Post Google’s Penguin update, link building has acquired a whole new meaning. It’s no longer just about getting website backlinks. It’s about acquiring them in a natural and organic way that proves to search engines that your website is, indeed, rich in helpful content.
Guest Posting Services have since grown to become popular among content creators. Every blogger and content marketer strives to publish content on high ranking websites with the ultimate goal of adding a backlink back to their personal website.
Highly ranked websites are crawled regularly by search engines, and your guest post will get crawled almost immediately after being published. With your backlink strategically placed within your content and on just the right anchor text, bots will follow the link to your website and index your content in the process.
Guest posting, when done right, offers a lot of SEO value and can help accelerate the growth of relatively new websites. In this article, we’ll highlight seven common mistakes content creators make when writing guest posts
Hiring Writers to Write your Guest Posts
We are living in a video-first era. Nobody wants to write content anymore. It’s just too much work. Content marketers now prefer to hire temporary writers from freelance markets to write guest posts for them. Boy, are they wrong!
Here’s the thing. Every writer has a unique tone when it comes to content creation. As a guest post writer, you want to establish your own persona in your content. This not only builds your reputation among website owners who love your tone but also establishes credibility in your content.
While freelance writers are good at their jobs, they are in it for the money. You, on the other hand, understand the value of your guest post even before writing it. So you are more likely to put in more effort in the writeup and actually deliver better content.
If your writer wasn’t well versed with the topic, chances are the post will be rejected for inapplicability. Don’t even get me started on the grammatical errors. Content outreach with 3rd party content may harm your chances of ever winning as a Guest Blogger.
Ignoring Keyword research tools
Keywords are a critical factor in organic search rankings. Optimizing your guest posts for keyword visibility will increase your chances of getting the post indexed fast and crawled more often.
The best way to find and leverage trending keywords is by using keyword research tools. The Moz Keyword Tool, Neil Patel’s UberSuggest, and Ahrefs are great examples of keyword analysis tools you should be using in your content creation process.
Ignoring Images
What’s a Book without pictures? Pictures tell a thousand words! Unlike traditional SEO methods, images actually play a great role in SEO rankings. Google uses Alt Text to understand the content in your article. The images then appear on the “Images” tab on search results.
Being Lazy to prepare a Tracker sheet
Tracking is an important measure of success. In guest posting, you want to keep a detailed record of all the work done – blogs contacted via email, samples submitted, their current status –and so on.
Good reporting not only helps you track your performance but also evolves over time into a network of contacts you can re-sell your services to later.
Contacting Publishers via Unstructured messages
Unstructured content pitches almost always never get a reply. Nobody is going to take you seriously as a content creator if your email sounds like a casual letter to your penpal. It’s highly unprofessional and it reflects negatively on your writing skills.
Instead, you need to create a template that you can use to contact multiple blog owners to save time. Interact, Connect, Know, Relate! Here’s a Blogger Outreach Email Checklist that you can use to draft your guest post email pitch.
- The subject should be short – e.g. Guest Blogging about[Niche] on [YourSite]
- Introduce yourself, purpose of contacting, and where you heard about the blog.
- State the topic you would like to guest post on.
- Ask for any particular guidelines to follow (if not mentioned on the website)
- Ask for a suitable time to discuss the offer further.
- Signature – include your social media profiles, website, and if possible, your phone number
No Follow-ups
There is no shame in following up on your guest post offer. As a Guest Author, you should be able to create a personal connection with the Blog owners and Publishers.
