3 Steps to Landing a Guest Blogging Gig

Guest blogging is one of the few remaining surefire ways to generate high quality inbound links to your site. Generating these inbound links will increase your content authority and ultimately lead to higher search engine rankings. The process of becoming a guest blogger on someone else’s site will take patience and determination.

Step 1

First, you must blog often on your own company site. Besides the obvious SEO benefits that the blog will bring your company, it shows that you can produce quality content on a schedule. It also gives you a place to practice your craft and make mistakes. Writing 1-3 posts a week for a few months or years gives you plenty of opportunity to discover what works and what flops. As with anything, practice makes perfect.

Step 2

Identify potential sites that might be willing to publish a guest post from time to time. A few things to look for:

• Industry Specific Sites. The site should be about the same general topic that you want to write about so that your articles are relevant to the audience. This also facilitates building yourself as a subject matter expert because you can borrow from the credibility of the site to promote your own expertise.
  • The exception to this rule is if the site that is so general as to encompass your topic but isn’t specifically geared toward your field. For example, I am a guest blogger at a commercial real estate website that has an Ask the Experts blog. I am blogging about websites and marketing as one of the experts even though it is not an industry specific website.
• Avoid “Nofollow” Links. “Nofollow” is a value that a site can add to links so that search engines won’t follow the links to see where they go. This is done to cut down on spam comments by devaluing the link. The reason you don’t want this on your guest blog posts is that, one of the main points of guest blogging is to get that external link to your company site. If they force a “nofollow” value on you then you lose that benefit.
• High PageRank. PageRank is a rating system that Google places on your site to determine it’s authority. Since you are trying to share in the value of the link back to your site, then a higher PageRank will provide more value to share. This is an area where you may need to compromise a bit at first. A site with a PageRank of 4 is not a bad place to start but as your blogging improves you should look for sites with ranks of 6-10.

Step 3

Submit an unpublished unique article. Some sites that are used to guest bloggers will have a process that you must follow to have your article considered, but most sites won’t be used to guest bloggers. Once you have identified a desired target site, then write an article for them that is unique and has never been published anywhere else (including your own blog). Email it to them along with an explanation of your reasoning and expectations. You may want to include:

• Why you chose them;
• That the article is unique and unpublished;
• A specific time period in which they have to respond (so you can use the article elsewhere if they don’t respond);
• Your willingness to produce content regularly; and
• And a brief (one paragraph) biography.

Becoming a guest blogger can be time consuming and requires a concerted effort to find and land the right positions. However, the rewards are direct and tangible to your business in terms of link authority, SEO, and reaching a new audience. These three easy steps will help you land the right guest blogging gig for your continued success.

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