Guest blogging can bring multiple benefits for you and your business. You get useful backlinks that help your web rank higher, you make your name known in the industry, and you get in front of new audiences. It all sounds very cool, but many people don’t really think it through and they literally waste their time on such activities. No stress! We’ll tell you how to avoid foolish mistakes and look at guest blogging as a strategical part of your marketing activities.

Why guest blogging?

Let’s face it, guest blogging is not for everyone and it might not be the right solution for you.

These are the three main benefits why you might want to look into guest blogging:

• building your personal brand,
• gaining additional traffic,
• gaining backlinks.

You might just drop the idea of guest blogging if:

• you don’t have sufficient time and human resources,
• you don’t have a strategy behind guest blogging,
• you haven’t prepared an overall marketing strategy.

Guest blogging must be part of a wider online marketing strategy and you must be clear on why you want to dedicate your time and energy to it. So, for example, if you want to boost your personal brand and introduce yourself as an authority in the industry, you will be searching for relevant blog sites in your industry. If you want to get more traffic, you need to go to the audiences which might be interested in your product or service. If you want to rank higher for specific keywords in search engines, you need to have blog posts published on related blog sites with a higher authority and write articles around your desired keywords.

Every marketing activity should be measured and this also applies to guest blogging. After you submit a blog post, make sure you will track the traffic you’re receiving from these websites. After all, you’ve invested a lot of effort into researching, pitching, and writing. You need to see what value it has for you.

How to find the best opportunities?

Becoming a guest blogger is not as easy as it may seem. Of course, it won’t be super difficult to write for a low-rated blog. However, if you want to get quality, you need to provide quality. Most blog managers receive tens to hundreds of guest blogging requests per day. And you need to be really good to get a chance.

So how you can find great guest blogging opportunities?

• Use Google! Search for things like “(your industry keyword) guest post” or related phrases like “submit guest posts”.
• Watch your competition. Moz has an excellent tool called Open Site Explorer where you can spy on your competitors. They have a backlink from this website, can I have one too?
• Do some research about blogs and influencers in your industry. You will easily find who these influencers write for and you will also know about the trends and popular topics in your industry.

Before you contact blog managers, do your homework and do some research. Highly-rated blogs are not excited about everyone who writes to them, so you need to prepare your pitch. Before you get to write the pitch email, answer the following questions: What kind of audience does this blog have? Is this audience interesting for me and is my message interesting for them? What style do they prefer? Who am I going to be writing for (beginners, advanced, professionals)? Is it aligned with my strategy? Who is this specific person I am pitching my blogpost to? Yes, you need a name.

Be careful about the most common mistakes guest bloggers make

You will drastically decrease your rejection rate if you just follow some basic rules and avoid these foolish mistakes:

• General email. Don’t send the same email to everyone, personalize it instead. Find out the name of the person you are sending your email to and adjust the body of the email to that specific website. You should also talk about the blog posts you would like to write for them.
• Writing to the same blog manager over and over again. Yes, blog managers are also people and they can get annoyed. Do you know what’s a good way to annoy them? Not keeping records about the websites and blog managers you contacted already. It’s kind of awkward to contact the same person twice with the same pitch just because you forgot that you already wrote them.
• Grammatical errors in your pitch. How can they trust that you’ll write a high-quality article for them if you’re unable to write a simple pitch without errors and typos?
• Thinking that guest blogging = advertising. It’s really not the same. You should know this before you write your pitch or submit an article. Nobody is interested in your PR articles. Your post should provide value for the audience of the website. The proper place for your link is in your bio, not in your article.

So, what do you think? Are you going to try guest blogging? We hope it will bring you the results you aim for.