guest blogging

You would think that guest bloggers have this down by now, but there are still many things they do that drive me up a wall. I have been a guest blogger on many websites and also received guest post pitches from writers. At this point, I can’t help but scratch my head at some of the things bloggers are still getting wrong.

You don’t need to be perfect, but you do need to know the basics. If you don’t, you will likely get your guest post pitch rejected before you even get a chance to showcase your expertise. You will also need to nail your presentation once you have a pitch accepted. Getting accepted to post an article and then not delivering quality is worse than having a crappy guest post pitch. If you know how you might fail at guest blogging, you can then correct your course.

If you want to be successful at guest blogging, here are four things you need to stop doing immediately.

I manage guest blogging opportunities for several clients, and it can be a challenge to keep up with which topic I’ve pitched for them, and where. Because most blog sites don’t respond right away — or even publish within weeks of my submitting an article — it can easily become a logistical nightmare keeping up with it.

Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears

Last year, I resolved to find software that would help me track which articles I’d submitted, which editors showed interest in, and when and where the articles were published. I started off trying editorial calendars like Kapost and CoSchedule, but what I needed was less of a calendar and more of a tracking system. Plus, some of the calendars I looked at were $20+ a month, and I can’t justify the cost if the software doesn’t do exactly what I need.

So, like Goldilocks working her way through the porridge, I continued on my search.

It would be remiss to start any article about guest blogging without mentioning Matt Cutts’ now infamous blog post on the subject back in January of 2014. Cutts, who is Google’s Head of Webspam, warned digital marketers and SEOs everywhere to ‘stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy.’

Unsurprisingly the article caused waves of panic to spread throughout the SEO community. Such was the resulting consternation and storm of plaintive and often confused commentary (657 comments on Cutts’ post alone, not to mention the innumerable articles written on third party sites) that Google’s penalty-enforcer-in-chief chief was compelled to write an addendum to the post stating that he was ‘not trying to throw the baby out with the bath water’ and that there were still ‘many good reasons to do guest posting.’

In case you’re not as tapped into the SEO world as us marketing professionals, you might have missed the firestorm that Google’s head of Webspam team, Matt Cutts, started a few weeks ago. He wrote a post about Google’s stance on guest blog posts, which many misinterpreted to mean that we should all give up on writing them. Before his words get twisted yet again, let me quote him from his  post:

…if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.

A similar outcry happened in 2012 when Cutts made a similar decree about press releases.

So Should We Stop Guest Blogging?

Let me interpret what I believe Cutts is trying to tell us.

There are plenty of people using content marketing tools like guest blogging, search engine marketing, and press releases in the correct way; that is: using them to build credibility and to reach a wider audience. But there are an increasing number of people who take advantage of these strategies to get their spammy links on other people’s sites, in the hopes that Google will raise their sites up search results.

Previously I wrote about how to get more of your guest posts picked up.  So when Susan was nice enough to ask if I would like to write here again, I thought it would be appropriate to dive a little deeper into the subject of writing guest posts.

Why Should I be Writing Guest Posts in the First Place?

From an SEO perspective the reason is simple, you gain backlinks to your site.

A link is like a vote from one site to another, signaling that they trust (or endorse) the content, services and/or products on the site.  The idea behind Google’s thinking is, the more links you receive from trusted, high ranking sites, the more reputable you are.  This and many other factors play in where you rank in the search results.

However, the benefits of guest posting can be much greater for a business than just acquiring links.