Guest Blogging Still Alive and Kicking!

Recently, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam Team has mentioned how Guest Posting is now seen as spammy, low quality content. While the rest of the SEO and digital marketing world is busy discussing about what the new guidelines should be for a guest post, we at Branded Innovation are calm and collected.

Why?

Because we don’t view guest posting as just a link-building tactic, we see this as a chance to connect and provide value for readers.

When guest blogging first started a few years back, it was seen as a chance to provide value for the audience and also gain backlinks at the same time. Over the years, the value part of guest posts have gone down significantly, overshadowed by people who are looking for a short cut to obtaining a link. Google is aware of this and has officially put their foot down on guest posts. But is guest posting really dead?

No.

It’s just shifted back to how it was originally intended for – providing value for the audience.

Here is the mindset that you should be in when you decide to write a well-rounded guest post.

You should be guest posting with a purpose, whether that is to teach a new audience about your niche or providing an explanation for a certain complex idea that anyone outside of the niche wouldn’t understand. Remember, SEO is only one part of a giant pie and if you are only go after a link through a crummy guest post, then you’re missing out on the other pieces of the pie.

The other pieces of the pie:

Branding
Building credibility and expertise in your specific niche
Increase in traffic
Gaining new readers
Interacting with your community
Google Authorship

We came up with a few guidelines that can help you become a better guest poster.

• Stop thinking about links. Think of links as a secondary objective. Your priority should be about gaining traffic and exposure as well as providing valuable content that will be remembered and referenced back to.
• Try to plan out a series of content instead of a one hit wonder. People reading your awesome guest post that has a cliffhanger will come back and wait for part 2 of the series.
• Introduce yourself as an “expert contributor” instead of a “guest author”. You can bring this to the next level by –
• Using your own Google Author account and markup with rel author. This way you have the chance to show people your awesome expert face.
• Track the right metrics – this means first identifying what your end goal is. Is it to get more traffic to your website? Build an audience? Whatever your goal is, make sure to track the correct metrics.