How to become a Guest Blogger

Creating great content is a surefire way of getting a lot of traffic and sales, especially if you publish that content on somebody else’s web page. In addition to this, if you manage to put your content on several authority websites in your industry, the search engines will start considering your website an authority, boosting the ranks of your keywords, not to mention that you will get laser-targeted website visitors.

First of all, you need to write great content; if you aren’t sure how to do that, hire somebody else to do it for you. Then, you need to take action and ensure that your great content is published on an authority site. And then, you’ll have to repeat these two simple steps until the sales start to overwhelm you.

This isn’t rocket science, but you should have some great samples of your own work before trying to push your content on an authority site; having a blog in the niche you’re trying to guest blog for is mandatory. In fact, make sure to browse the authority site you’re targeting on a regular basis, reading dozens of recent articles and thus getting to know what they like to publish.

Then, go even deeper; point your browser to http://www.quantcast.com and then type in the name of the website you’re targeting in the “Search” box – you will get a lot of information about the amount of website traffic, demographics (gender, age, number of kids, education, etc), similar blogs that the visitors are also reading and so on. And have I mentioned that this incredible resource is free? Make sure to use it and then you’ll know who you are writing for; you will also ensure that the visitors that come to your website through the article resource link will find exactly what they are looking for. Also, don’t ignore the blog readers’ comments; if many of them are requesting a related blog article, you might be the one that fills the gap.

But what should you write about? Your best bet is to go with evergreen topics, articles which offer advice that’s never outdated. A “Saving Your Marriage in 10 Easy Steps” article will make a great read for the decades to come, while a “Best website hosts of 2005” article will be read less and less as the time goes by.

Another good idea is to create lists using other people’s hard work. A “7 Great Websites to double your blog traffic in 24 hours” article would be well received if you can back the title with solid evidence. “How to…” articles are bound to be successful, especially if you can break down a complex process into several easy to follow steps.

A good tip is to identify and explore the popular posts for the targeted website, by using a simple Google search, for example:

“popular posts” site:lifehacker.com

Then, click Google’s “More search tools” link on the left side of the screen, and choose the results within the last month – we aren’t interested in seeing what was popular on Lifehacker 5 years ago. Read these blog posts and you should understand what’s hot.

In fact, it’s better to copy / paste these articles in a document editor and read them from there; this will also allow you to compute the average number of words / article, in case that this isn’t specified in the submission guidelines. And while we’re here, copy / paste just the titles in a separate document – you’ll get lots of great ideas for your own article titles this way.

No authority site will want to publish an article that’s similar with something they’ve published before, so make sure to use Google again, this time verifying if your targeted keywords appear in the result list:

“my targeted keyword” site:authoritysite.com

Try several variations of your keywords, with and without using quotation marks around them; if you don’t get any significant results it’s a good sign. And even if you see a few results popping out, make sure to read those articles and rewrite your content until it stands out on its own (if needed) by discussing topics that aren’t mentioned in those articles.

Try to get the targeted keyword in your article’s title, if possible; the actual URLs will include the article title most of the time, and a contextual link that comes from a page that has your keyword in its title and in its URL is going to give you a lot of SEO link juice. Don’t try to squeeze the keyword in the title if it doesn’t fit it naturally; the website owners might reject your submission because of that. Repeating the keyword once or twice in the article body is always a good idea. If it’s allowed, use H1, H2 and H3 tags that include the keyword – they will help your SEO efforts.

Now that your great content was published, make sure to promote it posting links to it on as many social networks as possible. Also, be sure to respond to all the comments; fortunately, you’re going to get lots of them.

But what should you do if your article is rejected? Proofread it, edit it and then read it again; sometimes you will discover that the article has some flaws. If it’s a great article indeed, try to submit it to several other websites, until it is accepted – maybe you didn’t target the right audience at the very beginning. And if this fails as well, you can always post the great article on your own blog

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