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Guest Blogging for SEO Strategy: Part I

Build Powerful Backlinks with Guest Posts

Rise in the SERPs and grow your audience

The beginner’s guide to guest blogging

Defining a content marketing strategy that includes guest posting can be time consuming and challenging. It’s much easier to write when you feel inspired or publish content that you find personally interesting. But these are not effective ways to spend your content marketing budget, build an audience, nor increase visibility online. You need a plan that includes a defined approach to enlisting contributors and guests to share their insight and expertise on your blog.

Get to Know Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is an effective inbound marketing strategy used to build brand awareness, drive traffic, and bolster your position as a thought leader. Contributor posts are pieces where external insight is woven into an article produced in-house, while guest blogs are authored fully by an individual outside of your organization.

Why Bother?

Contributor features and guest blogging are high ROI content marketing strategies. With a stellar guest post, you can drive traffic, increase engagement, improve visibility amongst your target audience, and build credibility with the search engine results pages (SERPs), like Google.

Google’s mission is to show its users the best possible content out there and relies on complex algorithms to determine what that is. Backlinks, or when other sites link to your domain, are one of the most powerful indications of this to Google. The more quality links you have to your site, the more likely Google is to consider your business authoritative and reliable, and therefore worthy of a higher ranking.

Benefit from Partnership Marketing

Guest blogging is a powerful approach to mutually beneficial partnership marketing in the digital age that allows both parties to build links, increase traffic, and strengthen brand awareness. The writer will receive recognition and a link in the post’s byline, while the business hosting the blog will receive one on the contributor’s site.

And remember, while you’re improving your rank in the SERPS, you’re also establishing and nurturing personal contacts and growing your professional network. At Infuse Marketing, building relationships is at the core of what we do, and we believe partnership marketing is about more than just metrics!

How to Get Started

Invite a complementing business partner or industry leader for an on-the-record conversation from which to build a blog post. Or reach out and offer this individual a spot on your blog if they’d be interested in authoring a guest blog post.

Selecting Contributors and Guest Posters

Selecting a contributor or guest poster begins with a look at your existing clients, network, and business partners. Get those creative juices flowing with a good old fashion brainstorm session. Make a list of professionals with whom you could collaborate for a mutually beneficial article.

For example, as a loan officer, you might partner with a real estate firm you’ve established a relationship with to create an article on local housing trends. Or perhaps you join forces with a luxury condominium developer or its leasing office to write an article on why many millennials are favoring condos over detached home ownership.

Or say you’re an e-Commerce florist shop. The bulk of your business comes from contracts with local businesses, and now you’d like to capture the home sellers’ market. You might partner with a home staging company for a think piece on how fresh flowers can help your home sell.

You have your contributor, now what? Follow the conversation as it continues in part II where we’ll discuss more examples for developing a guest blog post, promoting via social media, and acknowledging your contributor by name and through links.

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