Guest Posting: What NOT to do
Guest Posting: What NOT to do
During my time as a link builder, I have discovered many effective strategies for conducting a successful guest posting plan. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, link building is the final frontier, as it is the one aspect of SEO that is never finished. Link building is also the most difficult SEO strategy to get right. Guest posting exists as a strategy within link building, and it is often the bread and butter of a link building plan. So while I could regale you with stories of my successes at guest posting, I think it is more fun to shine light on my mistakes. So read on to learn what my experience with guest posting has taught me NOT to do.
Do NOT Underestimate the Task
Guest posting is an enormous undertaking that involves hours of researching, planning, organizing, communication, and writing. Do not take on the task of guest posting lightly, as your results will surely suffer for it. Getting a guest posting operation off the ground is going to take some time and effort as you develop a strategy, learn the ropes, and create an organizational and management system. Keeping track of your research and content is crucial to being efficient at guest posting, so great care must be taken when developing these systems. Failing to create a system to manage and record research and content is an easy way to waste valuable time and effort.
Do NOT Conduct Research Poorly
Research is the fuel that powers the guest posting engine. Without conducting research, you will have no clue as to the nature of the site you are trying to build links for. Even if the site is your own, you will need to know who you are in competition with for keywords. If you start looking for blogs to post on without doing proper research, you may find that you have targeted the wrong keywords or niche, which greatly reduces the power of your links, as they do not provide the relevancy that search engines look for. Knowing and researching your competition will give you insight into their link building strategies and will give you insight into how your own strategy should work.
Do NOT Search Ineffectively
Once you have fully researched your site, its keywords, the competition, and the audience, you will need to use this data to search for relevant sites for which to guest post. To do this efficiently and properly, you will need to know how to format your searches in order to find sites that allow guest post which are also relevant and high quality while excluding sites which do not meet these requirements. If you are inept at formulating a search that returns useful results, you will have to wade through all of the junk results in your search results which will reduce efficiency.
Do NOT Aggravate Blog Owners
Contacting blog owners to initiate guest posting on their blog is a crucial aspect of guest posting. If you are rude, waste their time, or do not offer them something that they can use, you will find your guest posting efforts are fruitless. Blog owners are the gate keepers of guest posting links, and you must engage them in a manner that is likely to lead to the links that you desire. Blog owners are concerned with one thing: traffic. The more traffic they get, the more successful and profitable their site is. To this end, you must offer them something that is likely to get them the readers and the traffic they bring.
If you can avoid the above mistakes when implementing a guest posting plan, you will be off to a great start to a successful link-building campaign. After all, it is better to learn from the mistakes of others than it is to make them yourself.
Author bio: Justin Gilmore is a Web Content Developer for Page One Power, a link building Company.
The 4 B’s of Link Building
P1P is known for its link building prowess and diversity, but did you also know that its co-founders are credited with coming up with some of the core principles of link building? From a very basic link building-centric philosophy, Jon Ball has devised a quick and easy way to categorize all link building strategies into 4 basic strategies. Bag, Beg, Build and Buy.
The 4 B’s of Link Building
1.Bag
The link is in the bag!
When you have something in the bag, you know you’ve done a good job of it. Part of the “Four Bs” of link building strategy created by Jon Ball, co-founder of Page One Power, bag refers to something on your site that a third-party chooses to link to, or a “natural link” on your site.
The idea here is to create content on your site that is so incredible, everyone will link to it and you’ll have some nice organic links to your site. This is a difficult strategy since it requires such an investment in time, energy and resources for making original content.
However, it’s an effective strategy if you want your site to get better ranks in the SERP based on its own merit. If you are working everyday to create new, original content that draws page views and links, and then getting that valuable content in front of web users, you’ll have conquered one of the most valid forms of link building in the long game.
Work hard, put out amazing content, and you’ve got those natural links in the bag in no time.
6 Characteristics of a Great Blog Post
Everyone (or nearly everyone) knows the benefits of blogging in today’s business world. A strong blog is nearly incomparable to other online tools for its ability to create an online presence, a sense of community within your market, and an avenue of direct communication from you to your specific target audience. A blog gives a company an opportunity to work on their branding, establish themselves as an authority, and release company news to their clients.
In this modern technological era, the information age, having a strong, active, and social online presence has become an absolute must. That being said a blog is only as powerful a tool as the person wielding it; sometimes it’s better to not blog at all than it is to have an out of date, poorly written, or lackluster blog.
Good Blogs Build Relationships
The entire point of a blog is to build a relationship with an audience. There’s no point writing a blog if no one is going to read it. A good blog is a person to person connection, with real human interaction. A good blog transfers knowledge, ideas and experiences.
Compelling content makes or breaks a blog. By publishing your blog you’re stating that what you have to say is worth not only your own time to write and publish, but worth others to read it. And, if what your publishing (content) isn’t up to snuff, your readers will be dissatisfied and end the relationship.
So, if you are passionate, excited, and ready to start a blog here are some guidelines for creating cogent, intelligent, and powerful content for your blog.
1) Make it Pertinent
No matter how well written, or how informative the blog post, without that it is wasted breath.
Relevance should be your number one priority when writing a blog post. Know your audience and gauge what will not only be appropriate, but pertinent. This is important to build authority within your chosen niche. If your company specializes in the food industry, your readers will likely be uninterested in a blog post about the latest fashion in footwear. Likely, you’ll lose branding power as well.
2) Include Useful Information
It’s not enough that a blog post be relevant to a subject. It also needs to be useful and important information. You blog should aim to help and educate its audience, offering something they can take away. People appreciate information they can do something with, and will return to your blog if you consistently offer posts that are not only relevant, but useful.
Why do most blogs fail? Well, according to www.diythemes.com, most blogs are too self-absorbed. It is not uncommon to find blogs that become a podium for the authors every thought and feeling. This pulls them away from solid, useful content, and suddenly their blog flounders and fails. Check out this good-natured video diythemes.com made about the reason why blogs fail:
3) Make it Engaging
A blog post must be well written. And it’s not enough to have perfect grammar and spelling; it needs to be personal, interesting, and interactive. Try and let your personality shine through in your writing. Don’t be afraid to write in a conversational tone. Personal stories and anecdotes are a great way to make a blog post more engaging. Southwest’s blog does a solid job keeping it personable.
4) Spark Discussion
This goes along with engaging your reader. It is extremely important to generate as much conversation and discussion as possible in your blog. Great posts should generate discussion, so don’t forget to include your readers.
Ask for feedback, thoughts, opinions, or even just comments. Include a call to action at the end of article to garner a response. And don’t forget to participate once the discussion starts; respond to comments, emails, and questions!
5) Keep it Readable
We’ve all seen the blog posts that we in the industry like to call the ye old wall o’ text. No one reads these. They can be the best, most interesting, well written articles, but if they’re not easily readable they get skipped over. This isn’t prose, so keeps your thoughts succinct and to the point.
Bullets, lists, graphs and images are a great way to make sure your content is easy to read. Always preview your work before you publish, and make sure it’s scannable. Check out this blog for a great job of making a hard to write subject extremely readable.
6) Appropriate Length
This is a bit trickier. Some say good blog posts should hover right around 500 words. Others say it needs to be longer.
The truth is both simpler and more complicated. A blog post should be as long as it needs to be. By this, I mean that it should be as long as it takes for you to succinctly and clearly state your idea. If you can write a well thought out, complete article in 400 words, that’s great. If you can keep it interesting, engaging, relevant and informative all the way to 1,500 words, then it’s still a great blog post.
These are the general characteristics I’ve take note of while reading great blog posts.
In the end, as long as you offer quality, pertinent information in a readable and engaging manner consistently your blog should do well, hopefully fostering a sense of online community as well as helping build a person to person relationship with your readers.
Did I exclude anything important for quality content and strong blog posts? Or have you seen a great exception to these rules? I’d love to hear about it!
P1P Interview Series: Meet Point Blank SEO’s Jon Cooper
Jon Cooper, Point Blank SEO
As part of our ongoing P1P Elite Web People Series, we pinned down the teen founder of Point Blank SEO, Jon Cooper. Luckily, he was kind enough to take time away from his busy schedule to answer some of our questions. Here’s our piece on the young Jon Cooper. Enjoy. –K. Clark
Typically, when you try to envision someone considered an expert in their field, you might be inclined to think of a greying, dusty scholar in a secluded room of books. The expert we are featuring doesn’t match the cliché. For one, he’s still just a high school kid who lives at home with his momma.
So why do most of link building firms turn to him for lessons? Well, kid though he is, he’s got skills.
In the past, back in the pre-internet days that Jon Cooper probably doesn’t have a recollection of, companies ranked employees with based on loyalty, experience, age and achievements. The business world has changed. Unlike their “analog” counterparts, ambitious young adults create the most successful web companies. This rising generation of link builders is sharp, outspoken and, they’ve got aspirations of grandeur. Take Ben Huh, CEO and founder of the “glorious” Cheezburger Network. Huh was in his early 20s when he created a web phenomenon with his funny, now-infamous images of “Lol Cats.” Or, there’s Steve Jobs. Bill Gates. Most of the culture is aware of the nerd-infused success born out of Silicon Valley. Being the young inventors of web, they changed the game in favor of the young and adaptable. Think of it as the young and nerdy brigade.
Cooper may still be a high school student but his blog about link building, Point Blank SEO is gaining momentum. Sure, he’s new, but SEO companies look to him for trends on link building and search engine algorithm updates. For a guy just heading towards graduation, it is not a bad way to start a career. He doesn’t have a company, yet. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t one of the more promising minds for SEO, and thankfully for the rest of the industry, he’s great about sharing his tactics.
Huh’s strategy is to “make people happy for a few minutes a day” and Cooper’s is similar. His posts employ wit and humor, something he’s very adept at. In addition to cleverness, he advocates interaction with his readers and treating everyone online with kindness. It’s part personality, and also Cooper’s way of marketing personal brand. He tries to respond to nearly every comment to his blog posts and social media. It’s working, and the positive association with Point Blank SEO is working for him. There are countless marketing companies but they get lost in the sea of bland, creativity-free marketing environment.
Humor is highly valued in the online community and well, Cooper gets the joke.
For instance, to subscribe to his email newsletter, you have to hit the “Be Awesome” button on his website. His Twitter profile description reads, “I’m the link builder Google needs, not the one it deserves.” For a kid, it’s bravado that is admirable, and more importantly, memorable. You could argue that his funny style is unprofessional, but Cooper knows his stuff. His “Link Building Strategies-The Complete List” has become something of a bible to the SEO world.
Not bad for someone who doesn’t run a SEO company and writes blog posts as a hobby. The search engine optimization (SEO) world might want to brace itself have its newest version of wunderkind-turned soon-to-be business owner…but at least we’ll have to wait for a few years for him to graduate from college. Here’s what he was kind enough to share with us.
Q. You’ve made quite a name for yourself as an SEO guru, and yet you’ve said that aside from consulting, you don’t intend to run an SEO company, per se. That means you have to be very passionate about link building to spend so much time and energy on it. If that’s a fair assumption, what is it about link building that is so appealing to you…why do you enjoy it so much?
A. First of all, I’m no SEO guru. I actually hate the term “guru,” because in this industry, it’s nearly impossible to always be on top of it. The reason link building is so appealing to me is because I love results. Who doesn’t? When you can show off your results by pulling up a new tab and Googling your keyword to see your site ranking first, it feels great. You also get to be creative and in my opinion, have a lot more fun with it than doing something like CRO [conversion rate optimization], analytics, or on-page SEO.
Q. You’ve been working on link building/SEO strategy for two years and blogging about it for…what, almost a year? I think I saw that you have about 1,000 page views on your blog per day. Were you surprised at how quickly your blog took off?
A. Yeah, so my site now gets about 1,000 visitors a day (not pageviews, but close!), and that’s 10 times what it was getting in December. It took off after I completely redesigned and re-launched it because I tried to establish it as more than just a personal journal. Before it was hard to read and the content was OK, at best. Sure, I had a few posts that people really enjoyed, but that was usually one in a handful. The new Point Blank SEO is trying to make sure every post is like that. It really does come down to content, but in general, there were a combination of things that made it really take off (read more about it here).
Q. Can you share with us some of the things you’ve learned along the way?
A. One thing I learned is that if you satisfy a need, you’ll be successful no matter what. One of the reasons I started Point Blank SEO was because there weren’t many great places on the web, if any, that were solely dedicated to link building, and the link building posts I came across were usually regurgitated thoughts. After the relaunch, I noticed that because my topic on was something almost every SEO wanted to know about, the traffic built itself.
Q. What about your challenges?
A. My biggest challenge has been balancing all the opportunities it’s opened up for me. I get offers to do things like interviews, guest posts, consulting work, and even full time jobs on a weekly basis, and figuring out which ones are worth my time are which aren’t has been a huge struggle.
Q. What is it about your recipe that makes people pay attention to you? Do you think (informed) humor and creativity are your key selling points? Has using humor ever gotten you into trouble?
A. I’m different, and that’s always been my goal. I try to make sure that everything I do separates me from others. It is the only way to be noticed in a competitive industry, and that goes right along with being creative. Creativity has been, in my opinion, one of the things that’s distanced mine from other blogs on the same subject. This post I published about a week or two ago is a perfect example of that.
I haven’t shown it too much on my blog or elsewhere online, but I take a lot of pride in my humor (especially my love for puns). Luckily, it hasn’t gotten me in too much trouble online, but I can’t say the same for offline. 
Q. I’ve been very entertained by some of the things that you’ve posted or said online… you have got a lot of confidence. Does that kind of confidence come naturally to you, or is it the result of being so good at link building?
A. [I] didn’t know I was rubbing off as confident all the time, but I’ve learned that with anything you do, [you should try to] be confident about it. Even when you’re not 100 percent sure, sounding like you know what you’re talking about is huge. Whether it’s on a phone consultation, blog post, or anything else, it has helped me a lot to try and establish myself as somewhat of an authority (if I am one at all).
Q. Lots of SEO companies look to you and to your blog posts for advice, expertise, trends, etc., does it ever go to your head?
A. No, it doesn’t get to my head, because I’m not charging for it. Anybody can go on my blog and read my stuff, and anyone can start a blog, so there’s no real investment into it on their part. If they don’t like my stuff, they can go elsewhere, so there’s no pressure on me to make sure they’re always happy with it.
Q. There are a precious few handfuls of people who are as adept at link building tactics… do you guys consider yourselves as part of an elite SEO club? If so, who are the people you’d say are also in the club?
A. Wow, there’s a club now?! Wish I got the memo… but no, not really. Many of the best SEOs are the ones who don’t blab about it all the time, like me.
Q. Do you have an SEO guru?
A. I never had a mentor, guru, or anything, just a copy of “SEO for Dummies,” an internet connection and a hungry mind.
Q. There are different theories about the human intellect and you may have heard of the concept of “different types of genius” i.e, Einstein was an amazing physicist, Twain a great humorist. Do you consider yourself to be someone who is an SEO/link building genius?
A. Not at all. I actually think I’m a little above average, at best. All I do to impress is to focus solely on it, and I have the free time that a lot of others don’t have to lay on my bed and brainstorm strategies for an hour every once in a while.
Q. Do you look at the web and see it differently than most people do? Do the potential algorithms and other tactics just show up for you?
A. I guess I see the web differently. Whenever I come to a website, the first thing I think is, “How can I get a link here?” I usually check for any paid links or any other obvious signs (it’s funny when you realize some of the top SEO blogs actually sell links right in their sidebar). Other than that, I have two eyes just like you.
Q. Do you have other hobbies outside of link building or do you fall into the nerdy kid in the basement stereotype?
A. Ha. I consider myself a nerd and I probably am, but I’ve played soccer all of my life (my team won our league’s championship this year!) and I’m one of the biggest advocates of disc golf, the coolest sport you don’t know about (actually started a club for it at my school). It’s like golf, but with frisbees, and the holes are baskets with chains. Google it.
Q. There are many eyes on you waiting to see what you do next… is that a lot of pressure? I saw that you are headed to college next year. Congratulations! Do you mind sharing with us what the young Mr. Cooper has up his sleeve going forward? Do you intend to stick with your niche of link building/search or are you going to take on some other aspect of the web?
A. Again, no pressure until I start charging for products or anything else along those lines. I still have no idea what my future plans are, so I can’t help you out there. I hope to always stick to link building, but don’t be surprised if I venture off to some other part of the web while I’m at it. [I’ve] always wanted to do an internet startup, so college might make that happen.
- Don't mess up a good thing. Here's what NOT to do when guest posting. Some don't-do-this Tips from our resident... http://t.co/WwVIZhyw
- The 4 B's of Link Building : http://t.co/kvAPlbsN
- Do you know what it takes to build links? No worries...we've got you covered.... http://t.co/wktp8sxz
- Guest Posting: What NOT to do: http://t.co/bUN4msRU
- 6 Characteristics of a Great Blog Post: http://t.co/Vz5QL6kW
- Google Tweaks Rankings, Hurting Firms http://t.co/L9UDNlHY #WSJ #iPhone
- Missed my flight this morning out of Boise because of security. Boise has the most intense security I've ever seen.
- @smx backpacking with my son in Olympus national park this weekend.
- Guest Posting: What NOT to do: http://t.co/6Vhcv76b