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Don’t Guest Post to Get Backlinks! Guest Posting Benefits from a better Strategy

August 25, 2014

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On 20th January, Matt Cutts published a post with a weird title – “The Decay and Fall of Guest Blogging for SEO”. This post and that day shook the entire blogging world, the after effects of which is still visible to a lot of bloggers. I keep getting emails even today from people who has written guest posts on my blog and almost all of these emails have just one thing – “please remove our link from xxxxx article“.

If you are wondering what this was all about… it was about Guest Posting!

It is true that internet gets abused very easily and most of the actions that happen are a direct consequence of these abuses. When I was very new to the internet, it was all about Adsense and the earning potential from it. People misused it to an extent that there were thousands of sites that were put up there with little to no meaningful content, only for the sake of earning money from Adsense. It was waiting to happen and Google brought down the axe on all these sites and along with it came numerous updates and rules making it difficult for even the genuine player to make money from Adsense.

Guest Posting was no different. I know people who got the desperate thrust that they and their blog wanted solely from Guest posting. Bloggers who couldn’t spend too much time writing content for their blogs also found it a great resource. They could get ready made articles and all that people asked for in return was a couple of backlinks to their sites, which they too did not mind.

But then it got abused just like everything else. People would submit irrelevant articles and bloggers would accept that as well. The links were also not going to sites that had any real value in it. The objective of Guest posting became solely getting a few backlinks so that the guest bloggers’ site could rank well on Google. And in most of these cases, the person submitting the article (Guest Poster) was doing it for a charge – some thing that he would quote to the owner of the site that wanted the backlink at the pretext of building a backlink from a reputed blog with a pagerank.

And then came the 20th of January 2014..

After about 2 months of Matt Cutts publishing that post, Google cracked down on MyBlog Guest, which was a good resource for guest bloggers. My Blog Guest had started off with a very good objective, but over a period of time, I felt that people started abusing that as well.

guest posting benefits

Don’t Guest Post to Get Backlinks

So, now the obvious question is, with all this happening in the Guest blogging world, is it advisable to guest post?

I am looking at it from a different perspective and this is precisely what my perspective was, whenever I wrote a guest post at one of those authority sites.

I never wrote a guest post to get a backlink. Then what is it that I wanted with writing posts for an alien blogger.

There were some core things that I did before I wrote a guest post. I would spend some time researching the blog that I was guest posting for. This is what my research comprised off.

  • What is the authority of the blog?
  • What niche and type of content was the blog publishing?
  • How many links does the blog have on their home page and their individual posts?
  • What content was the one that got the most attention and traffic?

These aspects formed my core research. I will explain the reasoning behind each of these.

  1. I checked the authority of the blog to see how good a brand are they and what is there reputation in that specific niche. I was only looking for blogs that were an authority in the specific niche. These blogs in a way were the blue-book for readers in that niche and their articles, even if it was not a great one would be savored by its readers.
  2. I wanted blogs that were in the same niche as that of mine. At the same time, I was looking for blogs that published content like that of mine. For eg: Copyblogger is a big brand in a specific niche but the content there was far too much to relate to my blog here in spite of the fact that both the blogs catered to a similar niche.
  3. I obviously did not want a blog that was put up there only to trade backlinks.
  4. I was looking for content ideas that I can write my guest post on.

[social_quote duplicate=”yes” align=”default”]Guest Posting is not dead yet. It has just gone into HIBERNATION and will wake up even stronger.[/social_quote]

Guest Posting Benefits – Blogging for Authority

While Guest posting started off with an objective of building authority for you as a blogger and your brand, sometime down the line.. it gradually shifted focus to building backlinks. You can blame it on the blogs that were accepting guest posts as well who invited such posts by offering people a bribe – a good quality, do-follow backlink.

This is where guest posting started becoming the victim of abuse.

While Google decided to take away all credit that a guest blogger got from placing a few backlinks in the post, the originally primary objective and the genuine one – that of building authority, still remains without an effect from any of these updates.

It is this objective that you should go after.

If you are picking the right blogs to guest post, you are sure to get a lot of traffic. Authority blogs have a huge following. Their posts go viral on social media sites and get shared multiple times. Their audiences comment and interact on almost all of their posts. And most important of all, they do not leave any stone unturned to promote their posts because the posts published on their blogs are as equally as important as the ones that they write by themselves.

Publishing just one guest post on Problogger some time back, sent me close to about 700 new visitors. That is the power of guest posting.

List Building with Guest posts

This is another strategy that I follow whenever I write guest posts. This is very simple and if done properly, you can get quite a good number of subscribers. None of the paid methods will give you the kind of results that you get with this strategy. This is one of the biggest guest posting benefits that I have seen.

Let me explain this strategy in detail.

  1. You first need to set up a personalized landing page. Note the underlined term. That’s right.. Your landing page has to be personalized. So if you are writing a guest post on dailyblogtips.com, your landing page should have something like “Special offer for the friends of Daniel Scocco” as the headline of the page.
  2. You add a simple message in your byline for the article you submitted as guest post. It should be something like, “He runs a FREE course that teaches you the complete system that makes him $xxxx per month from his blog”. You can link any of the important keywords in that line, to your landing page that you put together in step-1.

And that’s it.. You can get ready to add some good subscribers to your list.

You might now have seen that Guest Posting is not dead. Only the part that was being mis-used is now dead. You can still benefit a lot from guest posting. Put together a good strategy and start you guest blogging today itself.

Don’t forget to comment and let me know your thoughts about this post. Also share the post if your liked it.

About the author 

Dilip Kumar  -  

My name is Dilip. I am a fan of the internet and love the many opportunities that the world wide web provides. If used constructively , the internet can give you an opportunity to lead a life free of the 9-5 treadmill and will be able to give more time to your family members.
Read about internet entrepreneurship at my blog.

My name is Dilip. I am a fan of the internet and love the many opportunities that the world wide web provides. If used constructively , the internet can give you an opportunity to lead a life free of the 9-5 treadmill and will be able to give more time to your family members. Read about internet entrepreneurship at my blog.

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