Using guest blogging to grow your traffic
Although I haven’t used guest blogging to grow my traffic much, I know it has great potential. It’s just that, I’m obsessed with my own blog and with the limited amount of time that I have, I prefer to spend it writing content for my own blog.
Even when guest blogging can help me increase my website traffic in a meaningful manner, some psychological hurdle has been blocking me.
In this blog post I’m going to talk about how to use guest blogging to grow your traffic in the hope that, it may also inspire me to do the same.
There are multiple ways you can use guest blogging to increase your website traffic.
The inspiration to write this blog on how to use guest blogging to grow your traffic came from the email update I received from LinkedIn promoting one of their posts: The State of Guest Blogging: How to Guest Post and Grow Your Traffic.
What is guest blogging? Does it really increase your traffic?
Guest blogging explained
Guest blogging means writing for someone else’s blog to get exposure from an entirely new audience.
Whether it can actually increase your traffic depends on the quality of your writing and also the quality of the blog or the website where you are guest blogging.
There was a time when guest blogging was used mainly to get inbound links – publishers who publish your guest blog, attribute it to you and along with the attribution, they also link to your blog or website.
Those days, most of the people who were seriously trying to drive traffic to their websites, resorted to guest blogging.
Then people started using the “nofollow” tag and many blogs and online magazines these days give you no benefit in terms of backlinks.
If you want to write for them, they say, write it for pure exposure, and nothing else.
There are still some websites and blogs that give you “follow” backlinks, but their count is decreasing fast.
What is the difference between “nofollow” and “follow”?
Every website or blog has a page rank. It’s some sort of a ranking power or a ranking fuel.
It’s kind of a currency.
All the external links published on that website or blog get a small portion of this currency based on how much currency the website or the blog has.
Naturally, if a website or a blog has lots of page rank currency, it can distribute this currency to multiple links, but at the cost of losing some of it.
Webmasters who want to drive traffic from search engines need “follow” backlinks from these currency-rich websites and blogs if they want to increase traffic from search engines by improving their SEO.
Actually, there is no thing as “follow” backlinks. By default, every backlink is a “follow” backlink.
Since lots of people were trying to improve their SEO and consequently, drive search engine traffic to their websites, Google came up with the option of “nofollow”.
A blogger or Webmaster can use this attribute with every href tag to save his or her page rank currency but at the same time be able to link to external websites and blogs.
Coming back to guest blogging and how it can drive traffic to your website or blog.
How it can help you increase traffic.
Guest blogging helps you in two ways: gets you exposure on other websites and blogs, and gets you free, quality content for your own blog.
If things go well, I will be publishing a blog post from a guest blogger today.
Of late, as an increasing number of people are able to find my blog on search engines, I have been getting lots of queries from people interested in writing for my blog in exchange of a link to their website or blog.
Obviously they want to increase traffic by getting a link from my blog which enjoys better search engine rankings.
I use a plug-in that attaches a “nofollow” tag to every external link that I publish on my blog or website, but the plug-in also has a provision to make exceptions.
Being an experienced content writer and blogger, I can make out whether a guest blog has been written purely for the purpose of getting a backlink or the writer has invested some good amount of time and intention into writing the blog post.
When I feel that the writer really deserves a “follow” backlink, I make an exception.
Anyway, this was just to explain to you what is guest blogging.
Whether you are guest blogging or you are publishing blog from guest bloggers, provided you maintain a level of quality, you can increase traffic, you can drive more traffic.
Using guest blogging to grow your traffic
Traffic growth with guest blogging
As I have explained to you, guest blogging helps you in two ways:
- Gets you exposure and traffic from other blogs and websites where you publish your guest blog post.
- Gets you fresh and regular content for your own blog and in return, increases your search engine rankings, and in return, grows your traffic.
Hence, whether you guest post on other blogs or you allow other writers to guest post on your own blog, you can use guest blogging to grow your traffic.
How to approach online publishers and bloggers for guest blogging opportunities?
How to approach publishers for guest blogging opportunities
If you want to know how to use guest blogging to grow your traffic, one of the most important things to learn is, how to approach other online publishers and bloggers for guest blogging opportunities.
Guest blogging needs to be a full-fledged strategy.
It’s a sustained effort.
Before you move forward with your guest blogging strategy to grow your traffic, you must know why you want to guest blog (assuming for the time being that you are planning on writing for other blogs and websites).
First decide why you want to publish guest blog posts
This Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging by Neil Patel gives you every information you are ever going to need to learn about how to use guest blogging to grow your traffic.
He says that there are three reasons why you may choose to guest blog:
- You want to position yourself as an authority in front of a new audience.
- You want to leverage a high traffic website or blog to get traffic.
- Generate backlinks to your website or blog.
Keeping these reasons in mind will help you come up with appropriate guest blogging ideas and also approach the most suitable publishers for your guest blogging campaign.
Make a list of industries you would like to use guest blogging to grow your traffic
Randomly picking websites and blogs for guest blogging opportunities is going to be labor intensive as well as ineffective.
There is no need to approach every blog or website looking for writers.
You want to focus on your niche.
Make a list of niches you would like to focus.
Your competitors won’t publish your guest blog posts for obvious reasons unless you offer them something really irresistible – some sort of insight that you haven’t published on your own website.
If you are an app developer you would like to find websites and blogs on app development and ancillary technologies.
If you are a fashion designer, you may look for websites and blogs on lifestyle, celebrities and clothing.
If you are a content marketer, you may like to approach websites and blogs offering content marketing tips and tutorials.
The basic idea is, make a list of websites and blogs who would publish your guest blogs, and who will be directly or indirectly related to your industry or subject matter.
Finding the right publishers for guest blogging opportunities
This is very important. It’s given that whichever blogger or website owner you approach accepts guest blogging.
To begin your search, you can search for terms like
- “looking for guest bloggers”
- “submit guest post”
- “we accept guest bloggers”
- “guest post by”
- “guest post guidelines”
- “write for us”
You can combine these search terms with your industry, something like “content marketing write for us”.
You can use different search engines to prepare a nice list.
I would use Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo.
You can prepare an Excel sheet of all the links you have discovered.
Create different columns for the URL, industry, contacted/not contacted and response.
Prepare a message to offer your guest blog
When I receive offers from other guest bloggers, 90% of the offers I ignore.
This is because I know they have simply sent out a generic message to multiple publishers without having a look at my website.
Those messages that don’t have my name are immediately consigned to the trash folder.
Finding guest blogging opportunities to grow your traffic isn’t something that you want to do in a hurry.
If you don’t have much time, just study 1-2 links everyday.
Try to find everything about the blog including the owner of the blog, the person in charge of publishing and most importantly, what type of content is published.
Carefully study the blog
Go through different guest blog posts on the blog and see what topics guest bloggers cover when writing for that blog.
Pay close attention to the quality of the content.
If the blog is indiscriminately publishing guest blog posts, stay away from such a blog.
You don’t want to publish your guest blog on a blog that easily accepts blog posts from other bloggers.
Once you have gathered enough information that will help you write a personal message to the person concerned, you can write something like this:
Hello {name}.
Having great interest in {mention the field} I have been closely following your blog for some time now.
Your blog post on {mention the blog post} was especially insightful, especially the part where you say {mention the part}.
Of late I have been searching for guest blogging opportunities and your blog immediately came to my mind.
One of the greatest reasons why I would like to write for your blog is that I have noticed you’re a stickler for quality.
So, when I send you my submission, I know that you will publish it only if it is worth publishing.
I look at it as a positive challenge.
Here is the topic I think that can add some value to your blog {mention topic}.
If you’re interested, let me know and I will send you a draft.
Not interested?
No need to worry. I won’t take it personally.
Looking forward to hearing from you, and well done for all that great content!
Cheers!
{your name}
You don’t have to use the exact words, but if you use the underlying philosophy your message will be better received.
How to use guest blogging to grow your traffic even when you don’t want to ask other bloggers?
Sometimes you’re not comfortable with approaching other bloggers.
I can understand.
It doesn’t mean you cannot use guest blogging to grow your traffic.
There are many high traffic websites where you can create a presence for yourself and in return, use the platform for guest blogging.
You can use the LinkedIn publishing platform, for example.
The professional social networking platform allows you to publish blog posts.
When you publish a blog post on LinkedIn, all your contacts are immediately notified.
If LinkedIn features your blog post in one of its newsletters or in the “featured posts” section, it can generate massive amount of traffic for your blog or get you great visibility.
You can use Medium.
It is a great blogging platform with its own audience.
Both LinkedIn and Medium enjoy good search engine rankings and when you publish your content on these publishing platforms, it will be quickly crawled and indexed by all major search engines, helping you grow your traffic in the process.
Similarly, there are many niche platforms, HackerNoon, for example, where you can publish your guest blog posts to grow your traffic if you don’t want to approach independent bloggers.
If you want to use guest blogging to grow your traffic please remember that it is not a quick fix approach.
Just like any other content marketing method, it is going to take strategy, patience and lots of hard work.
There is no benefit in publishing your guest blog posts on websites that accept inferior quality content.
But, websites that accept quality content will not easily publish your post.
Hence, it takes time, patience and hard work.
It is an ongoing process.
Always be on the look.
Increase your expertise.
Improve your writing style (or work with an experienced content writer).
Expand your network using social media.
You can definitely use guest blogging to grow your traffic, provided you know what you want to communicate and which blog audience is the best for you.
Here is a nice list of 100 places where you can submit your guest blog posts.
