am going to tell you how to improve your Web positioning through this fantastic, and still quite unknown, online marketing technique. Because even if you already imagine how to make a guest post, you have to know very well some tips and tricks to apply it correctly and get the most out of it for your interests.

Because it is clear that a good guest posting strategy is not about wanting to publish your articles left and right on other Web pages, nor about publishing irrelevant content from third parties on your blog, but that collaborations based on guest posts should :

be well analyzed beforehand,
responding to a clear commercial strategy,
of useful content and
the result of a quality collaboration.
If you do not know how to start making guest posts, or you have already tried to get the most out of this strategy without achieving the expected results, it may be good for you to contact us and count on our Internet advertising and SEO Off page services, to achieve collaborations with most suitable guest posting.

Do you want to know how we design guest posting strategies for our clients? In this step-by-step guide, I show you how to make and squeeze guest posts, managing to increase your visibility on the internet, attracting more visits to your website and raising the authority and reputation of your brand. Let’s go there!

What is a guest post?

A guest post is the publication of an article (post) of yours on a third-party blog as a guest author (guest) of it. Or vice versa: publication on your blog of an article written by another author to whom you have invited to collaborate.

A guest post, also known as guest posting or guest blogging, is one of the most effective and powerful content marketing techniques out there today; powerful to enhance the authority of a brand.

Guest posting is a collaboration between blogs, a Win-Win strategy, or Win-Win, which means that it works and both parties (blog and guest author) benefit, and that’s what they like the most!

Is it worth writing and publishing a guest post?

At this point, I keep hearing many people who are not convinced to write and publish their articles in another Blog, “that would be like giving quality content to the benefit of another company”, much less publishing articles from other authors/companies in their blog, “that would be like advertising them!”. But believe me, there are so many more advantages than any drawback you can imagine!

If you dare to give it a try and manage to publish a guest post on a quality external blog, you will see how the Off Page SEO of your website benefits and you will begin to obtain the benefits of a winning content marketing strategy.

Here are some reasons to start a guest post strategy today.

Gives you Authority

Whether it’s publishing your own article as a guest author on another blog, or publishing an article by an author you’ve invited on your blog, guest posts give you authority.

If someone important in your niche publishes a post on your website, this earns you the trust of your target audience, since no serious influencer is going to want to collaborate with you if you are not really a good professional.

In the same way, if you collaborate as a guest author and publish your article on another blog, that means that you are respected and recommended by that author and that your brand is a weighty reference, that is, you also achieve authority!

Expand your client portfolio

One of the biggest benefits of collaborations between blogs, such as this strategy based on the guest post, is that it is a great opportunity to grow your company’s client base.

Through guest posting, your quality content can reach more people than if they never “left” your blog. And not only that, but you reach the right people: this type of collaboration achieves that many users and potential clients, who until then did not know you, suddenly do so on the recommendation of someone they follow (the author of the blog to where are you posting your guest post), what better way to get introduced to that whole new niche audience! The dream of any commercial of your company!

Writing guest posts or articles as a guest expands your client portfolio

Get readers for your blog

Getting a solid and loyal audience that closely follows your blog is not something that is achieved overnight, but is the result of a lot of effort and time.

If your posts seem to be getting ignored and not getting the expected traffic, guest post collaborations with other blogs can put you in the eye of the Google hurricane to start getting new readers for your blog, right where everyone wants to be!

You get external links (backlinks)

Achieving quality external links to your Web page (backlinks) is one of the aspects that search engines value most to classify a page. That is, to position yourself more and better in Google.

This is one of the most efficient off-page SEO techniques there is to achieve the long-awaited rise in the ranking of web search engine results, so you cannot miss it.

Open doors to offer content to other brands

If you are looking for a new business opportunity, such as offering your content or writing services to third parties, collaborations with other blogs are a great platform to make yourself known as an expert.

Also, it allows you to offer your experience so that others can use it and hire your services.

Step-by-step guide before making a guest post

Define your objectives before making the guest post
As I said at the beginning of this post, making a guest post is not just publishing content “like crazy”. It’s all about posting the right content and on the right blog. To achieve this, you first have to define what your goals are for this digital marketing strategy and, recommended, use the Design Thinking methodology.

What do you hope to achieve by writing a guest post? Basically, everyone who resorts to this strategy hopes to achieve three things, or at least one!:

get external links (backlinks),
gain more traffic to your website, and
improve the authority and visibility of your company.
The ultimate goal is to sell, right? But depending on what your short-term goals are that you want to achieve with guest posts, you can determine what to write about, who to collaborate with, and where to post.

Find where to publish your guest post
Once you have your goals clear, it is time to find the candidate blogs to publish your guest posts that bring you closer to them. I say “candidates” because you need to evaluate whether the place where you would initially like to publish your article as a guest has the necessary requirements for your publication to be truly effective and commercially profitable for your company. What are these requirements?

The blog should be directly related to your niche.
Have an audience that is really interested in your content.
Have a good number of readers and followers.
Being managed by someone who squeezes social networks to promote their content.
So let’s see where you can search and find those good candidates to publish your guest posts.

Start the search on Google

One way to test the ground and start building a list of potential candidates for our guest posts is to do Google searches using keywords or keyword strings.

Go to the Google bar and type the main keyword of your niche, for example “web design”, followed by “submit a guest post”, “guest post rules”, “publish a guest article” as well as words and phrases similar, that indicate to the search engine that you want to find places that accept this type of collaboration. You will be impressed with all the sites that Google will show you.

Gossip on Twitter
Although Twitter does not seem like an ideal place to find blogs or websites to publish your guest posts, it is a real treasure!

I assure you that on this social platform you will be able to find very good candidates for your guest articles, and the best thing is that most of these are not on Google, so you will be able to take advantage of your main competitors even if they are already doing guest posting strategies. .

The method is similar to the previous case in Google: in the Twitter search bar, type the main keyword of your niche along with “guest post”, “guest article”, “guest author”, “guest post” or similar .

Use this trick with Google Reverse Image

With this trick that I am going to explain to you with Google Reverse Image, you will find many blogs that allow collaborations and that are related to your niche. Without a doubt, it is one of the most fabulous ways to find good candidates to start publishing, wonderful!

Find out who are the most influential people in your niche who usually do collaborations and guest posts.
Google the name of these people.
Within the list of results, choose the “Images” option and download the photograph of this person.
Upload that photo to Google Reverse Image and search.
You will see all the web pages where they show this image, a large percentage of which will be from blogs where a guest post has been published, voilà!
Research the most respected bloggers in your niche
The most popular and most trafficked blogs, in a certain niche, tend to be those where the most recognized authors (bloggers) publish frequently. Why not post on those same sites?

I recommend that you investigate who are those most respected bloggers. Once we have some names, Google “guest article” or similar, along with the author’s name. This way you will see the blogs where these respected authors publish their guest posts, easy and effective!

Keep track of your competitors’ backlinks
Good candidate blogs to publish your guest post would be those where your main competitors are already contributing their guest articles.

There are several tools with which you can find out which sites link to your competition’s websites, software like Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs, for example, or free tools like SEO Review Tools. So keep track of these backlinks by simply typing in the URL of the Web page you want to investigate.

Do not ignore comments on your posts
If you want to get candidate blogs for your guest post, then you should be aware of the comments you receive on your blog because, if the articles you publish on your blog are of quality, surely some comments will come from other authors who have blogs on your niche, so you could be gaining an opportunity to do a collaboration of this type.

Go through social networks
I already told you that one of the most viable social platforms to get good candidate blogs where to post your guest posts is Twitter, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get opportunities on other networks, so take a walk through them and find out which pages or blogs they accept these types of collaborations in your niche.

Prepare the theme of your guest post
If you want to get another blog to accept your collaboration proposal and publish your guest post, you must be astute to choose the topic that you are going to publish and prepare it.

If you get a blogger to accept your collaboration, it will not be enough to write well, applying Copywriting techniques and writing about 2,000 thousand words with quality content. The article must be of interest to the audience and must be at the forefront of what people are looking for and expect to read.

Start preparing ahead of time; don’t improvise! This is key to hitting the target and starting to gain authority within your niche.

Use this trick with Google Reverse Image
With this trick that I am going to explain to you with Google Reverse Image, you will find many blogs that allow collaborations and that are related to your niche. Without a doubt, it is one of the most fabulous ways to find good candidates to start publishing, wonderful!

Find out who are the most influential people in your niche who usually do collaborations and guest posts.
Google the name of these people.
Within the list of results, choose the “Images” option and download the photograph of this person.
Upload that photo to Google Reverse Image and search.
You will see all the web pages where they show this image, a large percentage of which will be from blogs where a guest post has been published, voilà!
Research the most respected bloggers in your niche
The most popular and most trafficked blogs, in a certain niche, tend to be those where the most recognized authors (bloggers) publish frequently. Why not post on those same sites?

I recommend that you investigate who are those most respected bloggers. Once we have some names, Google “guest article” or similar, along with the author’s name. This way you will see the blogs where these respected authors publish their guest posts, easy and effective!

Keep track of your competitors’ backlinks
Good candidate blogs to publish your guest post would be those where your main competitors are already contributing their guest articles.

There are several tools with which you can find out which sites link to your competition’s websites, software like Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs, for example, or free tools like SEO Review Tools. So keep track of these backlinks by simply typing in the URL of the Web page you want to investigate.

Do not ignore comments on your posts
If you want to get candidate blogs for your guest post, then you should be aware of the comments you receive on your blog because, if the articles you publish on your blog are of quality, surely some comments will come from other authors who have blogs on your niche, so you could be gaining an opportunity to do a collaboration of this type.

Go through social networks
I already told you that one of the most viable social platforms to get good candidate blogs where to post your guest posts is Twitter, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get opportunities on other networks, so take a walk through them and find out which pages or blogs they accept these types of collaborations in your niche.

Prepare the theme of your guest post
If you want to get another blog to accept your collaboration proposal and publish your guest post, you must be astute to choose the topic that you are going to publish and prepare it.

If you get a blogger to accept your collaboration, it will not be enough to write well, applying Copywriting techniques and writing about 2,000 thousand words with quality content. The article must be of interest to the audience and must be at the forefront of what people are looking for and expect to read.

Start preparing ahead of time; don’t improvise! This is key to hitting the target and starting to gain authority within your niche.

Wait for the best moment to suggest the collaboration
Collaborations have a time frame and a purpose, so you won’t always be able to find the perfect opportunity to get accepted.

Some high-traffic blogs often announce when they are looking for collaborations, so keeping an eye on this information will help you get the perfect time to submit your proposal.

If the blog you are targeting for your guest post mentions or links to you, feel free to contact them first to thank them and then to suggest posting a guest post on their blog.

Write a fantastic collaboration invitation that they can’t refuse!
The first impression is what counts, right?

If this were not true, email marketing campaigns could be done in 5 minutes by anyone, but they need effort, creativity and a lot of cunning. The same goes for this invitation that you want to send.

When you send your guest post proposal to the blog editor, he will have a few seconds to decide if he reads your proposal or deletes it ipso facto.

If you have followed my guidelines, you will know that you must create a personalized email that does not start with the typical phrases that smell like spam, such as ‘Dear, dear sir, etc.’, but that you must be close and strategic to get their attention.

In addition, you must consider what guidelines are specified in the blog you want to publish in, to submit your proposal according to the format and style it requires, as well as remember that it is necessary for you to define who you are and what benefits the blog would gain if it accepts your proposal.

In your email everything should be clearly explained, in a subtle and natural way possible. A good example would be:

Good morning {publisher name}!

My name is {your name} and I have been a faithful reader of your blog for some time. You may remember me from some of my comments like the one I made on your article {URL or article title}, I loved this article by the way! Good job!

After reading you for a while, I dare to write to you because I would love to contribute to {blog title} with a post as a guest author.

Before sending you this email, I have been brainstorming some topics that I think your readers are very interested in and would be very useful:

– {idea from guest post}

– {idea from guest post}

– {idea from guest post}

If it’s okay with you, I’d work really hard to make sure the article I send you is completely original, creative, and with information that can’t be found on any other blog, with the high quality of your articles!

Of course, there is no obligation, and only by reviewing the article that I would prepare and send you, you could decide whether or not to accept that article on your blog.

So that you have an idea of the quality of the article that I propose, I am sending you a link to a guest post that I recently published on {name of the website}: {URL of another guest post made by you}

If you want to know a little more about me, you can find me at: {web address and social networks}

I would love for you to take a minute to answer me, thank you!

Until then, I send you a hug and see you on your blog,

 

How to write the perfect guest post?

There’s a lot I could say to help you create a terrific guest author article, and this clearly includes a ton of SEO Copywriting strategies. But I will focus only on the most important:

A guest post does not revolve around you
Although many showoffs love to write articles on other blogs as guest authors to show off their business, promote their brand and get free publicity, this is unethical!

The purpose of a guest post is to create quality and useful content for the audience of that blog, and that they can take advantage of it to answer their concerns. Don’t make the mistake of turning a collaboration into a poem to your ego!

Respect the style and focus of the blog where it will be published
Remember, you are a guest; the guests respect the style of the place where they arrive, they are not there to make changes.

Review the style of the other posts, their length, the type of images they use, whether they include videos and other audiovisual resources, the tone, etc., and try to adapt to this, even when you use a different style on your blog.

Create an in-depth and really useful article
The purpose of a guest post is to serve as a reference in your niche to provide answers, propose solutions, help the audience and clarify doubts. This way you gain authority, expand your brand name, and the blog that gave you the opportunity gains the trust of its target audience by offering them useful content.

Develop a topic in depth, but without making it extensive, heavy and difficult to understand for readers. You will see how you receive comments and they will want to continue reading your posts.

Give air to your content, don’t get bored!
No one wants to read a 5,000 word post that looks like a boring testament or history essay, crammed with facts and information that seems never ending.

If you want to collaborate effectively, you have to be astute about organizing information, and one way to do that is to give your paragraphs air. I eat? Making lists! Lists are easier to read, more attractive, and are interesting to look at.

Take advantage of this and other strategies, to facilitate the reading of your article, and you will see how you get more acceptance as a collaborator.

Give air to the content of your guest post article, don’t get bored!
Choose a winning title and about something highly sought after
I always say that to create a winning article, you have to start with a winning title.

If you want your post to generate a lot of traffic, it’s important to research post ideas and topics so you can be astute when choosing a title.

The title is like the cover letter and has the power to attract or alienate your readers.

Don’t forget to create internal links
Although it is not your blog, it is good that you include quality internal links within your guest post, as this is positive for the SEO of the blog in which you collaborate and the editor will be happy to see that you are interested in its web positioning.

Trust me, doing this will earn you the trust of the editor and they will call you for future collaborations.

Invite readers to interact with their comments
Blog comments are powerful because they generate traffic, help get more subscribers and it is the beginning to improve the user experience, because there people comment if they are happy with the publication, leave suggestions for new topics, ask questions, etc.

Put a call to action (CTA) in your guest post and persuade readers to leave comments on it.

Also, respond to these comments so that you establish a link with the audience, since it is useless to collaborate, publish and leave readers forgotten. Interacting in the comments is beneficial for your conversion rate.

Take advantage of your guest author bio
While I’ve made it clear that publishing a guest post isn’t to talk about yourself, it does give you the opportunity to create a short bio as a guest author.

Take advantage of it to add a link that leads to your website, to direct towards a specific product, invite them to read a publication or to invite them to follow you. Depending on the objective of your collaboration, you can do one or the other, but naturally.

Track your post as a guest

You can’t leave your guest post as a half pregnancy. It is not just about publishing and that’s it, but you must follow up:

reply to comments,
share and publicize your post on your social networks,
try to get a new collaboration, and even
Send a thank you note to the editor of the blog where you posted.
It’s part of the work involved in collaborations. Do not publish and disappear forgetting your “baby”, there is still a lot to do!

Measure the results of your guest post
As I said, collaborating with a guest post does not end when you manage to publish on a third party’s blog. After achieving this, you have to measure the results to verify or not that the article as a guest met your objectives.

One way to obtain data is through Google Analytics and its incoming link tracking system.

Latest Guest Post Strategy Tips
Larger Web pages do not ensure more traffic
Let’s be clear: one of the purposes of the guest post is to generate traffic and improve the position of your website in Google results.

However, if you want to gain traffic by collaborating, don’t go for the bigger sites: just because they get more visits doesn’t mean you’re going to get more organic traffic.

One way to measure success and ensure traffic to your website is by the number of comments received by the blog where you are going to publish your guest post. I know many small blogs that get up to 50 comments for each post, and that, dear reader, is a good indicator of traffic for any collaboration!

Squeeze external links
The incoming links to your website (backlinks) are very important for the positioning of your website and should never be ignored, even when you do a collaboration.

Of course, I remind you that you must be astute to include it naturally throughout the text and whenever it leads to content related to the topic you are developing, and to help the reader.

If you don’t do it right, your bounce rate will reveal your bad practice to the search engine, and to the editor of the blog with which you are collaborating!

Lean on infographics

Pictures say more than words, many times. Today, social networks are full of photographs and infographics, so I recommend you make use of them.

What I like best about infographics is that they adapt to your style, are easy to create, and give you the opportunity to be very creative.

In addition, there are numerous online tools with which you can create fabulous infographics that can mark a before and after in your organic traffic. I am not exaggerating when I say that a well thought out, useful and attractive infographic can easily put you on Google’s radar.

Sell yourself with a memorable bio

A boring biography is the common denominator among many bloggers. But those who have understood that creating a great bio is important for traffic, today they have conquered the search engines.

If you sell your bio with shrewdness, honesty, and some humor, believe me, in no time your collaborations will improve your online presence and your brand will be respected.

Tell who you are, what you do, what you offer and why it is worth visiting your website, in a close and jovial way, and you will see how the audience follows you. My tips for writing the perfect ‘about us’ section could help you create an amazing bio.

 

Conclusion: making a guest post is useful to expand your brand and conquer Google

Although many Web page owners still do not know how to make a guest post to improve their visibility and positioning in Google, this strategy has been tested by many large brands, especially at the level of content marketing and Inbound Marketing.

Guest post collaborations are a perfect opportunity to reach your target audience and engage with new audiences, as well as deepen ties with important people in your niche. That is why it is one of the main techniques of SEO Growth Hacking.

The SEO of your website will thank you and you will be getting many assets. I assure you that it is a safe bet if you plan a guest post strategy as soon as possible. Maybe tomorrow is too late! Maybe tomorrow your competition is already collaborating with the most important blogs in your niche!

Did you find this article helpful? As I’m sure that’s the case, hehe, I invite you to share it with your friends on social networks, so they can also learn how to make a guest post correctly.

Finally, remember that at Xplora we are an SEO and web positioning company, so I say goodbye indicating that you will find a simple form below, which you can fill out to let me know your concerns and leave me your comments. And so I can contact you!