Tag: blogging

Does Guest Posting Still Work?

If you’re worried about Google cracking down on your guest blogs, you should know that it can’t algorithmically differentiate between guest posts and normal articles. There’s no compulsion to disclose whether a particular article is written by a guest or not.

While Google might not be able to single out the guest posts, you still need to maintain a certain level of quality to reap the benefits.

3. Only the Goals have Changed

As the Google algorithm has matured, so have the various SEO and ranking strategies. If you’re approaching guest posting with the same link-crazy attitude as before, it might not work for you.

It’s time to retire guest posts that contain a truckload of links while providing zero value and substance. That’s one of the main reasons why guest blogging earned such a bad rap.

Ultimately, the success of your guest posting strategy depends on your content, not on those pesky links. Make content relevant, useful, and valuable and you’ll have nothing to worry about!

Is Guest Posting the Right Fit for You?

We’ve already talked about the benefits of guest posting for your SEO and ranking. But when it comes to link building, there’s no shortage of tactics to choose from. Each strategy has its own benefits and risks. The same goes for guest posting.

The big question is: Does guest posting work as a dependable link building strategy? The answer depends on your unique needs and end goals so we’ll let you be the judge of that!

Analyzing the benefits and drawbacks of guest posting is the best way to pinpoint whether it’ll work for you or not.

The Benefits of Guest Posting

The-Benefits-of-Guest-Posting

Here are some benefits guest posting can provide for link building and beyond:

Increases Brand Awareness

Guest posting for a trusted website in the industry can be a massive boost to your brand awareness. If you deliver authoritative and meaningful content, new audiences will take notice and flock to your site.

Boosts High-Quality Traffic

If your guest post wows readers, they’ll definitely be coming back for more. This ensures that you’re getting meaningful traffic from people who genuinely love your content. It also boosts exposure within the industry and pushes your rankings up as well.

Does Wonders for your Domain Authority

If you follow the motto of quality over quantity, you can successfully increase your domain authority. The key is to focus on creating fewer guest posts for highly authoritative sites to build high-quality links.

Creates New Business Opportunities and Relationships

Surviving in the blogging industry is all about building new business opportunities, useful leads, and fruitful relationships. Guest posting can earn you a lot of attention from both users and other companies. This opens up new horizons for collaboration and growth.

The Risks of Guest Posting

Now that we’ve explored all the benefits, it’s time to look at some drawbacks and risks associated with guest posting.

It’s Not Very Scalable

Guest posting too frequently can get you in Google’s bad books. That’s why guest posting isn’t a very scalable strategy. It works best when it’s done sparingly but with great attention to quality.

The catch is that getting your post to feature on a high authority site is difficult while going for a site with low editorial standards may do more harm than good.

It Might not Bring in Traffic Right Away

One of the biggest downsides to guest posting is that the new guest post is created on a brand new page with essentially no authority. It might take a while for the new page to get indexed and bring traffic to your site.

However, this can be circumvented by asking the owner to include internal links elsewhere on the website or doing additional link building.

The Dos and Don’ts of Effective Guest Posting in 2022

Guest posting isn’t the same anymore, it’s changed for the better! Now it’s time to change your strategy with a new and improved user-focused approach.

Here are some important dos and don’ts for effective guest posting:

Do Focus on your Expertise

We’ve already discussed how important it is to target highly authoritative sites for guest posting to get the most out of it. The tricky part is that these sites have good domain authority for a reason. It’s difficult to meet their rigorous editorial standards so you really need to focus on your expertise.

Badly researched, recycled content will only land your pitch in the bin. Focus on what you do best!

Don’t Go Overboard with the Links

We know it can be tempting to add in a ton of links to your site in your guest posts, but it’s time to fight that temptation by only adding links that add value. Google recommends using no-follow links like Wikipedia to make your article look more authentic.

Focus on the quality of the links, not the quantity. 

Do Promote it on Social Media

To bring in some extra traffic, you need to promote your guest blogs on social media networks. This will provide some much-needed visibility and can strengthen your backlinks even further.

Leverage your Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter network to attract more eyeballs!

Don’t Reuse a Blog Post

In the world of guest posting, reusing an already published post is a cardinal sin. While it’s better to create fully unique content, you can also repurpose old content to deliver the message in a new way.

Reused guest posts reflect badly on your blog and will most likely get rejected.

Do Partner Up with a Link Building Agency

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While guest posting is an effective strategy, it does require a lot of expertise, effort, and time. If you’re not well-versed in the intricacies of how it all works, it’s better to consult a professional link building agency. Instead of wasting time on low-authority sites, let your link building agency find high-quality guest posting opportunities for you.

Looking for services to optimize guest posting? Check out Outreachmama’s premium guest posting services.

Does Guest Posting Work: In Conclusion

Does Guest Posting Work: In Conclusion

Guest posting may be dead for some but others have chosen to give it a more user-focused makeover. This new revamp is all about making guest posts more consumer-friendly and insightful. That excludes badly researched generic and annoying link-filled articles.

Even with all the links stripped back, guest posts can boost brand awareness, increase domain authority, create new business opportunities, and much more! With benefits like these, guest posting is certainly worth exploring.

As long as Google values quality content, it doesn’t matter what form it takes. Target humans instead of algorithms and good rankings will follow!

Does Guest Posting Still Work?

Posted by admin
If you’re worried about Google cracking down on your guest blogs, you should know that it can’t algorithmically differentiate between guest posts and normal articles. There’s no compulsion to disclose whether a particular article is written by a guest or not. While Google might not be able to single out the guest posts, you still … Continue reading "Does Guest Posting Still Work?"Read More

Do Your SEO Services Include Content Marketing?

I think I can help you with this question, so I’m going to do my best to answer it now.

Content Marketing vs. Blogging

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For starters, let’s not mix up blogging with content marketing.

You’ll definitely find SEO agencies that publish blog posts to a site as part of their package. Yes, they’ll focus on link building, content optimization, and publishing content to a site.

We cannot confuse content marketing with blogging.

Content marketing is a multilayer approach to building an audience and generating leads.

Blogging is a lot different since it just consists of daily, weekly, or biweekly publishing of a blog post on a website. There really isn’t much to it other than sharing posts with the world on your blog.

And as you should be aware, blogging doesn’t consist of a deeper strategy like the hub and spoke model of content marketing.

The Difference between Blogging and Content Marketing

In the early stages of content marketing, you identify customers’ needs and wants, things that they are interested in, buyer types, and start developing content specifically tailored to their ideal target audience.

On the other hand, blogging does none of this. It has no promotional strategy involved whatsoever. And the cold hard truth is that an SEO agency probably can’t be good at everything.

3-examples-of-seo-strengths-weaknesses

Examples of SEO Strengths & Weaknesses

Example: an SEO agency is phenomenal at link building. But they might not be at Onsite technical stuff.

Example: an SEO agency is great at Onsite technical stuff but they aren’t good at true content marketing.

Advice for SEO Agencies

First and foremost, if you are an SEO agency and you want to offer content marketing services, please remember that the customer always comes first.

So, do a deep dive into what content marketing really is. You have to learn how it works and know what the key components are. Then you can start to hire people that fit the right profile.

Before attempting this with clients, try it out for yourself on your own website.

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Hiring a Content Marketing Team

Once you start getting a grasp of what to look for pertaining to content marketing, you can start hiring and building a team and then offer your services.

Don’t mix up blogging with content marketing.

We took this path in my SEO agency.

My company strictly started off as an SEO agency and we realized the real power that good content marketing could have on an SEO campaign.

Content marketing is so authoritative that it gave us 10 times the firepower in our SEO arsenal.

When you are creating content that generates links, builds an email list, and generates traffic on its own, client satisfaction figuratively goes through the roof. You’re going to have very happy clients in this scenario.

And it’s so much more than client satisfaction. The quality metrics of your site also go sky high. And you’re generating links, your domain authority is going higher, and everything is working really, really well.

Your actual SEO activities compound the effects of content marketing and make them that much stronger.

5-approach-this-one-step-at-a-time

Approach This One Step at a Time

Yes, you have to take things one step at a time.

If you plan to offer blogging services, there’s a place for increasing the size of your site, and increasing the internal linking of your site. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with just blogging as long as you do it correctly.

On the other hand…

If you plan to offer content marketing, make sure you have a content manager on hand, you’ve got some really good content writers, you have a content editor on hand that can make sure everything looks clean, you have a graphic designer that can make images pop and look good, and your articles need good formatting.

And talking about articles, they need to be easily skimmed, and the longer the article is, the more likely it is that it’s good. So, never discount the value of long form articles.

Using Your SEO Chops

And this is where things get interesting, because you get to use your SEO chops on the backend.

Many content marketers are really great at the content portion, but they aren’t so good at promoting their content.

As a search engine optimization expert that specializes in something like high quality link building, not private blog network (PBN) stuff, you have a leg up on most content marketers because they don’t have the chops to drive good link building like most SEO marketers do.

6-quote-using-your-seo-chops

You can potentially offer the best of both worlds to your clients if you use all of your resources to the fullest.

That’s about it. I hope this helped.

If you have any other questions, you can always contact me here.

Thanks for reading.

Good luck!

Do Your SEO Services Include Content Marketing?

Posted by Ajay Paghdal

I think I can help you with this question, so I’m going to do my best to answer it now. Content Marketing vs. Blogging For starters, let’s not mix up blogging with content marketing. You’ll definitely find SEO agencies that publish blog posts to a site as part of their package. Yes, they’ll focus on … Continue reading “Do Your SEO Services Include Content Marketing?”

Read More

Content Marketing: What Are Blogging Best Practices for a B2B SaaS Startup Wishing to Generate Industry Visibility?

I have experience in this area so I’d like to take some time to answer this question.

When we are talking about B2B SaaS, we’re talking about an industry that has national keywords and lots of competitors that have been in the biz for a long time.

And in all honesty, your competitors probably understand the power of content marketing. At least some of them will understand its value.

If you are a startup just joining this industry, you may be funded which makes your life a heck of alot easier. If you’re bootstrapping then you’re going to have to get a lot more creative.

For me, personally, I feel that creativity always leads to better outcomes anyway.

Developing a Solid Blogging Strategy

With a brand-new content strategy, it’s all about creating content that your customers care about. You can figure out what they want in several ways:

A.) Since you already know your customer, write down your ideas about your ideal customer on paper.

B.) Use information provided by your competitors. They are a great resource.

When evaluating what your competition is doing, please pay attention to the following areas:

 

  •         Get a history of all of their blog posts.
  •         What are they writing about?
  •         What are their titles?
  •         What are their topics?
  •         Are people engaging with their content? How often?
  •         Are people sharing their content on social media? How often?
  •         Use Ahrefs or similar to determine their blog traffic.

By evaluating all of this information, you can tell if your competition is connecting with their customers – i.e. your customers.

Just to be clear, this isn’t the Holy Grail though. Many of your competitors aren’t doing content marketing right.

So don’t look at what they’re doing and assume that it’s gospel. Because sometimes your competitors are getting it wrong too.

C.) Initiate in-depth interviews with your customers.

Ask your customers questions like:

 

  • What are some of the biggest challenges when it comes to their business?
  • What made them seek out a solution like yours in the first place?
  • What kind of publications do they read? How often do they read them?
  • Do people in your industry actually go online and read content? Remember, certain industries don’t, so content marketing might not be a good fit.

After asking all of these questions of your customers, gather the answers and use this information to build up multiple personas of your ideal customer.

To start this off on the right foot, you have to create a solid blogging strategy. You have to get to know your customer and understand what they want, while leaving no room for unnecessary assumptions that might not be correct.

2-an-example-customer-persona

An Example Customer Persona:

Sally the accountant is in her mid-40s, she’s married, likes to watch MacGyver in her spare time, she’s a mid-level executive at a firm with 500-1000 employees, and she reports to XYZ decision-maker and she needs to make sure that her numbers look good on this end as a daily concern, and some of the industry publications she reads are ABC.

You create these personas, and based on them, you are starting to lay the groundwork on who you’re writing to.

Whether you’re writing this content yourself, or you have writers to write it for you, having this information helps create content that your customer base will find valuable when reading.

3-building-your-content-strategy

Building Your Content Strategy

Are you going to do the standard blogging model?

In this model, you are blogging once a week. You are either writing content that builds an audience or you’re writing content that’s going to be good for the search engines.

Often times, the content you create will be good to build an audience and please the search engines. They are often mutually exclusive.

Sometimes content that would be very helpful to a user in your specific industry isn’t going to get searched for a lot. But, if a user does somehow come across it via the search engines or paid traffic, they could end up opting in to your list and then you have a subscriber that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.

And once they’re on your list, you can keep marketing to them over and over again.

Who Are You Writing for?

You have to decide if you are:

 

  •         writing for the search engines
  •         writing for people
  •         or writing for both

The latest, most effective content creation technique right now is called the hub and spoke model.

4-the-hub-spoke-model

The Hub & Spoke Model

In this content model, the overall goal is to create premium guides. Besides that, the other major goal is to create really, really big thematically relevant interlinked content.

Here’s an explanation of the hub and spoke.

The hub is a meaty, long form piece of content.

The spokes are also long form, high quality articles that help build out certain points of the main hub article. They are perfect for fleshing out certain topics that you touched upon in your main hub article.

If the content is truly compelling, it will end up becoming a backlink generating machine.

Because of this unique ecosystem of content, the homepage will rank highly in Google, the spokes pages will rank highly in Google, and you will be looked upon as an authority in your market.

If you set it up correctly, people will gladly read this content. They will remember you and your business. And if you add an email subscription box, they will even opt-in to your mailing list.

This method can provide very powerful results.

It’s also becoming more popular because so many people are now creating content.

Now you have to create better and more strategic content in order to set yourself apart for success.

My Recommended Strategy

I recommend creating these large, content rich guides that your audience will love.

Think about a specific topic. Something that’s really, really important to your industry.

Think about how you can break that down into a main article (hub) and then and then subparts (spokes).

Figure out how you can link it altogether. And then spend some time writing it or have a trusted writer create the content for you and put it all together.

Once this piece is completed over several months, you can then repurpose the content as well. You can turn it into a downloadable e-book, break it into pieces and use it for your newsletter, create an infographic, turn it into a video, or even use it for print advertisements.

In the meantime, you should be promoting the heck out of it.

The moral of The story is this:

You’ll generate amazing visibility in your industry if you begin with quality content.

This is going to put you on the map. This is what is going to make people stand up and take notice of you.

Blogger Outreach

While this strategy is good, blogger outreach is even better. I’ve written extensively on this topic in a number of posts on my blog.

Here are the links:

https://www.outreachmama.com/advanced-link-building-strategies/

https://www.outreachmama.com/trustworthy-online-services-blogger-outreach/

Thanks for taking the time to read this answer. I really hope you found it valuable.

Good luck!

Content Marketing: What Are Blogging Best Practices for a B2B SaaS Startup Wishing to Generate Industry Visibility?

Posted by Ajay Paghdal

I have experience in this area so I’d like to take some time to answer this question. When we are talking about B2B SaaS, we’re talking about an industry that has national keywords and lots of competitors that have been in the biz for a long time. And in all honesty, your competitors probably understand … Continue reading “Content Marketing: What Are Blogging Best Practices for a B2B SaaS Startup Wishing to Generate Industry Visibility?”

Read More