Recently I have tried my hand at a little guest blogging. When it comes to promoting your website you can do one of three things:
- Wait for others to do it for you – social media
- Pay some SEO company to go off and do whatever they fancy, such as submit your site to 1000 web directories which NOBODY will ever look at
- Spread the word through guest blogs
OK, there are other options, such as spamming forums and blog comments, but these are generally not very effective and can get you classed as a spammer.
In fact, anything which you do to actively add a link to another website for your own personal gains is really spam (unless its an advert of course!).
Guest blogging, when done properly, is a much more professional way to promote your services. Essentially you are doing what a good web marketing firm will do. You seek good quality blogs in your industry and ask the owner if they would publish a guest blog from you. The conditions are generally simple: you write something for their blog, keeping in mind their audience and the style of the site (something every good copywriter always does) and in return they allow you to place a link back to your site.
You have probably seen them and not realised. For example, if this article was a guess blog, I would finish it with something like:
Jon Wade has been dabbling and generally causing trouble online for a few years now. He blogs about it all on Webologist.co.uk where he often gives some free SEO advice, but mostly he rambles a lot and talks nonsense.
See what I did there? One link to the home page which shows the domain and one to an internal page. Showing the domain is sensible just in case a cheeky publisher decides to remove the links at a later date – the article will still help promote you and your site even if the reader cannot click through to your site.
The idea of the “deep link” is that acts as a call to action (i.e. it encourages people to click it) and it may also help you out in the search engines, i.e. you will rank better for those words. The ranking part is considered a secondary effect, a bonus if you will, as the main aim is to get people reading your articles and choosing to do business with you as a result.
The good thing about guest blogging is that it is a two way partnership. You approach websites which you like, which hopefully means that your market will also like them, and the website publishers then accepts your article as being something worthy of their site. The fact that your content can be refused should mean to Google that this is not a “free for all” site like many of the website and article directories are.
There are also some great services around which help bloggers and publishers hook up. My favourite is My Blog Guest (MBG) which is managed by Ann Smarty, a professional marketeer and SEO. MBG works in two ways: Firstly there are forums where you can find websites to blog on and request bloggers for your site.
Then there is an article directory where bloggers can write content and then publishers bid on the right to use it. The blogger still chooses where the content gets published. They have set some rules to ensure that publishers do not edit articles without permission or remove or alter links. There is even an automated alert when a part of your article is changed.
Guest blogging really is a good way to promote yourself online. It is a way to speak direct to a new audience. Imagine it like you are visiting other companies and speaking about your product. It is a great opportunity.
Of course, you do not have to do it yourself, you could hire a pro blogger to do some guest blogging on your behalf!
