Make your guest post stand out...
If you have been reading the Traffic Generation Cafe for any length of time, you are probably aware of the benefits of guest posting.
Here is a concise summary of these benefits from the “Guest Posting” page of this site:
“You gain access to new audience and can potentially acquire a good amount of traffic back to your site/blog and possibly a few subscribers as well.
Your post will have twice the exposure and social media promotion between Traffic Generation Cafe’s and your social networks.
My readers will also have an opportunity to hear a new and fresh prospective and discover another informative site to follow as well.”
In addition to publishing this blog, Ana practices what she preaches and is a prolific guest poster.
If you spend much time reading blogs it seems like her guest posts are everywhere.
These guest posts are almost certainly a major factor in the 300% increase in search engine traffic that Traffic Generation Cafe has received in the past 9 months. It also is likely a big factor in this site’s homepage jumping to a PageRank of 4 in the 6/27/11 update.
Given that the benefits of guest posting are widely recognized and the more popular the blog that publishes a guest post the greater the benefit, it has become very competitive to have a guest post published in the top blogs.
If your target audience is the top 500 blogs and upon average they feature five guest post a week, then there are only about 2,500 weekly opportunities for posting to the top blogs. Given that there are 244,000 people that include “SEO” in their Linkedin profiles, that only leaves room for 1% of SEO’s to get an article published in a top 500 blog per week.
If you add in all the bloggers and others that do not include “SEO” in their Linkedin profiles, the competitive landscape balloons. Further, these calculations are based on a top 500 blog, it becomes significantly more competitive to have a guest post published by a top 100 blog.
So how do you increase the likelihood of your guest posts getting through this editorial gauntlet and being published by an A-list blog?
First of all, it helps to have a provocative headline, is mandatory that the content is well written, and the post is submitted to a blog for which your article is a good fit. For more detailed tips on guest post publishing, read
- Take Your Blog to Celebrity Status – 10 Guest Blogging Secrets
- Guest Posting: How To Successfully Borrow A-list Bloggers Traffic
I would add the following to the tips included in these two articles by suggesting that you dig into the revenue model of the blog(s) you are targeting.
If it fits within the flow of the article. include a link to a webpage that offers the publisher an opportunity to monetize their traffic from their visitors reading your article.
The publisher will obviously be more enthusiastic about publishing an article that might generate some revenue (assuming the article meets the quality standard of the blog and the link is not simply gratuitous).
Also, it will confirm to the publisher that you have taken the time to conduct research on their blog.
Use of this tactic alone will not get your article published, but it might just be that little extra boost that gets you through the door.
Here are a couple of examples where I have utilized this tactic:
1) In a post submitted to FamousBloggers about backlink checking using free tools, I included a link to a professional strength backlink checking tool featuring the FamousBloggers affiliate link code. It was easy to conduct the research by inputting site:www.famousbloggers.net “backlink checking” into the Google search box. It’s probably a good thing I conducted this research, because Famous Bloggers had published an article on backlink checking between the period that I started writing my post and when I hit submit. I might have appeared rather careless if I had not been aware of their recent article.
2) PageRank is back in the news again because it was just updated for the first time since January. However, given the randomness of the updates, the usefulness of PageRank during periods when it is numerous months out of date is questionable. I wrote a review comparing Page Authority from Open Site Explorer to PageRank and submitted it to SEOmoz. Given that Open Site Explorer is a SEOmoz site and the paid version of the service is a significant revenue generator, I had a pretty good idea that my positive review was likely to get published
Marketing Takeaway
Given how competitive it is to get a guest post published on an A-list blog, the more research you conduct the better.
An area of research that can be productive is to dig into how target blogs are monetizing their traffic.
While you do not want to cheapen yourself by gratuitously adding in links that do not fit within a post, if appropriate it cannot hurt to add in a link that might offer the publisher an opportunity to make some money.
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