What You Need to Know About Guest Posting in 2021

17 August 2021

Guest posting is a type of marketing that often gets an eyebrow raise. The truth is that there are many ways to utilize guest posting – some of them are excellent tools in your marketing arsenal, and others may get you on Google’s bad side. The key is knowing the difference and using only legitimate guest posting strategies.

But what does that look like? Here, we offer some pointers and helpful information from EraBright, a Black-owned advertising agency.

Contents

1 What You Need to Know About Guest Posting in 2021
2 Conclusion

What You Need to Know About Guest Posting in 2021

A great guest post is one that helps you, but also provides some value to the publisher and readers. Before getting started, target sites that make sense for your business. This helps your SEO strategy and avoids your link being viewed by Google quality raters as being “spammy”.

How to Find Guest Post Opportunities

There are many blogs out there that have a clear message to “contribute”, “write for us”, etc. These are great opportunities to contact them and find out more about their policies. If there are sites that you like and match your target, but they don’t identify that they accept guest posts, you can always reach out to them individually. Just remember that you won’t always get a “yes”.

Some tips for finding blogs that accept guests posts include:

Search for blogs in your market or niche
Choose blogs that are authoritative and have a high domain authority/rank
Choose blogs that have followers, readers, or high engagement
Assess the blog’s social media
Search Google for a topic and “guest post” and see what type of results you get. You may find other bloggers in your industry on sites that will also accept a guest post from you.

Writing a Great Guest Post

Once you have narrowed down where you want to submit a guest post, the next step is writing the content. The goal of guest posting is to bring attention to your brand, business, products, or services. Therefore, you want your guest post to be interesting and informative, and you want it to bring awareness to your brand.

Look at the blogs you are targeting and get an idea of the sort of content that is published there. Take note of blogs with a lot of engagement. You can use a similar style to successful posts, just make sure you match the tone of the site. You should also choose a topic that is relevant to your brand and the chosen blog. Write your content in a way that is “evergreen”, meaning it won’t become quickly outdated.

What about Backlinks?

For many people who guest post, the overarching goal isn’t to build backlinks. Of course, getting a do-follow backlink to your site is an added bonus. Increasingly, websites are only allowing guest posts to contain no-follow links, which means the link won’t go back to your site. While that’s bad news for backlinking, it’s not detrimental to your goal of brand awareness. After all, you can mention your brand in the article and provide a link, and also will likely have author information at the bottom.

One word of caution about backlinks – Google can penalize websites that have low authority or spammy backlinks. If the backlinks seem irrelevant, poorly placed, or low quality, it can actually hurt your Google ranking. The best way to avoid this is to choose legitimate blogs with a decent domain authority/rank, and avoid sites with a high spam score.

Conclusion

It seems like every year there are new guidelines and advice for how to manage digital marketing and SEO. Guest posting is one element that seems to be evolving more now than in the past, however. Increasingly, search engines are watching how sites interact and link to one another. For this reason, it is important to be selective in your guest posting adventures.

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Ariana Smith

I enjoy writing and I write quality guest posts on topics of my interest and passion. I have been doing this since my college days. My special interests are in health, fitness, food and following the latest trends in these areas. I am an editor at Content Rally.

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Bloggers, Beware! Blogging Mistakes You Should Avoid

Blogging as a career and source of income is more than just taking pictures, eating good food and writing articles. When blogging turned into a business, there are a lot of steps that bloggers need to make sure to attain success. In other words, upgrading a blog into a business is more complex than what people think. However, it can also be rewarding and fun at the same time. To ensure success in blogging, listed here are some of the blogging mistakes that every blogger should avoid. As they say, prevention is better than cure. Read also: Doing It The Right Way: Common Mistakes Every New Blogger Commits Not using whitespace or header When a reader first visits a blog and sees a wall of pure text, they’ll immediately close the tab without looking back. No matter how amazing the ideas are, the visual presentation makes up half of the battle. Bloggers or writers should learn to break their paragraphs to avoid chunky-looking parts. Use subheadings to give the readers eyes a breather and anchor points. If possible, cut down to 3-5 sentences each paragraph. Not knowing the audience Among the common mistakes that bloggers need to avoid, being clueless about their target audience is on the top of the list. It is sometimes unavoidable that bloggers will write and create content depending on their mood without even taking consideration of the readers. Lacking knowledge about the target audience can create complications in the future. Without considering the target audience interests, the content will be useless. Before starting on writing, create an image of the audience that the content is targeting. After making an image of the target audience, do some research on the things they want to read. Researching about the audience is the smartest technique a blogger can do. Avoid posting every day After considering that blogging is a career and part of the content marketing strategy, bloggers must be knowledgeable about search engines. Because of search engines, bloggers tend to publish a new blog entry every day just to improve ranking. However, posting on a daily basis can greatly affect the engagement level of the blog. And also it can be a disservice on SERPs (Search Engine Result Page). Keep in mind that the search engine value is a fresh, informative and relevant content. If the published articles don't give benefit to the target audience, then it’ll be a waste of effort. To ensure the quality of the articles, creating a schedule when to post articles is beneficial. It can give bloggers enough time to create a high-quality and well-researched article that can benefit its readers. Read also: 4 WordPress Plugins To Make Your Blog More Powerful To fully learn about SEO, some sites offer a crash course about SEO. Visit Website for more information. It usually tackles the effect of content to blogs. Also, it includes the importance of SEO in rankings. Read also: Avoid These 5 Mistakes Before Starting An SEO Stop trying to sell something in a blog post Blogs are tools to promote products, but not as a sales method. Current and future readers usually remain anonymous when reading an article. So they can just immediately leave an article in the middle reading if it gives them pressure or threats. Instead of selling products, use the blog to validate credibility, build authority and instill trust. If the readers find the contents and the blog reliable, then they can become the sales opportunity of business. Using Inappropriate Titles Headlines and titles are one of the most important things in a blog post. Titles and headings tell the readers a good deal of the content. Also, it helps in setting expectations to the readers. A title must be compelling and are creative to attract readers. However, certain headlines don't fit to what the content talks about. Sometimes, the title itself is not compelling enough to attract people to click and read the article. Bloggers should consider human elements before coming up with titles. Let the title and headline speak for the content itself. Make it as descriptive as possible to have an impact on potential readers. Uses a Generic Logo Bloggers don't need to invest all their cash in having a custom design to complete their blog. However, bloggers should consider a personalized logo. It is one of the first few things that new visitors look at when visiting a new blog. Usually, the logo speaks for the blog itself. Takeaway Listed above are the four basic and common mistakes that a blogger should avoid. Even if mistakes are inevitable, avoiding them can help in the success and growth of the blog. It may be a little mistake, but its impact can greatly affect the business and ruin the reputation of a blog.

Doing It The Right Way: Common Mistakes Every New Blogger Commits

Many people thought that when you choose a blog for a living, you are just only making money while sitting. But when you let them write their first couple of posts, it hits them like: I never thought that this job would be tough, and like any other person, they mess things up. Messing things up in the beginning and making mistakes along the way is normal. So to help beginner bloggers get started accordingly, here are some of the most common lapses every new blogger should avoid. Mistake #1: Absence of your Niche What’s the core of your blog? Do you write about anything every day? Or are you stuck with an ordinary subject matter that you like? If you write an article about food one day and fashion on the next and then wonder why no one is commenting, chances are people don’t have a clue about what your real blog is. Don’t underestimate the power of focus because a clear and straightforward blog can more likely niche to develop a somewhat focus, valuable, efficient and passionate content. Mistake #2: Missing your real audiences Gathering hundreds (even thousands) of reader online can be astonishing, but when you don’t know who your real viewers are, the problem enters. When writing a new blog, why not create an article as if having a conversation with your friend or a family member instead of addressing it to a crowd? Being specific to your topics will instantly make your blog more engaging and personal making your blog site more interesting and gather more readers. Mistake #3: Quantity Vs. Quality One common mistake of every blogger is the constant publishing of new articles every single day. Well technically, posting a lot to your blog is not a bad thing but if your posts are crappy and invaluable why update regularly? Read also: Some Powerful Attributes That A Website Must Have In Its Content Instead of wasting the time of your readers with your irrelevant blogs, you can create a real and profound blog post that requires time to analyze, write, and edit to encourage reliability and credibility. Mistake #4: Negligence of editing Are you one of the writers who can write flawless posts in a flash of the eye? Oops! Stop right there and consider editing your blogs, because there’s no such thing as a perfect blog. But if you still want a close to perfection article, there are possible things that you can do: Make sure that every spelling is correct and always watch out for grammatical errors. Polish everything. In proper editing, you can cross out unnecessary words, replace jargons with simpler terms and split two long sentences with short information. Evaluate your post properly. Make sure that each paragraph is cohesive with the paragraph before it. Read also: Improve Your Local SEO Via Content Marketing Mistake #5: Never consider plagiarism as a choice Most of the rookies in the world of blogging do ‘copy and pasting’. And they think that they can escape it. You can’t. Plagiarism doesn’t work at all because readers and editors can easily tell whether an article was made initially or plagiarized. If you copy the thought of another blog, your voice will not sound like you, and it will destroy your reputation. Plus, if you will be caught stealing the ideas of others, your site will be punished by Google that will cause an adverse impact on your blog and will affect its growth. If you ever read through the list of mistakes and is now thinking that you committed them, just remember that every neophyte learns many things and those mistakes are common. Every blogger has probably done one or more mistakes in his or her lifetime. Takeaway With the mistakes listed above, you will have a clearer path to excel in your writing. The period of your writing doesn’t matter because everyone at some point makes common mistakes in their life. Instead of being discouraged by your mistakes, use it as a fuel to power up your experiences that will keep your blogging business continuously growing and healthy. Read also: Avoid These 5 Mistakes Before Starting An SEO

Blogging to Live Better: 10 Benefits of Blogging

Remember back when blogs weren't really a thing? Not the case anymore. As of 2015, 28.3 million Internet users updated a blog at least once a month. If you're not sure what all the hype is for, here are ten benefits of blogging that you shouldn't miss out on. 1. Share Your Passions : Maybe you have a deep-seated love of French baking. Or maybe you're gung-ho about knitting. Maybe you're a talented underwater basket-weaver. Whatever your passion project might be, a blog is a great place to share it with the world. Because where else but the Internet can you find people with so many different passions wanting to talk to each other? 2. Get a Better Job : If you're great at blogging, you can even turn it into a better job. Maybe you use blogging as a tool to help improve your online profile, show potential employers your chops, and get hired. Or maybe you love blogging so much and get so good at it that it becomes the better job you always dreamed of. Either way, if you dedicate yourself to learning how to blog well and writing regularly, you could parlay it in to a better job than the one you have now. 3. Become a Better Writer : And while you're at it, you could become a better writer in the process. After all, blogs update all the time--every week, every few weeks, or every month (or, for the very ambitious, every day!) Where else would you have so many opportunities to practice your craft? And if you're worried about how blogging translates into more technical writing like whitepapers, reports, emails, or essays, think of it this way: the only way to get better at writing is by writing. A lot. Blogging is, as a rule, a conversational form of writing. It's a great way to get comfortable writing, and writing quickly. Once you're thoroughly comfortable around your own language, how to structure a piece, and how to rock a word-count, translating those writing skills into other forms of writing is a breeze. 4. Practice Another Language : Since you have so many opportunities to write, why not use them to practice another language? If you're consistently forcing yourself to form coherent thoughts, sentences, and paragraphs in your non-native language, you may be surprised to find how much easier it is to work with that language. And, as you establish a following, you'll have more opportunities to interact with native speakers of the language, which means you'll be able to practice even more. Who knew blogging could help you learn so much? 5. Improve Your Technical Knowledge : Of course, it doesn't have to be languages. You could also flex your blogging muscles to improve your technical know-how. Let's say you want to write about failed back surgery syndrome, like this website. What's the easiest way to learn about failed back surgery syndrome? By writing about it and doing the research required to write about it with authority. Always been curious about coding or economics? What better way to talk your way through what you've learned that blogging about it? 6. Connect with New People : And while you're blogging, you'll have all kinds of opportunities to connect with people as you establish a following. These could be people you'd like to add to your professional network. Maybe they're potential blogging clients of yours. Or maybe they're people who are just as passionate about interior design as you are. Either way, learning how to spread your opinions and engage with your comments section is a great way to bring more people into your orbit. That's the beauty of the Internet. 7. Get Immediate Feedback : Plus, while all kinds of new people are engaging with your work, you'll have all kinds of opportunities to get feedback on your work. Did you ever take a writing class in high school or college? Think back to how that process worked--you wrote something, turned it in, and waited a week or a semester to hear back about it. It was a decidedly one-sided process. Blogging is different. When you post something, people have a chance to engage with it in real-time via your comments section--and you have a chance to talk right back. This is especially useful if you have an idea you want to develop further. Put it out into the world on your blog and see what people say. Sometimes, a little outside perspective is just what you need to make progress. 8. Establish Yourself as an Expert : Let's be honest--anyone can blog about something. Let's say you want to be a travel blogger. You can totally start a blog and write about far-off places. But as you spend more time on your blog, doing your research, writing about what you've learned, and sharing your expertise, the more your blog turns into a demonstration of your expertise in your chosen field. One post about something is one thing. But if someone comes to your blog and sees twenty in-depth pieces about a particular subject, they'll view you as someone who knows what they're talking about. 9. Get More Exposure : Of course, not everyone starts a blog just to write about their dogs. Plenty of businesses start blogs to help boost their online exposure. Who says you can't do it too? As we noted, blogging is a great way to attract an audience and engage with people. If you run a business, a blog is a great way to bring attention to that business and topics related to your business. It might even bring you a few customers. 10. Build Your Portfolio : Finally, the only way to build a writing portfolio is by writing. A lot. Blogging is nothing if not writing a lot on a regular basis. If you need to beef up your portfolio and show your own expertise on a subject, a blog is a great way to start getting your name on articles online. Even if it's just your own blog, it gives employers, clients, and fellow enthusiasts a chance to read your work in a casual setting. More Benefits of Blogging (and Writing) Now that you know so much about the benefits of blogging, why not start a blog for yourself? If you're not sure where to start, no worries. We can help with that. Check out our blog for all kinds of tips to boost your writing and blogging, like this post on the common mistakes every new blogger makes. Read Also : 5 Blogging Tips For Beauty And Fashion Bloggers In 2018 Bloggers, Beware! Blogging Mistakes You Should Avoid

What You Need to Know About Guest Posting in 2021