How to do professional guest blogging

Guest blogging can be described as the practice of writing articles for blogs, as a guest author, with the intention of getting more exposure for your website or blog with regards to brand recognition, traffic or backlink building. Although sometimes a guest blogger might target only one of the above, most of the time it is done for all of them. Usually, a post written for a blog by a non-regular author, often to enjoy the above benefits, is recognized as a guest post.

As Google is always targeting sites with low quality content, it is getting harder to get a guest post published on high ranking websites. While most websites have raised the bar for the quality of guest posts, some have stopped accepting them altogether. So how can you thrive as a professional guest blogger with all these obstacles? Well, here’s how…

Target audience research

The most basic step is “reading”. When you decide to write an article on a specific subject for a blog, do a quick internet search and find the latest posts on that topic, and read them end to end. Then go to the target blog and go through the most popular posts. Do not forget to go through the comments as well. Check what people have tweeted about it. Basically, read as much as you can. Familiarize with your target audience and the blog to the point that you have no doubt about your post doing well. Even if you do not do anything else, this step alone will put your guest post leaps and bounds ahead of others.

Keyword research

Keyword research is another key aspect of writing a professional guest post. The bigger the blogs that you publish your guest posts on, the more value it would add to your websites SEO. You will be able to benefit from all the SEO work they have already done for their website and drive more click-through traffic to your website, for keywords you would otherwise never be able to get any search traffic.

In addition, as the backlinks from your guest posts gets older, your article will easily rank better in search engines for the relevant keywords, due to all the link juice it is getting through all high quality websites. Remember that a little keyword research will take your article a long way.

On-page optimization

After doing all the research, it is time to write your guest post. Remember that the best way of writing a successful blog post is by engaging in a dialog with the readers. But do not forget about the search engines. If you want your articles to rank well in search engines for a keyword or a phrase, you have to tell it what your article is about. Optimize your article for your target keywords to best of your ability. Do not just think about what the post is going to do for you. Think about the long term value it could bring.

Optimize your byline

Most of the websites will let you add a small byline at the end of your article. This is the best (sometimes the only) place to persuade the readers to visit your website and increase the click through traffic. Optimize the byline well and, if possible, link it to a special landing page on your website.