The Simple Secret to Effective Guest Blogging

Guest blogging has long been established as an effective method of improving your SEO (search engine optimisation) through link building and a good way to reach a new audience. Thanks to fantastic blogs such as DailySEOtip.com who allow you to submit guest articles, such as this one, you can increase your influence on your chosen subjects as well as drive traffic to your own website which is ultimately the aim of any SEO activity.

So time to get to the point of this article and share my simple secret to effective guest blogging. I’ll leave the “how to guest blog” and “why guest blog” to others for now, if you want to get some background then check out those links.

Guest blogging can be a time consuming process. Writing is hard, bloggers are picky and you’re open to criticism. This is why it is important that whenever your article is accepted, and featured by the blog, that is has the biggest chance of being shared by numerous sources.

My simple advice is a three step process:

Step 1 - Once you’ve identified which blog you are going to submit a guest post to, check out their most popular posts. Many blogs have a section on their site which categorises popular posts, otherwise go by the number of shares via social media or comments made. Make a list of the top 5.

Step 2 – Now that you know what the blogs audience likes to read, write an article related to that subject and your website. Within the article include lots of positive references to other brands and link to them. List articles such as “Top 10 inspirational web designs”, “15 SEO tips from the SEO experts” or “20 beautiful brand designs from 2012″ are a fantastic way of legitimately referencing other brands within a guest post.

Step 3 – Time to get social. Typically the blog you are submitting the article to will share it via their social media channels, but on top of this you can now send individual tweets mentioning the brands you included. For example:

“15 SEO tips from the SEO experts – http://bit.ly/url – including the brilliant @seosmarty and@lorenbaker. Written by @Fasthosts”

9 times out of 10 at least one of the brands or people you’ve positively mentioned in the article and tweeted will retweet and share via their social networks as a way of saying thanks.

Suddenly the article that was originally only written for SEO value has now reached thousands more people leading to more traffic to the guest post and your website. Hopefully a few more Twitter followers as well. It goes without saying that it is a good idea to focus on referencing brands that have a large Twitter following (though not too large in case they never see your tweet!).

The principles behind this idea can be applied to any content you create, whether it is guest blogs, articles for your own website, your webinars, videos, case studies and infographics.

The simple secret to effective guest blogging is to
“Create content that you know a selected target audience is interested in, and share it to them in partnership with influential organisations and individuals connected to that audience.”

Written by James Hay, Social Media Executive at Fasthosts Internet.

For more great blogging advice as well as tips and news about social media, online marketing and SEO, check out the Fasthosts Blog. You can also follow James and the Fasthosts team on Twitter @Fasthosts