What Are the Golden Rules of Successful Guest Blogging?

If guest Blogging is a major part of your content marketing strategy, you must ask yourself the following questions:

• How can I be a successful guest writer?
• Do I know how to be a good guest?
• What rules and guidelines should I follow to create content that is appealing and blog appropriate?

To answer these questions, we have prepared for you a list of golden rules to read, reread and check against every time you are about to write a guest blogpost.

Guest blogging rules:

• Choose your target audience

The first and most important rule you must remember is to carefully pick your target audience. Although guest blogging is a great way to get backlinks and increase your social sharing, your efforts will go in vain if you guest blog haphazardly and neglect to research the credibility of blogs and their domains.

• Do some research

Once you have selected a list of blogs you would like to write for, it’s time to find out the following information about each of them:

• Who is the blog’s main target audience?
• What categories and tags do they use?
• Does the blog include bylines?
• How frequently are posts published on the blog?

Answering the above questions will help you decide whether or not the blog is a good fit for your goals. If yes, you can proceed to the next step.

• Review the blog’s guidelines

Many blogs have blogging guidelines you can easily find via their sitemap. To better understand what would make your submission legible, you need to Review the guidelines carefully. Moroever, make sure you follow the guidelines to a tee. Whether they ask you for a pitch, a full article or a bio, do not drop the ball or try to improvise.

See Also: How to Make Your Blog More Visually Appealing 

• Create relevant & unique content

Use your knowledge of the brand and the blog to create unique, original and relevant content. Take the time to give your content a twist; an uncommon angle that has not been used before. Moroever, avoid submitting radically different topics or formats. This kind of experimentation is better done at your own blog. You should also keep the blog’s audience in mind. Write for them and provide factual, educational or entertaining content and avoid trying to sell your products and services using too much backlinks.

Bonus tip: Make sure your blogpost isn’t too short or too long. Look at the blog’s published content to get an idea about the appropriate length for your submission.

• Establish your credibility

Do you often engage in guest blogging? Make sure you cite all your work. The more you can show that people love and interact with your content, the more blogs will be willing to have you as their star guest blogger. Showing that your blogposts earned many shares and likes is a very good indicator of your authority and blogging skills.

See Also: 5 Benefits of Blogs for Business & Marketing

• Accept constructive criticism

So you have submitted a guest blogpost for review and you are waiting for feedback. Instead of getting the usual ‘WOW, great job!‘, you were given some comments and asked to revise the content. What do you do? You can either revise the post and review the comments and make the necessary changes or you can withdraw the submission. Whatever it is you choose, be sure to be graceful and thorough as well.

• Don’t stop at publication

Your blogpost is published and you are a very happy you. That’s awesome. However, your work here is not yet done. You need to take the time to do the following:

1. Promote your content via your social media channels.
2. Engage with your readers by reading and responding to all comments.
3. Follow up with the blog creator with a thank you note.

Bonus tip: When guest blogging or when blogging for yourself, it is essential that you take the time to review the performance of your blogposts. If you have published a post and it didn’t do well, you need to look at your headline, the topic you chose, the audience and your approach. If it did well, track its stats and make sure you use them for other guest blogging opportunities.

In your opinion, what do you think of guest blogging? What makes a good guest blogger? We are always looking forward to your insights and feedback in our comment section below 🙂

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