How to Leverage Guest Blogs to Assert Your Expertise in Your Niche
Driving organic traffic to your website is as important as getting traffic from advertisements and promotions.
There are quite a few ways of doing this, like internal links, long-tail keywords, or blogging regularly.
Blogging is especially important to keep adding fresh content to your website. It is important to keep adding articles filled with SEO-optimized keywords and related to your niche so that search engines like Google can rate your website higher on searches engine. Thus, driving organic traffic that might be searching for a topic related to your article to your website.
If your website is well monetized, this increase in traffic could add some extra revenue.
Today we’ll be taking a look at how you can use guest blogs to assert your expertise in your niche.
What is guest posting?
A guest post is when a writer writes an article for a website without being part of the company. Some guest blogs can be featured, but many guest blogs are essentially ghostwritten, meaning the author gets no recognition.
Guest blogging is an excellent way for freelance writers to make good money, but guest blogging is also done by plenty of SEO agencies to insert backlinks to their website, adding to organic traffic as well as allowing search engines to take more notice of their website.
What makes a great guest post?
There are a few ways to spot a great guest post writer, namely:
- The articles are educational.
- The article is relevant to the topic.
- Content is high-quality, mostly free of grammatical errors, and reads easily.
- SEO optimized.
- Between 700 – 3000 words.
Great guest post writers aren’t easy to find, but they aren’t rare unicorns either.
If you’re the one applying, make sure that you have an article or two written already; even if these aren’t published articles, websites will need to have an example of your writing to know if you can write or not truly.
If you’re a company looking for guest post writers, just follow the bulletins mentioned when looking for good writers. Have them send an example or offer them a topic and let them write a short article for you.
What is a niche edit?
Niche editing is when an author of a guest post uses a link within their article that goes to a different article that has information beneficial to the reader, most likely related to the topic of the original article.
The main idea behind adding these links is to create a web of backlinks, especially on websites that have a large amount of traffic already.
It also gives you a bump up on search engines since you’ll be linking your article to older articles that have already been indexed and trusted by Google or other search engines.
Now that we have some background info, let’s take a look at how you can leverage guest posts to assert your expertise in a niche.
From the example above, a backlink is added to the words “search engines.” It’s clearly marked blue when a backlink is added. The link takes the reader to another post about writing for search engines. This is a relevant topic since the post is about content plagiarism and writing, so users who are reading this might want to know how to write better for SEO.
Leveraging Backlinks on Guest Posts
Now that we know what a niche edit is, it’s important to know how to get them.
The most important place to start is to make sure you have a firm grip on the topic you’re writing about and make sure you stick within the context of the topic.
Backlinks are an important part of raising brand awareness and getting leads, which is why it’s important to get as many as you can, on as many websites as possible.
Especially when those backlinks are on an article that is getting a lot of traffic.
Here is how you can start getting backlinks with guest posts:
Find your niche
It’s safe to say that without actually knowing what you want to write about. It would be difficult to convince a company to let you write for them.
Before you start, decide what your niche will be and make sure that you have a fair amount of knowledge about the topic.
Finding guest blogs to write
Once you’ve decided what you want to write about, start looking for websites that have similar topics to what you want to write about.
Take a glance around their website and look at whether they accept guest blogs. Plenty of websites accepts submission for guest blogs and will even have relevant information about the format of the article and the submission process.
If a website does not have that information, contact them via the given channels like email or phone number.
Here we can see an example from webflow. Guest blog writers who are interested in writing for them can come to this webpage and look at all the requirements and prerequisites before writing an article for submission.
Write a great article
Placing backlinks in articles that rate low for SEO, or even worse, are just poorly written, won’t see much traffic.
Adding your backlinks into an article without traffic will only result in your backlinks receiving very little attention anyway. Resulting in time lost writing the article, as well as possibly a chance at writing more articles for that website.
There are plenty of tools and tips to help you write if you struggle to write good content. If at any point you get stuck, take a look online for some inspiration.
Cutting a deal
Once you’ve sent out a few article submissions, you’ll be hearing back from the websites. At this point, websites that are willing to post your article will most likely request some edits, and you should ask for a favor too.
Most websites do allow one or two backlinks in their guest blogs, but if it’s not specified, you need to discuss this with the website you submitted the article to.
Let the magic happen
Once your guest post is added to the website, depending on how much traffic the website gets, you’ll quickly start seeing more engagement and clicks on your article coming through the backlink on the guest post.
From here, you need to have a goal. Either get customers from the backlinked article further through the website towards a product or subscription; or send them to another article through backlinks on this article.
Write for the audience
When writing a guest post, it’s important to write with an audience in mind. Not only will it help you keep the readers engaged, but it also makes it easier to add the article as a backlink to another, related article easier.
When a backlink is added, the users who are most likely to click through and engage with it are the ones that are interested in what your article is about.
Thing is, the people who are reading the article currently with your backlink in it are reading the article because it’s a topic they are interested in. To get a high click-through rate on your backlink, it needs to be relevant to the current article it is in and add substance or extra information the reader cannot find in the current article.
Increasing brand awareness and trust
Becoming an expert in a niche takes time, but with enough guest posts under your belt, you’ll quickly start gaining a following on your own website, especially if the backlinks are well-placed and written.
When readers find backlinks to your website often, they’ll start to associate your brand with a certain topic and would most likely use your website if they have an issue with the related matter.
From there, more companies will approach you to write guest posts for them, allowing you to create more backlinks on websites with decent traffic, as well as build strong relationships with other brands and companies.
Improved ranking
As more and more backlinks to your website are added to other, well-established, and trusted websites, Google will most likely start associating your website with those. This could lead to your website ranking higher up on search engines, effectively driving more organic traffic toward your website.
Post guest blogs on social media
Don’t forget the most important way of getting your guest blogs out in the open, social media!
When deals are being made with the website that’s hosting the guest post, include an agreement that stipulates who can post what and where.
Social media posts that link to your guest blog could increase engagement a lot, especially if targeted advertisements are used.
The only issue is whether you would be posting the guest blog article on your social media account or whether the company you wrote for will post the article on their accounts.
Most websites that allow guest posts tend to add social media links back to the author’s social media accounts, sometimes in the author’s bio even.
Build a community
As well as using social media to get more people clicking through your guest blogs and the backlinks in them, building a following on social media is also important.
There are a few reasons for this.
- Firstly, having a large following on social media will allow a large number of people immediate access to a new guest blog once you post it on your accounts.
- Secondly, building a community of followers will give you a reputation that helps more people trust you as an expert in your chosen niche.
- Lastly, when a user first clicks through a backlink on a guest post; or even through your author bio, they need to see that you have an online presence. A large community is a quick way to win over new users.
Get it right today!
There are plenty of benefits to guest blogs that both writers and websites can use to effectively boost their own content on search engines.
Following the guides and tips in this article, you should be able to start leveraging guest posts to assert your expertise in a niche faster than you can say, “start leveraging guest posts to assert your expertise in a niche.”
Tags: Business Reputation Marketing, SEO.
