The Dos and Don’ts of Guest Blogging

Lauren Owens - August 3, 2012

Guest blogging is a great way to get quality inbound links to your site. And inbound links, we all know, are a cornerstone of SEO. But, like many ways to market your brand online, there are good ways and bad ways to go about it. Here, we’ll look at some of the Dos and Don’ts of guest blogging.

Do – Use your expertise in a way that can grow your audience – and your influence.

This is the main reason behind guest blogging.

There are blogs that do not directly compete with your business but that relate to your business in some way. If you sell shoes, for example, you might want to look into creating quality content for wedding blogs, fashion blogs or, depending on what kind of shoes you sell, blogs aimed at parents, gardeners, environmentalists, etc.

Don’t — Contact blogs that have nothing to do with your business.

The purpose of guest blogging is to find your audience — or potential audiences — where they live. The key word here is synergy. Creating posts for blogs that have no synergistic connection to your business is a waste of time for all involved.

Do — Create quality content.

The content that you create for each blog should be unique, and should depend upon the look and feel of the blog you’re writing for. If you want to produce content for a blog that tends to be photo-heavy, for example, you will need to produce photos that illustrate your blog post.

Don’t – Pepper your guest blog post with unnecessary links.

Guest blogging is all about cultivating relationships, not building link farms. Link once or twice to extremely pertinent information on your own site, and leave it at that.

Do – Find your audience where it lives.

Use a demographic tool like Google’s Double Click Ad Planner to determine what kind of audience a blog attracts.

Don’t – Waste your time.

Don’t waste your time producing blog posts for blogs with little traffic. Evaluate a blog’s traffic with Double Click Ad Planner to make sure a blog is worth your time.

Do – Write your blog posts ahead of time.

When you approach a publisher with a complete package, rather than an idea, you make it much more likely that the blogger will accept your content.

Don’t — Be impersonal.

Think of guest blogging as relationship building. Don’t send out mass email blasts, or the same content to more than one publisher. Your goal is to make friends. So be human and put your best face forward.