Writing A Guest Post For Another Site? – Here Are Your Top Five Tips

Guest posts are the best ways to generate free traffic for your site, but not all writers and websites are created equal. To get your posts accepted to high traffic sites you need to follow a simple protocol that is used by the masters of content management. There are a few foundational steps you need to work through prior to pressing that submit button.

The Truth About Fan Worthy Content.

Ever get through writing an incredibly powerful post that fills your soul with pride, and then get stuck on whether you should submit it as a guest post or keep it for your own site because it is that damn good?

There is that voice inside of you that says, “Oh, this is great work, I don’t want to send it off to someone else to use. I want use it for my own blog”. I think we have all had those thoughts run through our head before, but this is where you can’t be selfish. No matter how good your post is, without the right network connecting with your message you won’t make any traction. And, unless your site ranks in the top 10,000 sites globally pass it on to a bigger site to spread your message.

Getting accepted to high ranking site is your solution for credibility as an expert in your chosen niche and will help you build your readership that much faster.

5 Steps to take next time you write a guest post/article

1.   Visualize and Define The Exact Type of Reader You Want

 What type of individual or group do you want reading your content? Do you want hipsters, professionals, students, lawyers, dog owners or children reading your stuff? All these groups of people are require an entirely different set of needs to be met.

Example – A business owner needing to file their taxes would hire a professional accountant to help and not let a friend claiming to be a jack of all trades file their income. We are talking about niche specialization here.

Prior to writing your guest post/article make sure you study the high traffic sites audience and their needs. When you understand their demands and Joie De Vivre you can then tailor your content to tickle their fancies and engage their readership.

2.   Prepare Yourself For The Followers

A landing page is a must for your next guest post. After reading your post there will be a link in your bio to your site for people to connect with you and learn more about your message. It doesn’t matter what you are blogging about in the first place, whether for passion or profit you still need a method to capture leads. If you don’t get people to connect and subscribe to your email list you may never see them on your site again, and we don’t want that now, do we?

The landing page for the future followers doesn’t need to be too elaborate or too inviting. Make a page where readers can learn more about you and understand the direction of your message.

A clearly situated subscribe button on your site is a must. The box should easily viewed when first landing on the page. Some people chose placement right below the header or on the right side menu bar.

Some people may find this too intrusive or don’t like having a subscribe button on their first page of their site. If that is your case make a specific landing page specifically for this one post. Capture email leads and start communicating your excellence to them.

Your fans don’t really want to know how your day was or what you are planning to do this evening, save that for the Twitter machine. They would rather connect with you because you have solved a problem for them. You need to give before you receive =)

3.   Valuable Posts Need To Be Prepared on Your Own Site

To keep readers engaged once they have landed on your page make sure you have several other useful posts that relate to the niche topic you wrote about in your submission article. It is about keeping the reader engaged on your site, pageviews and time on site! The more problems you solve for the readership the better!

Don’t you hate it when you read a fantastic article on lifehacker or huffingtonpost and then follow through to the author’s website to find out more about their story and there is no follow up material? Instantly we click exit screen and am on to the next big idea or interest for the day.

Let’s avoid this situation happening on your site. Prepare for battle and capture the new fans with some epic content, making them return for more and more tomorrow. You will be amazed at the spike in pageviews on your site if you have prepared solid follow-through content on your own site that relates to your submission article.

4.   High Alexa Ranking Sites With High PR Only

The quality of backlinks is far more important than quantity. I remember in the past years you would have been able to submit to several low quality sites, and boom, an easy link-back. Unfortunately, with the new Google index ranking systems each back-link is not considered equal.

For instance, if you get a link back from a site with an Alexa ranking of 100,000 versus a site that holds a ranking of 1,000,000 you are earning a link from a site that is not 10 times more powerful, but rather exponentially more. Think about earthquakes and how they are measured on a Richter scale. An earthquake of 4.0 is not twice as powerful as a 2.0 earthquake but rather an increase in power of 10 to the power of 2, which makes for a massive difference.

Please, please, please take the time to evaluate the traffic of the site you are submitting to in advance. Check out their social feeds like the Twitter machine, Facebook and other shares. How connected is the community and supporters?

Finally, make sure you seek out sites that have a Page Rank of 3 or higher. Yes, it is true that some sites have very high traffic with only a Page Rank of 1 or 2, but it is the well established and developed tribes you need to be hunting for first!

5.   Time to Network and Spread The Word

Alright, you have now outlined your top sites, prepared powerful posts to submit, and prepared quality content on your own site and are basically ready to blow them out of the water with your fresh ideas. Should you consider anything else before pressing submit?

…..ABSOLUTELY

You might be at the point in your niche specialization where you have created an eBook or product that you have just released and plan to capture new buyers from your guest post articles. So, what you can do next in preparation for the surge in readers? Write a post outlining the benefits to your product prior to sending in your post and then send that post out to all your followers, RSS feed readers, friends, etc. You need to plant the seed of expectation. This is the pre-game marketing

Once again focus your headlines on proving solutions for you readers. Always under promise and over produce with your content and problem solving skills.  Your product will sell itself once you get the ball rolling with that approach.

Persuasion is always the name of the game, and we were all born to sell, so don’t feel bad about making money =) Use your call to action phrases and allow the reader to feel your deep seeded desire to want to lend a helping hand with your work.

Now Get TO IT !