Google-Friendly Ways to Make Guest Blogging Work for You in 2020
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Search for Guest Blogging Opportunities
Now that you know why you want to become a guest blogger, let’s focus on finding guest blogging opportunities. A good place to start is with your own niche or industry since you’ll likely know more about what you normally do for a living.
One way to track down guest posting opportunities specific to your niche/industry is to use Google search to your advantage.
Do a Google search for your industry/niche + guest blog — or “submit guest posts” or “accepting guest blog posts.”The results should also take you directly to pages that provide guidelines for guest bloggers, which crosses another thing off your to-do list.
Explore Your Target Blogs before Guest posting
Before you start cranking out awesome guest-posts, take a moment to explore your target blogs. Look at things like the type of blog content already posted. Are the posts similar to what normally interests your audience or you?
Next, turn your attention to reader engagement. How involved and active are a blog’s readers, subscribers, or followers?
Signs of an engaged readership typically include:
- An assortment of relevant comments
- Posts regularly shared on social media
- Follow-up posts that appear to be in response to significant comments/feedback
Also, set your sights on blogs where the blog owner is active on social media. This is Google-friendly because it suggests your guest posts will have a good chance of being promoted on various social platforms (which equals more visibility).
Additionally, check to see if a blog’s readers are engaging more with the actual posts attributed to the blog host or if it’s more of a mix between host posts and guest contributions.
The mix matters because you don’t want to dive into an uphill battle on a blog where the readers tend to shy away from guest content.
Prepare Guest Content Likely to Fit in with Each Blog’s Style
Yes, you’ll need to make a convincing pitch first. Let’s, for the sake of staying on topic with this particular post, assume you’ve already done that and you’re in (congrats).
We can now zero in on the nature of your guest blogging content. Bear in mind that just because you’re in as a guest poster doesn’t mean your content will actually be accepted. Boost your odds of submitting acceptable posts by getting a feel for the tone and nature of a blog’s existing content.
Pay attention to such things as:
- Audience level — beginner, intermediate, expert/advanced are the three basic levels
- Nature of the audience — general consumers, b2b consumers, industry insiders, etc.
- How content is presented — lengthy, in-depth posts, short-and-sweet posts, primarily lists, detailed tutorials or how-tos, etc.
As long as you’re browsing blogs, see how other guest posts are presenting their guest blogging content, especially the longer-term contributors. Are they giving answers to commonly asked questions? Are they mostly sharing unique insights or tips with longer posts?
Information of this nature is useful for Google-friendliness since your guest content is more likely to be seen as relevant if it fits in well with existing content.
As a matter of fact, it shouldn’t be obvious to readers that certain posts are from the host and others are from guest-posters.
