Guest posts can add great value to your link building and branding strategies if you’re willing to invest time. While the links may not be as valuable from an SEO perspective, they are invaluable from a general marketing and brand perspective. Marketers often turn to guest blogs to get rich quick to secure backlinks that help their content perform better in searches. Guest blogging is very lucrative if you approach it strategically and for the right reasons.
Most believe that guest posts are becoming less and less effective for SEO purposes as Google’s algorithm changes to favor other forms of authority building. If you’re a marketer, you’ve probably been contacted multiple times with requests for guest posts. You’ll get abysmal opt-in results if you redirect all traffic from guest posts to a crappy landing page. Since Google has decided that guest posts shouldn’t follow, I don’t think it’s the best option for creating backlinks to your site.
If you can’t reach them via email and there’s no form to submit guest posts, you can opt for social media outreach. Even if you’ve covered all of your basics using the tips above, there’s still a chance that a host might reject your guest post. Guest posts also bring new ideas and experiences to an audience that can open up to your ideas. I firmly believe that if there was an international law prohibiting guest bloggers from linking to their projects, we would see a drop of at least 90% in the number of guest posts worldwide (not that I would have done any research), says Karol K in a guest post for Jeff Bullas.
This means that guest posts are a big commitment these days, as content must focus on authoritative, long, fact-based, original posts to have any hope of success. Neil also explains how he attacked guest blogging in the video above — he started off with one or two guest articles a week. But guest posts on well-visited, highly engaged blogs that have your target audience as readers are still worthwhile.
