Seven Biggest Mistakes of Guest Blogging

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Usually, most Internet marketers always care on different social media strategies that can be used to build the brand, promote their business, and build a relationship with customers. Instead, today we will discuss about guest blogging. More specifically, the seven biggest mistakes of guest posting people committing over and over when trying to incorporate guest blogging into their marketing strategy.

First of all, why should you care about guest blogging?

The Importance on Guest Blogging

As most of us know, guest blogging is the act of writing a piece of content for another person’s site to get a link back to your own website. The true advantage of guest blogging, however, comes at the end when we get to include those few glorious sentences. The ones that gives the reader a glimpse into who we are, how magnificent we are, as well as a link back to whatever it is we’re linking to. Not only can these links help you to rank for some seriously profitable keywords on Google, but they can help you build up your social following, spread the word on your brand, and ultimately, make more sales.

So, here are the common mistakes of guest posting and how to avoid them:

1. Not Having Any Strategy

This is quite possibly the biggest mistake a lot of people starting out with guest posting make. They think they can just improvise with it. The fact is, you can’t just ‘improvise’ a marketing strategy. It needs to have a good strategy and planning. If you don’t have a plan in place for what you are trying to accomplish with your guest blogging efforts, you will just end up pitching useless posts and creating content that doesn’t give you any traction.

So how can you right this wrong? Simple. Define your goals. Decide whether you want to use it as:

  • A method of backlinking, where you target specific keywords and rank on Google for those particular phrases
  • Get in front of a new audience perfectly aligned with your business, product, or service
  • Build your newsletter subscribers by linking directly to a subscribe or squeeze page
  • Drive direct sales

Whatever it is you want to do, keep your goal in mind when finding and pitching websites to write for.

2. Not Keeping Track

It gets really awkward when you pitch the same topic twice in a row to the exact same blog owner. And not only does it get awkward, but you look like an amateur. Long or story short, track it.

3. Not Personalizing Your Pitch

It is simple: If you address your email as “Dear Website Owner” or “Dear [URL]”, you do not deserve the chance to submit content to that site. Web-surfers should be witty, meaning you should not have any problem looking up the name of the website owner in order to personalize our pitch. It can be as simple as browsing through the site’s About Us page, their Contact page, or even by reading some of the comments on the site.

Worst comes to worst a simple “Hi there” will work so much better than “Dear Site Owner” if you cannot find the owner’s name.

4. Not Spell-Checking The Pitch

Seriously, if you can’t even spell-check or proofread your pitch before submitting it to make sure it’s free of errors, how is the blog owner ever supposed to trust in your ability to create high-quality content for their audience? Take the 60 seconds to read over your pitch before submitting it. You’ll be happy you did.

5. Not Pitching in Your Pitch

It sounds so obvious: If you’re going to submit a request to write a guest post for a website in your industry, you should include the topic you wish to write on. However, it turns out it’s not that obvious. In fact, you would be surprised to hear how many website owners receive pitchless pitch emails. Do yourself the favour and take a few minutes to brainstorm 2-4 topics that you think you would be a good fit for your target blog’s audience. A lot of website owners (especially the busy ones) don’t have time to go back and forth with you figuring out which topics work best for them. Instead, pitch them a few topics and give them the chance to choose which one works best.

6. Not Submitting Your Best Work

Let’s get one thing straight here: Just because you are writing content for someone else’s website does not mean you can slack and submit sub-par quality. Remember, just because that blog manager has given the green light for you to submit a post to their site does not mean they are obligated to hit the “publish” button on that piece of content. Give your best effort and submit nothing but your best work. Not only will the site owner appreciate it, but their audience will enjoy reading it and will likely click the links in your author bio.

7. Not Linking Your Website in Your Author Bio

So what was the point? One of the biggest benefits of guest blogging is the links you get in your author bio. Not only can you use them to link directly to your homepage and drive big traffic, but you can use targeted anchor text that will help you out-rank your competition on Google. Hitting the first page of Google is one of the most profitable benefits to guest blogging. It is the most popular reason for people to commit time and energy to a regular schedule of guest blogging.