Important Blogging Rules Every Guest Blogger Must Know

As a guest blogger or collaborative content marketer, you are expected to showcase your talent in the website of your host. If you have guest blogging as part of your overall content marketing strategy, you had better be good at your trade. You must therefore know the rules of guest blogging and play by the rules. If you can consistently create good content around topics relevant to the audience of your host blog, using the right and appropriate format, and directly promote your content and the host website, you’ll quickly endear yourself to your host. Thereafter, if you follow the rules and keep to your host’s lead, you can succeed as a guest blogger. That success rubs off on your host as well as your own business. That makes the relationship mutually beneficial to both the host and the guest blogger. In this relationship, the golden rule is read the rules/guidelines, reread the rules/guidelines and keep strictly within the rules/guidelines in your guest blogging activities.

 

Therefore, if you want to be a great guest blogger, it is important you know these here tips/rules/guidelines.

Do Your Homework Well

Knowledge and preparation are vital keys to successful guest blogging. Always do your homework well before starting out. Part of this preparation is proper investigation of your host blog before selecting them. You must know something about the audience, the blog niche, the categories and tags for the content, frequency of publication/updates, preferred topics, and if by-lines and backlinks allowed on the content. This information will enable you to prepare well enough for the huge task of guest blogging ahead.
 
Review and Understand the Guidelines

Don’t ignore the blogging guidelines as related to your blog host. Always review and understand the guidelines well enough as you start off and as you blog along. Whatever the guidelines require you do, be sure to comply. Some guidelines may require you to first submit an expression of interest form, or a pitch and even a completed article and your concise Bio. Compliance with these requests to the satisfaction of your blog host helps to quickly cement your guest blogging relationship.

Create Only Unique and Relevant Quality Content

Do not ignore consistent good content. That is what attracts readership. You can always review what’s been published on a particular topic then give the topic a bit of twist to provide fresh and additional information for the benefit of your readers. If you manage to consistently come up with an uncommon angle about a particular topic such that your content manages to provide a fresh take on the topic, you have very bright chances of impressing your host website’s submission reviewer and the audience.

Carefully Pick Your Target Websites

One of the major benefits of guest blogging is to extend your reach beyond your website and your brand. That way, your content manages to reach more readers, secures quality backlinks from authoritative domains, and increases your social-sharing opportunities. That naturally translates to more traffic back to your website. It is important to figure out which sites reach the people you want to reach and which domains offer more credibility to your content and brand. Thereafter, you can carefully pick your target websites before you guest blog on their sites. 

Conform with Set Formats

Most blog websites have their preferred blog formats. The reason you must avoid submitting content on a radically different topic or format. You do not have the luxury of content experimentation as you can have on your own blog website. It is best to fit your content into your host’s blogging environment as much as practicable. Unless you have express permission to do so, never submit a content type that your host blog is not used to publishing. If it becomes absolutely necessary to publish something a bit different, you can explore the possibility of convincing your host blog to expand its focus to your particular format or topic of interest.

Write Only for Their Audience

A guest blogger writes solely for the audience of his host blog. If your content fits in seamlessly for the readers, they may not even know you are a guest blogger unless your bio says so. Write content to fit what the audience expects. This content is reinforced with a matching blog style, factual and informative content as well as educating and entertaining content. Your content must focus fully on how it can help your audience and not as disguised ads for selling anything. It should not in any way be perceived by your audience as a way to get as many backlinks as possible to your website.

Always Submit Original Content

In content marketing, content is king. The best content for guest blogging is original content. Some host blogs don’t accept content that’s been published anywhere else on the internet. It is easy for them to detect any content that’s been published elsewhere through Copyscape software for instance. Some blogs may accept content if a disclosure is made and proper acknowledgement and attribution shown. Failure to do this, you risk getting blacklisted.

Don’t Fail to Promote Your Content

Promoting your content vigorously is highly beneficial to your host blog and your own website. It is therefore advisable to widely share your content on appropriate online channels particularly social media channels. While sharing, be sure to include links to the original post. That helps with directing traffic to the right places.

Routinely Engage with Your Readers

If you routinely engage with readers, you can get useful feedback and even great ideas for more content. User generated content too is very useful for SEO. Try to always read and respond to all comments generated by the content you posted. It is also advisable to track where your content is promoted on social media and carefully interact with any comments posted therein.

Always Follow Up Diligently

By following up, you can always review performance feedback to evaluate the success of your content. If you detect contents not doing well, you can find out why then take remedial actions. Poor performance of content may have to do with issues relating to your blog headlines, your audience, the topics and even your general approach to blogging. It is good too to always check in with the blog editor or director of your host blog. That way, you can tap into their thoughts and opinions about how well you are doing as a guest blogger. You can share your host blog editor’s opinion together with your content stats as intro for other guest blogging opportunities.

Write to an Appropriate Length

Most host blogs usually have word count ranges for the blogs they allow. Their blogging guidelines usually specify this. Even if not specified, you can spot-check the length of existing content then craft your own content to fit in. You diminish the likelihood of your articles being accepted if you write too long or too short.

Respect Facts

In blogging, facts are sacred. They help to enhance credibility and authority. Always make sure your facts are correct and all direct quotes/statistics attributed appropriately. When it comes to quoting statistics and figures, be sure to get to the original source to verify before quoting. If you are unable to verify any information or statistics, it is advisable to exclude them from your content.

Follow the Stylebook of the Site

Most blog submission guidelines often specify the site’s stylebook. Just stick with it. In some cases you may be required to stick with American grammar or English grammar and that includes the dictionary type too. Stick with their formatting style as well and be sure to stick with the steps provided by the host website to submit your content.
 
Always Make a Case for Your Content

It is part of blog promo to always make a case for your content. If you are given an opportunity to craft an introductory email, make it brief but intriguing. You can customize it for the site as proof and to show you know the audience and the purpose of the blog. That helps to project why your authorship and content should work well on the site. If you introduce yourself well enough through your accomplishments, you can quickly build authority, social proof, and a great rapport with your audience.

Quickly Establish Your Credibility

You need credibility to build authority, social proof and rapport with your audience. Credible references are essential here. For this reason, you can always cite relevant outlets where you’ve published content, and if convenient, demonstrate your content’s effectiveness with credible stats and laurels. Don’t leave out your bragging rights if you are not compelled to. They help your credibility.

Diligently Scrutinize Feedback

User generated content is helpful for a blog’s SEO. The reason you cannot afford to ignore feedback from your audience. If you diligently review the comments and questions posed through feedback, it can help you to craft new content or to retouch old content with new information. You may even decide to take down an old post if the feedback you get makes it necessary.

Best Places to Find Guest Blogging Opportunities Online

If you are a content marketer, the words guest blogging cannot be strange to you. Content marketers and bloggers guest blog to get backlinks and traffic to their websites. They need relevant and high quality content to communicate and enhance their websites and brands with good traffic. Every online business owner or marketer needs good traffic on their websites. Guest blogging/guest posting blogs stands out as one of the best ways to get this traffic. Guest blogging tends to compliment the direct blogs on your own business website. Where to guest blog to get the best results can at times be hugely challenging. Online, if you search well, you will find many online platforms providing guest post services. But, finding a great guest blog opportunity poses some challenges which most content marketers must have to grapple with if they are desirous to get the real benefits of guest blogging. Following are great places to find the best guest blogging opportunities on the internet.

Reputable and Authoritative Blogs

The reason you need to guest blog in reputable and authoritative blogs is rather obvious. It is because of the traffic such blogs already attract. There are many websites on the internet already having good traffic to help you find the best guest blogging opportunities for your own website. But, before settling to guest blog on any website, you must first be sure their blogging niche and their content are similar to yours. That is where you are likely to have competitive advantage as a guest blogger. Most importantly, you’ll also have to consider whether or not they’ll accept guest posting and on what terms and conditions. If they accept your guest posts, as well as allowing you to add backlinks to your website on your content, it is good for you. You can directly mail them your blog posts or write some useful comments below their posts with the relevant backlinks. That is about the only way you can take full advantage of the good traffic the authoritative blog is already having. If you habitually visit reputable and authoritative websites, you will be able to find the best guest posting opportunity with time.

On Social media

These days, social media is where nearly everyone is at 24/7 around the world. With over 4.5 billion active users, social media is one of the best platforms to push anything you want on the internet. Among the very popular social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and the likes, you can simply make a blog post and you will get massive reactions to your post. These social media platforms have a handful of features and in-house tools to find every bit of information you need and to enhance guest blogging. Through these platforms, you can search for and locate guest bloggers and websites that need writers to find the best opportunity. You can take your time to try your hands on different social media platforms to find some of the best guest blogging deals there are. One great advantage with social media is that most people who use the platforms love to find guest blogging opportunities from those already connected. Therefore, if you understand the awesome power of social media well enough and use it in the right way; you’ll derive great benefits from guest blogging on the platforms.

Forum Communities

The internet houses many forums and communities where people interact and exchange ideas freely. Out there, you will find many online platforms providing guest post services as well as allowing you to be in touch with many great guest writers. On these platforms, if you like, you can even buy guest posts according to your requirements. For usefulness, the only care you need to take in doing this is to be sure the posts are relevant to your content or niche industry. Also, after making sure the platforms are reputable and they rank highly on Google SERPs, you are good to go as a guest blogger.

Through Search Engines

On search engines you can practically search for and find anything you need online. All you need do is to just type a related keyword on your computer search console and pronto a search engine like Google will provide you with all possible information in a matter of seconds. Through search engines, you can diligently search for websites whose contents are similar to yours particularly if in the same niche industry. Search engines will help you to find high-ranking websites more efficiently to enable you get the best guest posting opportunity. You can then reach out to such websites to find out if they accept guest blogging. In addition you can start emailing them or commenting on their relevant posts. By commenting regularly on their posts, you’ll manage to create a strong relationship between you and them. Such relationship is usually very good for business. Your real challenge however is to get the proper knowledge of how to search on the search engines in the right way. If you can for instance search Google in the right way, the search engine will find you the right results that suit your guest blogging needs.

How to Create a Content Distribution Plan

If you want to be an effective and efficient content marketer, anything you do, you must have a plan for it. It is not enough to simply create good content. Without an effective content distribution plan, the content may not be too helpful in your marketing activities. It is great to plan your topics, write your content, confirm the quality of the content, optimize the content but when you hit “publish”, what comes next? Content distribution of course! That is hugely important for the success of your marketing efforts. After creating your content, you must have a good plan to distribute it multi-platform. That helps to get as many eyes on it as conveniently possible. You may choose to do your distribution manually or through popular online content distribution tools like Buffer or Hootsuite. Next is to be sure that the places you distribute your content will be helpful in its sharing and engagement.

Below are some of such places you can share your content to generate more traffic, views, leads and engagement.
•  Twitter
•  LinkedIn
•  Google Ads
•  Facebook posts
•  Facebook Ads
•  Instagram posts or stories
•  Email list/newsletter
•  Repurpose as YouTube video
•  Pinterest
•  Reddit
•  SMS (text message marketing)
•  Blogs
•  Messenger bots
•  Guest posting on third-party sites like Quora, Bing ads and Medium.com
•  HARO (Help a Reporter Out)
• Google-My-Business, GMB posts

If marketers have a good content distribution plan, together with improving their Google listings, improving their local SEO, and expanding their website marketing activities, their shared content can generate more traffic, views, leads and engagement.

How Emails Help Your Content Promotions

As a professional online marketer, if you want to successfully build a loyal audience and promote your content, you are missing out if you are not leveraging email marketing. Online, email marketing remains one of the most effective channels for content promotion. Email marketing is a highly cost-effective channel through which your content can reach, engage and impact many people online. A very effective way to get leads and boost sales for your business!

These here tips will certainly give you some credible, tried and tested ideas on how to improve content promotions by way of email marketing.

Build a Credible Subscribers List

For email marketing, building a subscribers list is absolutely essential. Building a list of subscribers who are actually interested in your brand and the content you create is the first and most important step to take going forward. You can get that done by simply adding a “Subscribe to my blog” button on your website. Leveraging on the exit-intent pop-ups which encourage visitors to sign up for content updates from your blog also help to build that list. For effectiveness, your subscribers list should be well aligned with the demographics of your target audience. That helps to improve your content promotion results.

Create Rich Quality Sharable Content

Creating a rich content is a basic essential in email marketing. It must be easily sharable too for effective marketing reasons. If you routinely create content that is of high quality, relevant to your target audience and provides value to them, you get very good results for your efforts. Be sure you are familiar with what your subscribers are looking for. By relying on social listening tools and resources like BuzzSumo or Quora, it is possible to identify the top-performing topical ideas in your business niche. Generally, many subscribers are always looking for business/marketing advice, effective online marketing tips, business growth strategies and suchlike information. That’s exactly why creating content that caters to the interests and needs of your audience is of extreme importance in email marketing.

Design Quality Mobile-Friendly Newsletters

The world is increasingly in a hurry and many people now do business on the go. Welcome to the world of smart phones/mobile devices. Presently, more and more people tend to access their emails by way of smart mobile devices especially smartphones. That’s why it is essential to always design mobile-friendly newsletters if you want to effectively promote your content. By choosing a compelling subject line, it helps to generate curiosity and encourages people to open your email. If the content is well written and informative, it arouses the needed curiosity to further read more of it. When laced with embedded backlinks, CTA buttons and social media sharing buttons, it can easily go viral thereby attracting more subscribers and customers to your business.

Commit to Scheduling your Emails

As an email marketer, if you want people to actually open your emails and read and share your content, it is essential that you develop an email marketing schedule. Doing so helps to remove emailing randomness and its attendant negative effects on your marketing efforts. By letting your subscribers know well in advance when to expect your emails and what kind of content to expect, you get better responses/results. That must however fit into your overall strategic plan. For email marketing success, you need to plan your content promotion and distribution strategy to ensure that your content gets maximum exposure, without which, your results will be hugely limited. Strategically, no matter how well-written your content is, it isn’t worth much if it is unable to reach the right audience.

Leverage Your Emails

One of the best strategies for content promotions is to leverage your emails. By doing so effectively, it can help you to generate more site visits, more article views and engagements. If you can successfully build a credible subscribers list, write compelling subject lines and email copy, you can promote your blog content effectively. That is what gets the good results from your marketing efforts by way of leveraging your emails.

Send Newsletters Weekly

Every ambitious email marketer must always think of ways to create even more value with his content. In that quest, simply posting a blog post without making any efforts to effectively promote it is not good enough. One very effective way to promote blog posts is to create a newsletter that features your top-performing content preferably every week. Such weekly newsletters tend to get more clicks than the newsletters promoting individual posts. In your weekly newsletter, you can promote different types of content pieces, from blog posts to videos and podcast episodes. A major advantage of weekly newsletters is that even if a subscriber manages to miss an update from you, they can readily find all of your content pieces in your weekly updates. That way, provided they stick to your weekly schedule, your subscribers are not likely to miss any of your updates.

Smart Ways to Identify Valuable Affiliates

If you’re an affiliate marketing newbie, it may at the beginning seem to you as if choosing an affiliate partnership is no big deal. Ordinarily it is, but with the preponderance of effective affiliate marketing software and tools on the internet, it really isn’t a big deal. No doubt every merchant needs to be concerned about who they choose to represent or market their brand since most consumers see affiliates as real extensions of brands. In addition to that, carefully choosing the right partners can save merchants valuable time, stress and expended efforts in dealing with evasive, unserious and at times very difficult persons as affiliate partners. It is for these reasons many expert marketers believe that it is well worth the while to spare some extra time and efforts to source for and find the right affiliate partners.


 
Because of the intricate relationship between Merchants, Affiliates and Consumers, the partnership arrangement is as good as the weakest affiliate. Every merchant thus needs a good affiliate who is already doing very well as an influencer on the internet. Such affiliates must be persons who’ve already built up a body of engaged fans and followers and have worked hard to gain and maintain their trust over some time. These are the types of affiliates you can really benefit from if you’re picky about whom you choose. In a well-chosen affiliate partnership arrangement, it is the affiliate’s job to personally refer a merchant’s business to his/her followers. The reason adequate care must be taken to make sure he/she is the right partner for the job. It is the duty of the merchant to ensure that the affiliates he/she settles for have the right capacity to bring real value on board the partnership since it is the affiliates who must act as true representatives of the brand. As such, they must have the right capacity to promote and educate others about the product/service they are marketing.

Here are some tips which can assist you to determine which affiliates are really capable of adding value to your business.

Dutifully Track Affiliate Performance
 
The only credible way to truly measure affiliate performance value is by way of in-depth analytics using available tools online. It is easier to make decisions on whom to work with when you have the correct performance data at your disposal. That is irrespective of whether the affiliate is a new, up-and-coming affiliate or he/she already has considerable experience in affiliate marketing. The data you get from the analytics helps with the decision to determine which affiliate is bringing in real value to the business.

Evaluate the Quality of their Content 

In influencer marketing, content remains king. It is good content which attracts readers and retains followers. In affiliate marketing, the best affiliates to use are the ones who are steadily churning out high-quality, heavily trafficked content on their website, blog and social media profiles. The key is to always look out for original, well-written affiliate content featuring rich imagery and graphics. That is, the type of content which major search engines such as Google like to rank high. That is what guarantees the much needed traffic every marketer craves for.

Examine their Online Presence 

Expert marketers believe that it is best to partner only with influencers and publishers who have a positive and commanding online presence. That is, online presence which is devoid of controversy or damaging criticisms. You can easily gauge affiliate reputation from the comments and replies to their contents on social media from the general public. Since it is best to work with affiliates who have solid online presence, it helps to look out for affiliates who are actively engaged with their audience by way of quick responses to comments/concerns and the quality of the responses. 


 
Pay Attention to their Ethics Indicators 
 
An affiliate partner is a very important link in affiliate marketing strategy. That is why it is good to make sure you know how much information affiliates willingly reveal about themselves and their business without deliberate embellishments. It pays to research this information as affiliates’ ethics indicators. Such indicators are usually voluntary disclosures on an affiliate’s website or social media posts. The more affiliates reveal about themselves, the better for the indicator judgements. These indicators are good for affiliate partnership because they help build trust between the consumers and the promoters. Affiliate marketing works well through personal referral which relies heavily on trust.  Personal referrals can be grossly ineffective unless there is trust in the relationship.

Actively Search for Good Affiliates

The internet has lots of individuals and enterprise affiliates who are actively looking to partner with merchants. An active and deliberate search on the web can unveil many good and reputable affiliates looking to partner with merchants. Some deep searches can actually reveal highly informative stats indicating how active and successful some affiliates have been with previous campaigns/promotions.

Evaluate Affiliate Communications 

Effective online affiliate communication is indicative of how active such affiliates are. It is possible to know even from the very first couple of e-mails whether or not a person is going to be a good partner for your business or not. A lot depends on how quickly affiliates respond to inquiries and how much sense their responses make. Their response time and meaningful engagement are indicative of how serious they are with their marketing business. Tardy and unintelligent affiliate responses to inquiries are real indicators of poor affiliates.