Grow Your Website with Guest Posts

Building and launching your own website is hard enough – but what are you supposed to do when you open your doors and find out that, despite your expectations, people aren’t lining up to check out your products?  This is the struggle that most website owners face.  No matter how good your content or your products are, they aren’t going to make you successful if you don’t have traffic coming in to your site.

So how do you find these interested buyers and bring them back to your site?  Well, there are tons of different traffic generation strategies out there, but one of the most consistently underutilized is guest posting.  As a guest author, you contribute content to other peoples’ websites and newsletters, in exchange for a link back to your site.  Not only do you get a high quality, relevant backlink for your efforts, but you also build up traffic from the people who read your guest post on another webmaster’s site.

Here’s how to start taking advantage of the power of guest posting to drive visitors back to your site…

As you might expect, the first step in the process is to find sites that you can post on.  If you’ve been around your industry for a bit, you likely already know which sites are well respected as authorities in your niche.  These sites are a great place to start your guest blogging journey.  But if you’re new to your niche, you can find relevant websites by using Google’s Blog Search page (or similar website directories) and searching for keywords related to your site.

Try to come up with a list of at least 10-20 websites that you could potentially write for.  Don’t worry -  you don’t need to write articles for all of them just yet.  Instead, we’re going to narrow down the list according to the following criteria:

Site strength – When writing guest posts, it’s best to seek out sites with a higher PageRank and Alexa traffic score than your own.  You want your guest post to be seen by as many people as possible (so that your article will send a good number of visitors back to your site), so it doesn’t make sense to post on new sites or sites without a significant amount of traffic.

Site activity – As you analyze each of the sites on your list, make a note of how active they are. Do you see people sharing their own thoughts and opinions in the comments section of each article posted?  Does the owner of the site have a strong social media following?  Posting to sites with more active, engaged users will help increase the exposure of your article.

ñ  Site relevance – It isn’t necessary to post to sites that are exclusively in your industry, but they should be at least somewhat related.  For example, if you run a site that sells pet products, you don’t need to post to sites that deal exclusively with pet issues, but you should avoid guest posting on sites in the home construction industry.  Not only will this improve the quality of the traffic that winds up on your site, it’ll help from a search engine optimization standpoint as well.

Evidence of existing guest authors – Not all websites accept guest posts, so it’s a good idea to examine each site on your list for evidence of past guest authors, including posts by these featured writers or pages that share guidelines for potential authors.  Remember, it doesn’t hurt to ask if you find a good site that doesn’t have either one of these elements, but it will be easier to get your post accepted if you know that the site already takes on guest authors.

Using these criteria, pare your list down to your top 3-5 guest posting choices.  Now it’s time to get in touch with the sites’ owners!  There are two schools of thought on the best way to do this when it comes to successful guest posting:

The “write first, ask questions later” approach, which involves writing an article first and then sending the finished copy along with your proposal to the site owners.  Ideally, you will have researched the types of content that work well on the webmaster’s site and written on a topic that you feel will interest his or her readers.  Writing the article first allows you to demonstrate your skills as a writer and prevents the “back-and-forth” that can sometimes delay the guest posting process, but it does have one major weakness – if the author isn’t interested, you’ll be stuck with an article that was custom tailored to that site.

The alternative is the “obliging writer” approach.  Instead of starting with a finished article, you come up with a potential topic and send just the proposal to the owner of each potential site you’d like to post on.  If the owner is interested, you begin the writing process and revise your article as necessary based on the site owner’s feedback.  It does take a little more time to go from concept to finished guest post using this method, but it often has a higher likelihood of succeeding since you’re developing the article alongside the site owner.

Obviously, there are advantages and drawbacks to each of these methods, and you may find yourself using them both in different situations.  However, there are a few general rules you should keep in mind no matter which approach you use:

Always be respectful of the site owner’s time. Be polite and professional in all communications, and remember that the site owner is doing you a favor by sharing your content.  If he or she asks for revisions, do them well and finish them in a timely manner.  Expect that you’ll get plenty of “no” answers along with a few “yes” opportunities, as not all sites accept guest posts and your writing style may not be a good fit for all of the sites on your list.

Be upfront about your expectations.  There are no “generally accepted” rules to guest posting, as the specific arrangements in each case are made between the site owner and the guest author. For this reason, be sure to let the site owner know upfront what you hope to get out of the process.  If you’d like to write a 500 word article and include two links back to your site, include this information in your proposal so that there’s no confusion later on.

Make guest posting a regular part of your traffic-generation strategy. Guest posting once in awhile is fine, but what really makes this strategy successful is it’s ability to take you from beginning website owner to well-respected industry authority.  When people see your posts on multiple sites within your niche, your perceived authority skyrockets, so try to get several posts to launch around the same time for maximum effect.

Finally, keep in mind that there’s a learning curve to guest posting.  You probably won’t be able to get the owners of major industry sites to take your requests seriously from the start, but if you invest the time in developing content for progressively larger and larger sites, you could see a substantial improvement in both traffic to your site and your relative authority within your industry.

Image: philip kalantzis-cope