Guest Blogging: 4 Tips To Become a Successful Blogger

Is guest blogging worth it in 2023?

If so, how to write one?

According to Referral Rock, around 60% of bloggers write one to five guest posts per month. This is more than half of the articles online, counting both organic (natural) traffic and paid traffic. 

In this article, we are going to discuss:

• Guest Blogging- What Is It?
  • Benefits of Guest Posting
  • Determine Your Guest Blogging Goals
• How to Become a Good Guest Blogger
• 1. Having A Specific Goal(s)
• 2. Choose the Topic Based on Your Goals
• 3. Find A Reliable Blogging Site for Your Guest Blogs
• 4. Writing the Content
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Final Thoughts
• Related Reads

Guest Blogging– How to Become A Good and Successful Blogger in 2023

Guest Blogging- What Is It?

Guest blogging (AKA guest posting) is the process of writing an article and publishing it on someone else’s (often a client of yours) website.

There are two types of compensation benefits and they can differ depending on the type of client or publication that you are writing for. 

One of the types is traditional payment. Once you are done with your after process, you will get the discussed payment from your client and another type of compensation is providing a backlink to your website (if you are a website owner) or even social media accounts. The main objective here is to get more brand awareness. More brand awareness means more leads for your business/website and thus revenue for your business.

Benefits of Guest Posting

The following are some of the benefits that you can acquire from implementing guest blogging:

Social profile– Build a profile to become a leader or a well-known expert in your field. 

Growth– Grow your brand/business by reaching wide audiences.

Reach– Growth and reach are interconnected; with guest blogging, you can reach a wider audience and grow your brand internationally.

Social media following– We are living in a world where almost 62% of our world’s population is online (especially in social media). With the help of guest blogging, and sharing those content on social media can help you to get better leads for your business/website.

Improved SEO– SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the tactic, as the name suggests that you optimize your content/article in favour of Google search engines and other search engines. 

The main objective here is to rank your content higher in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) to get more awareness of your brand/company. 

Guest blogging strategy helps to put out more reliable content online at a steady pace which makes the Google Algorithm think that the information is reliable and from a trusted source. It flags the contents higher and shows the result on page one of Google SERP.

Get Authoritative Link to your Website– As mentioned, as a non-compensatory benefit, for the return of your content, you are entitled to get the reliable white-hat link (link favoured by the Google Algorithm) to your website. 

The main purpose here is to get more traffic to your website indirectly and also increase your SEO factors such as DR (Domain Rating), and DA (Domain Authority). 

These factors play a major role in increasing the probability of getting your article ranking higher in the Google SERP. This process is widely known as link building.

Build a New Relationship— Guest blogging is a great opportunity to meet the expert in your niche. It is a great chance to learn new things and get an overall different perspective on digital marketing. 

Interacting with clients gives you an idea of what they are expecting and how you want to structure your content which ultimately solved the reader’s pain point. Also, there is a good chance for driving a new partnership in your niche such as new job offers.

Now that we have covered the benefits of guest blogging, it is time to understand the first step in guest posting, which is to determine your guest blogging goals.

Determine Your Guest Blogging Goals

According to a Bloomberg report, 8 out of 10 entrepreneurs will likely fail in the first 18 months. One of the main reasons is not having a clear set of goals for their business. The same can be said for guest blogging: without proper goals, it can be quite challenging to get the best result for your work. You are a guest blogger and your goal should fall under the following three categories with some restrictions:

1. Getting organic traffic to your website
2. Getting well-known as an expert in your niche
3. Getting backlinks in order to get traffic indirectly to your website.

As mentioned there is a restriction and that is getting backlinks for traffic to your website indirectly. Some factors need to be considered such as the quantity and the quality of the backlinks. Why there are such restrictions on getting backlinks? 

Backlinks in general are good to get traffic for your website. And it is much easier to get more traffic by getting more backlinks instead of gaining organic traffic through your own content.

But there is a limit. In recent times, somebody “created” PBN (Private Blog Network)

In simple words, PBN is a network consisting of expired domain names with higher domain authority. People buy a bunch of domains, create the network, post some generic content, and ultimately insert the link to their business site where all the primary content is present.

This way, you can easily get traffic to content. But this is highly frowned upon by Google and there is a high possibility that the algorithm can flag your content as malicious activity.

Now you have an idea about the guest article idea, but what is the best way to achieve that goal? If you are looking to achieve high traffic and become a well-known expert in your niche, the best way is to find the types of blogs that have huge appeal to a wider audience and give the best quality article. According to Growth Badger, the quality of the content is still the number #1 ranking factor for success in the Google SERP.

These goals help you to understand the type of blogs that suit you the best.

How to Become a Good Guest Blogger

The following steps can help you to push in the right direction to become a good and reliable guest blogger.

1. Having A Specific Goal(s)

First and foremost, in order to become a good and successful guest blogger is to have a specific goal. Now we have seen the generic goals above which gives you an idea of the overall picture of digital marketing (which is having more traffic to your content). But it is important to have short specific goals to reach the ultimate goal. For instance, you can set your short goal as getting Y amount of referral traffic or set a goal such as increasing the SERP visibility by X% in 3 months.

These specific goals should correlate to each other, so that even if you focus on one goal at a time, indirectly other goals are also getting achieved.

For starters, you can go with short-term goals such as

1. Get clients through your guest blogging in a fixed period of time
2. Get referral leads by X amount of % in a fixed period of time

Now if you take a closer look, these goals are different and yet have some form of relation to each other. By getting more leads, there is a higher probability of getting more clients to your business.

2. Choose the Topic Based on Your Goals

Now you have chosen your goals and it is time to choose the topics for your guest posts. As mentioned above, 8 out of 10 entrepreneurs fail and one of the reasons is that they focus much on the publication instead of readers and their pain points. 

This can work if you want your content to get published online instead of actually solving people’s difficulties. In this way, you are working towards the publisher’s goals instead of your own.

The first thing to ensure before writing the topics for your guest blog post is to check whether the chosen topic is correlated to your business goals. Guest blog posts are an effective way to become an expert in your niche. 

As mentioned, guest blogging provides you with a great opportunity to meet and talk with knowledgeable people in the industry. It is a great way to learn about the niche and what are the current technologies or methods being used to become a good and reliable expert in the industry. 

Get the idea by having a talk with the industry leaders and understand their pain points and as well their customer’s pain points. Correlate each other and come up with a topic that also has a positive influence on your business goals. 

When you start your guest blogging strategy, think it of as your own blog. This gives you an authoritative and responsibility for your article. Second, when it comes to actual writing, the following steps help you to get started:

1. For maximum reader engagement, start by choosing a topic that is currently trending in whatever niche you occupy and that is interesting relative to your reader base.
2. Use Google Trends for guest post ideas. This tool is free and lets you know what the nation is currently searching for right now. 
3. Search for a topic keyword. Ahrefs and Semrush help you get the necessary keywords for your parent topics. 

Now you have a solid parent topic that is currently trending in your target demographic and a keyword that has the ability to rank higher in the Google SERP.

You are almost done with half of the guest blogging strategy. Now it is time to search for good blogging sites and pitch in your guest posts.

3. Find A Reliable Blogging Site for Your Guest Blogs

First, create a template that consists of the following factors:

1. Check the domain authority and domain rating of your targeted websites. This shows the reliability and reach of your content to a wider audience. Higher DA and DR mean more reach and a higher possibility of appearing in the Google SERP (1st position to 3rd position)
2. Check your niche competitor backlinks. The backlinks from the publisher may accept guest posts.
3. Search this term “intext: submit a guest post” to access the advanced search option for your guest post opportunities. Meaning if you replace the “intext” with the keyword from your niche or the topic and submit the query, Google will give the result of the blogs that accept guest blogging

The only part remaining is writing quality content and pitching your idea. Before pitching your idea, go through the guest post guidelines. After that, create your pitch. It is fundamental to perform in-depth research before pitching your idea.

For starters, if you have chosen the target website, go through its resources, and create a topic repository for their content/blogs/articles. Match with your keyword research, and check if there is any possibility that the particular topic or keyword has not been covered yet. 

Now with all the details, along with the guidelines, prepare your pitch. In this way, the probability of accepting guest posts will be much higher.

Once you create your pitch, it is now time to contact the representative of the publication and submit your pitch. One of the best ways is through a formal e-mail. Keep it simple and crisp. Most of the guest bloggers submit a large proposal, beating around the bush. This can not get the offer that you are expecting.

Use Google Sheets for pitching ideas and you can also use some charts to point out the opportunity that can be leveraged for more leads. Also for your reference, you can use Google Sheets to track the response from the publishers for easy access.

4. Writing the Content

Follow this checklist to help you structure a good guest blog:

1. Write a long-format article (at least 1500 words) with relevant information.
2. Avoid chunks of paragraphs. Instead, use bullets or number points for conveying the information in a readable manner.
3. Add links from reputable sites. This helps to guarantee to the Google Algorithm that your content is reliable.
4. Add statistics. One of the ranking factors for the Google SERP is relevance and reliability. Statistics about the topic at hand will help you to achieve that.
5. Add internal links (from your publishers).
6. Use images (original images) to further convey information. You can use free tools like Canva to create infographics for your content.
7. Add a meta description with your keyword (not more than 160 characters) for Google to see what the content is all about.

These steps will help you to push in the right direction to become a good and reliable guest blogger. But in order to be the best, you need to track the performance of your content. Google Search Console (GSC) is a great tool to check traffic and other factors in detail and it is completely free.

By getting the data from GSC, you can plot a plan on how to update your content and keep it relevant on Google.

Frequently Asked Questions

Final Thoughts

Is guest blogging easy? Yes, certainly, if you have a plan then it can be easy. Planning is the most important thing not only in guest blogging but also in every task. This article hopes to give an idea about guest blogging and the steps that can put you on the right path to becoming a good guest blogger. Guest blogging on the whole is a trial-and-error method in order to find the best fit. Try and try and eventually, you will find the right strategy for your guest blogging. 

Related Reads:

• User-Generated Content: What You Need To Know In 2023
• 6 Top Blogger Outreach Tools to Empower Your Business 2022
• 5 Benefits Of Guest Posting For Link Building