If you have been around the blogosphere for some time you would have heard the term guest blogging. You might not know what it means and you might not care either, but I think that it is important that you understand the concept of guest blogging if either you are a blog writer or blog reader, and even if you are neither, still it never hurts to learn something new.

read more SEO Friendly Content Writing- 8 Greatest SEO tips that every post must follow

What is guest blogging or guest posting?

Guest blogging is simply writing a blog post for a blog that is not your own. You write for someone else’ blog, who have allowed guests to publish posts in their blog.

So you might wonder why you would do such a thing, why would you guest post in someone else’ blog and not your own. Well there are a number of benefits of guest posting. In this article we list the main benefits of guest blog posting and after going through it I am sure you might want to try your hand at guest posting too.

Great publicity through Great Guest blogging

You can get publicity of your blog through guest blogging on other popular sites. There are a number of websites that allow guests bloggers to blog on them. When you blog with your name more and more people come to know of you and your writing so in this way guest blogging earns you a name and publicity for your blog.

However remember that guest blogging is a two way process. When you publish your posts in one blog, you are also expected to let others post in your blog. Some websites allow you to re-publish your content that has already been published on your blog. This is good when you have begun blogging and your traffic is quite low. Then re publishing you articles on a site where there is much more traffic is beneficial for your site as it will redirect some of the traffic to your site.

read more Top Mistakes Bloggers are making everyday

Guest blogging is a great way to get authentic and high quality backlinks to your website. Although there are many arguments against this technique too but if you use it properly and follow the guidelines we have then you can get benefit from it too. When you guest blog, you can leave a link to your blog in your author’s bio section of the website. If the readers like your posts, they can click on your link to read more of your articles. There is also another way to promote links to your blog and that is by putting up the links to related articles in your blog between the posts but there are two things to consider before that.

1. Firstly check that whether the website you are posting to, allows links within a posts. Sometimes there are some blog posts that do not allow you to write links within the post. Also in some cases there is a strict limit to the number of backlinks that you can provide within the post and sometimes backlinks are only allowed in the author’s bio only. So read the blog’s policy about backlinks first and then make the post.
2. Secondly, the most important thing that will generate traffic is to guest post in blogs in the right blog niche. People will only like to read your content if they think it is similar to the content that they are already reading. Only then can you post links within the guest post too. Links that are not related to blog’s keywords are not supposed to be used in the interlinking of the article.

Although remember not to over stuff the post with your link. Google penalizes the posts that are stuffed with backlinks. Infact do not write the post with the sole purpose of earning yourself backlinks in mind.

read more Creating great content for your blog

Increase your knowledge and authority with guest post sites

The more you write about your niche, the more knowledge you will gain. You will do more research and learn more new things in your niche. It is a great way to increase your authority in your niche too. When people will read your posts they will understand the niche and start considering you as the authority. It is a slow process and would take time to win the trust of people but it gets much quicker if people see your posts in an authority blog. People trust a blog and when they see that your post is on it, it means that the blog trusts you. In a trickle effect people will also start trusting you sooner than compared to without the guest posts.

Secondly you can get feedback on your writings from a wide variety of audience. The comments on blogs are very important. They not only tell you which areas you are lagging in and need to work on, it also gives you a number of new ideas to work on. Also on authority blogs, you can get the feedback from the Blog creators that will be quite valuable given their industry experience.

Breaking the monotony of writing in the same way everyday

Guest blogging will enable you to break the monotonous routine of writing in your blog over and over again. You get to have a change of environment. It will improve your writing style and your vocabulary. You have to follow a different pattern of writing. Maybe the place where you are guest blogging have a separate themes or settings. This will make you learn more and would give you a healthy break from the monotony of following the same steps.

Get more followers on your social media account

Guest blogging is a great way to garner social media followers. In the author’s bio section you can give your Twitter handle in order to get Twitter followers. It will result in your getting more and more following on Twitter. More following means more views for your content, whenever you will share it. In the same way you can link all your social media together and get the maximum amount of following for your content.

PR with fellow bloggers in your niche

Another great use of guest blogging is to create friendly relations with other authority bloggers in your niche. It is always good to have fellow friends in your work environment. Blogging has become very competitive and it will be good if you have some friends that you can rely on. To make friends the key is to provide excellent content in the guest post. If the content is great it will not only get you more following but it will make you esteemed in the eyes of the owner of the authority blogs. There is always need of good content so you might get more offers to write guest posts if once your post is good enough.

So now you must have understood the benefits of guest blogging. These are not the only uses of guest posts, there are a number of other important aspects to it too.

Anyways now moving forward let us see how to write a great guest post.

read more 5 amazing ways blog commenting can benefit you

Writing an amazing guest post

When you are writing for someone you must definitely be extra careful about everything. There is absolutely no room for mistakes. When someone is giving you the chance to come to the center stage of the audience that he has built from his hard work, it is your responsibility to take care that you do not misuse this opportunity.

Here are  tips for writing an excellent Guest Post.

8 tips to write excellent Guest post

1. Research about the platform where you are about to guest post

Even when the niche is same, every blog has its own style and rules for the posts. If there are rules and regulations available (They are usually on the guest post request page) make sure you go through them thoroughly and then follow them verbatim. It is usually very irritating for the blog owners that when they are giving an opportunity to the guest blogger, the guest blogger would not even bother to follow basic rules and principals.

2. Build some credentials

When you are requesting for a guest post on a top authority website, make sure you have some good credentials to show to them. Write some good blog posts on your blog. You will get the opportunity to write a great blog posts only after you pass the criteria of the selection and the selection will be based upon your previous writing works. So before applying for the job, you must have something to prove your mettle in the field.

3. Provide something new and valuable

On authority websites there are usually most of the topics already covered in detail. Make sure you browse through the content, so that when you write on a topic it is not repetitive. There is no use of writing on a topic that has already been explored by a specialist blogger. Find topics that are not covered or give information in the topic that is not already there. Choose some new technology or newer fashion trend or new product reviews.

4. Discuss the topic first

Instead of submitting the whole article to a website, just to find that the article is not publishable due to any reason, it is better that you discuss the topic that you are interested in getting to be published as you guest post with the blog admin. Once the admin approves the topic only then should you start working on it.

5. Put in hard work

It is very important that you put in all your efforts and hard work into the article. Do good research and provide useful information. Write something that will add value to the website. Do not think that the article will not be published on your blog so why put in so much effort. In fact you must put more effort in the guest post because it is a display of your talent to a wider and varied audience.

6. Proof read and error proof your post

One mistake that most bloggers make. They write a long informative post but when it comes to proof read it they get lazy. In the hurry to get the content up online they will just publish the post and would not proof read it. This is very wrong because no matter how much expert you are, people tend to make small grammatical errors and mistakes. So make use of spelling and grammar tools. Google’s Grammarly is a great tool for blog editing.

But having a tool does not mean that you do not need to re-read the article too. You must read the article once you have completed writing it because the tools can just identify grammatical errors but you can find out if there is some point missing, some sentence that needs changing or any aspect of the article that can be made better or more useful.

7. Provide credits and references

Provide credits and references wherever required. Whenever you are stating a static or a graph tell the source of the content. When you are using images from the web, do not forget to give the photo credits. These small things are not only important ethically but also shows how professional you are.

8. Proper linking within the articles

There must be proper linking within the articles. The purpose of web 2.0 is to have proper linked articles and pages. So it is very essential that you link your article to high authority websites.  It is important that you link to websites that are well known and are ranked high in Google and Alexa. Otherwise if you link to spammy websites Google will penalize your page for that.

Also Read: Create a free blogs on Blogspot – Step by Step Guide

Here is a comprehensive list of Blogs that welcome guest posts. As well as this one.

Here are two case studies that can help you understand the value of guest blogging by a couple of real world case studies.

• “How Guest Blogging Can Create Hundreds of Scraped Links”– Built Wise saw hundreds of scraped backlinks as a result of their guest post at Search Engine Journal

So fellow bloggers guest posting can be beneficial and if done properly it can generate a lot of revenue for you. Do you do guest posting? Share your guest posting tips with us by commenting below.