Guest Blog Posting for Backlinks, aka the Blogger Blitz!

Time to start thinking outside of that box. If you’re going to hit big (and you are) then you need to start leveraging off the traffic that the heavy hitters are already getting. This is an awesome way to explode the growth of your site. You just need to know why and how much.

One of the best ways to show off just how much you know about your niche is to become an expert on some of the biggest blogs in your niche and for you to give ‘em everything you’ve got.

The biggest, most popular blogs have many writers submitting guest posts, so if you want to get noticed right away for all the right reasons, you cannot be afraid to get in line.

Connecting with popular blogs by offering them amazing free content that only you could develop enables you to create some great, consistent backlinks.

About five years ago, we had a small business client who is a professional organizer. She paid us for on-page optimization only, for terms like professional organizers Massachusetts. We told her how important backlinks are and gave her some insight into the value of blogging. She became a columnist at an organizing blog that ranked well in Google. We were frankly amazed at how good her ranks got very quickly, knowing that we did nothing but on-page optimization. While you might not think that just a single post on one blog would help that much, Google apparently did and her site ended up being deeply regarded as an authority in her field. Plus, she got great traffic from a new audience. That is really what you are after with this strategy. You want to get people to fall in love with the way you think and see your writing across a multitude of related sites.

Creating strategic partnerships with bloggers means you can produce content and get it in front of an audience of prospective clients while also driving traffic to your website and showing Google that your site is valuable. The key to success when it comes to guest blogging is to write such great content that people are thirsting for more. If you can write content that gets people talking, high-profile blogs will be more willing to accept your blog posts for publication. Remember this:

Bloggers need your content as much as you need them. It’s symbiotic.

But don’t just approach random blogs! It’s important to read a blog before asking to be a guest poster on it. The blogs you approach should regularly feature content in line with what you’re offering and have an active readership. Your job is to make sure the content you’re offering bloggers is similar to what they usually publish, in terms of length, subject matter, and style. Look at the volume of comments on all of the posts on the blog to get a sense of the social interaction, because you want tons of it.

The approach is fairly simple. Either send an email to a blogger with a sample post that is right for their blog and ask them to publish it, or ask them what content they would like you to write. If you send pre-written articles, the bloggers you approach already have the content in hand when deciding whether to work with you, but we have found some prefer to guide your writing. If you can get them to buy into the idea of a piece you write for them based on their input, they will feel more a part of it. Keep your emails short and let them be wowed by your content or Author Rank/social authority (such as your massive Twitter following or email subscriber count), rather than your sales pitches. You can find related blogs by searching for your keywords and “guest blog post” or on blog directories like technorati.com.

Do you write guest blogs?

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