Guest posting continues to be a great tool for brand managers and digital marketers to build a brand, improve search engine rankings and acquire inbound links to boost organic traffic. Links coming from well-regarded, successful sites are still an important criterion for search engines to determine the credibility of a website, which is why more and more small and medium businesses are exploring guest posting as an SEO strategy.
If your local business has been utilizing SEO to some extent but has not fully exploited the potential of blogger outreach, you’re missing out on one of the most effective marketing tools available to entrepreneurs today.
While guest posting is a specialized skill that requires in-depth knowledge of SEO along with access to a vast network of influential bloggers and site editors in your niche, you can use your entrepreneurial network to get started and gain a few local links that point back to your site.
Here are five tips that will help you start your DIY link building campaign on the right foot.
Pitch to a site visited often by your potential customers
According to the link-building experts at Outreach Monks, a premium white-hat guest posting service, an outreach strategy can be truly successful only if it involves gaining quality backlinks from legit, high-authority websites.
If you’re a local online business that sells kids’ bikes, for instance, you can reach out to local sports clubs, parent bloggers, event organizers, and so forth, and propose to write a guest post on their site in exchange of a mention of their business on your blog (if you have one).
This process can be tedious, but even getting a couple of mentions on popular local sites can help increase your brand’s visibility. To make the most of your efforts, however, choose your guest posting sites with care.
Don’t write content you wouldn’t read
Whether writing for your own site or for a guest post, make sure that the content is original, interesting and error-free, and provides value to your readers. In addition, make sure your submission is in line with the site’s publishing guidelines, or your effort may go to waste.
A white-hat (ethical) guest posting campaign relies on niche-relevant, spam-free content with naturally placed editorial links that won’t irk the reader.
You can hire a professional writer for the job, but it would cost you much less time, money and effort if you outsourced the entire process to a full-service guest posting agency—rather than coordinating with different professionals while also trying to learn the nuances of effective link building.
Don’t stuff your post with links
Don’t make the mistake of stuffing your guest posts with several mentions of your site or you could displease your reader even before they completed reading your post. Worse still, your post could be outright rejected by the blog owner for being spammy or salesy. A maximum of two backlinks should serve your purpose—more than that will sound more like a sales pitch and less like an informative post written for the benefit of the reader.
This article has been contributed by Nancy Clayton. She worked in marketing before she found joy in writing. She now writes for Submitcore blogs as a full-time career.