One of my recent favorite posts on this blog was my guest blogging secrets post, which went into great detail on why guest blogging is an excellent solution for any blogger, along with profiling some of the best sites and guest bloggers in the game today. Keeping with that same traditional, I was talking with James Agate, the SEO Director at SkyrocketSEO.co.uk, a link building company that has been spending a lot of time on guest blog posting services as of lately.
I continually talk about how we are seeing more and more activity in guest blogging, and we will continue to see more of this increase as more guest blogging services and solutions become available. It’s always great to get a different perspective on how others are doing well in the guest blogging space and what’s working and what’s not. I sent James a few questions about guest blogging and you can read the full interview below.
1.) What is guest blogging and why should people be using it?
Guest blogging or guest posting is the act of developing a relationship with another blogger or web publisher, pitching a topic to them that you are an expert on and that their audience is going to love, writing the blog post and then working with them to publish it. Essentially you appear as a guest on what is otherwise “their show”.
You get the benefit of earning a link (good for search engine rankings) and engaging with a new audience (leading to referral traffic). The important thing about guest blogging is that it is beneficial all round because the audience gets some killer content and a dose of your expertise and the blogger gets “a day off” from producing content.
It is a really important online marketing technique and although not new, it has increased in importance as it is a future-proof way to develop inbound links to your website. If you develop relationships with and write for the right kinds of websites in your industry you will be earning high-authority links (which search engines appreciate and reward you for), these kinds of links will often survive Google updates (like Penguin and Panda) since the links are the high-quality, relevant and worthwhile kind that Google encourages. Additionally, we can call them future-proof because if you removed Google from the equation, these would still be links that you would want pointing at your website because they are likely to drive targeted visitors who may well convert into leads and sales.
2.) What are the benefits of outsourcing guest blogging versus doing it yourself?
Doing your own guest blogging is really very time consuming, challenging and often quite overwhelming. Many clients have come to us having tried to do guest blogging in the past with limited success.
The problem is that it is quite a difficult thing to get started with as you’ll want a system in place, you need a promotional plan, you have to understand what to look for with guest post opportunities (guest blogging is quite easy to get wrong and end up with some very poor links which could well do more harm than good!), you need to know where to find guest blogging opportunities and so on.
The next issue is the management of the campaign, as I said before it can be quite time consuming and it because frustrating if you aren’t experienced at managing a guest blogging campaign as you can easily overwhelm and confuse yourself if the campaign isn’t structured correctly not to mention you can fall behind your own schedule if you don’t find the time to chase up websites that have agreed to publish your post but haven’t got round to doing it yet.
Additionally if you are doing this yourself or utilizing limited in-house resources, the scale of the campaign just won’t be there. You’ll be doing guest blogging part of the time whilst also trying to juggle your other commitments as an employee or indeed a business owner.
The real benefit of outsourcing your guest blogging to a third party like us is that we take care of everything from start to finish – we take away that headache and hassle. You pay for your blog posts and we go off and do all the research, link prospecting, contacting, relationship development, content writing and facilitation of publishing.
We aren’t miracle workers of course but we have the experience, the team, the expertise and the tools to make your guest blogging campaign run a lot smoother.
3.) How effective can guest blogging be for driving traffic and increase search rankings for blogs?
Really very effective – if done correctly. We often target a spread of websites so that we can secure placements for clients which drive traffic but also placements which can help increase search rankings, some do both.
Smaller websites and blogs tend to be quicker to publish your guest post which means that you can often target and publish to more of them in a shorter time frame to help boost your search rankings. The traffic potential from these websites is of course smaller though as their audience is typically smaller.
Bigger websites and blogs may tend much longer to publish and be much stricter in terms of the blog posts that you can contribute but the payoff is that the post may send hundreds or even thousands of referral clicks back to your website.
That being said, don’t just assume big = better because some niche websites drive high-conversion traffic back to your website if they are really relevant to your products and services.
A good mix is best as your link profile looks natural in the eyes of Google and you ensure an even balance of results seen versus time taken.
4.) How can Skyrocket SEO build a guest blogging solution that will effectively bring a web site or blog to the next level?
For all our clients, we construct a campaign from scratch to ensure that links are fresh and of the highest quality. We don’t post to any blog networks or the like. We devise a promotional plan to cover off the various niches and industries that it would be suitable for you to target and we then deploy our experienced team of consultants to make the campaign a reality.
If you would like to learn more about outsourcing your guest blogging efforts, be sure to visit SkyrocketSEO.co.uk, along with their Complete Guide to Guest Blogging for Business post, and my previously mentioned guest blogging secrets post. Also, feel free to leave any additional comments or questions in the comments section and James will answer all of your questions.
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