Guest posting is an important strategy for driving huge traffic to your website. If you’re not sure of what I am talking about, don’t feel confused.

Guest posting is applicable on various blog niches, very popular in typical digital marketing, drives a lot of traffic to a website, and a good option when it comes to generating backlinks.

It also offers you an opportunity to create and expand relationships between your website and other popular blogs. Most importantly, guest blogging is an effective way of building your brand and online presence.

A win-win scenario

Guest blogging creates a perfect win-win scenario for both your blog and your target blog. The publisher gets free, top-quality content that has been written from a unique perspective. On the other hand, the guest bloggers benefit by improving their reputation and online presence.

Guest blogging mistakes to avoid

One common mistake I have noticed is that most people confuse article marketing with guest blogging. Article marketing was a common trend three to four years ago. The concept involves recycling your old blog posts by sending them to article directories.

A few years ago, article marketing was a decent way of building links to your website. However, Google’s Brain (algorithm) is becoming more complex. It can now assess the content relevance, combat scam, and use other approaches to rank websites. Google and other search engines consider duplicate content as a scam, and that means backlinks from duplicate content aren’t valuable.

Some sites such as Zimbio, Reviewlatest and others, generate traffic but are composed of duplicate content. Google and other search engines seem to make exceptions for these sites. However, if your website contains a substantial amount of duplicate content, it will get flagged as spam and won’t get as much traffic as you intended.

Anything wrong with cross-posting content?

Publishing the same content across multiple sites is known as cross-posting. In this case, search engines analyze these sites to determine the site credited with publishing the content. This analysis is based on the publishing time, the frequency at which the site is crawled by search engine, among other factors. Cross-posting articles simply create duplicate content.

Duplicate content is spam

Have you ever heard about the so-called scrapper websites? These sites take posts from other websites and repost them. If duplicate content wasn’t an issue, you could drive as much traffic as you want to your website simply by getting content from top sites and republishing on your blog. No fuss.

Therefore, if you intend to recycle your blog posts for guest, it’s a bad idea. Majority of websites that are likely to accept guest posts will definitely check the content you submit using Copyscape or any other software that can detect plagiarism. Even if your content slips by, it won’t benefit your website from SEO standpoint since Google, and other search engines will flag it as spam.

Once the blog owner realizes that you submitted duplicate content, they won’t be happy, to say the least. One way of creating a successful blog is by creating lasting relationships, and perhaps you won’t make any by posting duplicate content or cross-posting.

Important guest posting tips

If you intend to guest post on high authority blogs, it’s wise to submit compelling content. That article will get more exposure, and you want people to trust you. Besides, high authority blogs have discerning preferences when it comes to accepting guest posts.

Here are tips to help you guest post like a boss.

• Use attention-grabbing titles. Also, include a link in your article to another post from the website you’re submitting the guest post.
• Start small and work up the ladder because some high-authority blogs may not accept your request unless you have established your brand.
• Popular blogs are always conscious of using images that violate copyright laws. Therefore, find a creative license picture or purchase the image to include in your submission.
• Read the article submission guidelines carefully. Some blogs will allow one or more dofollow backlinks.
• Check the other articles published on the website you intend to guest post. Learn the writing style and format.

While guest posting is an excellent way of driving more traffic to your website and getting a higher rank in the search engines, it can harm your site if done wrongly. I hope the tips discussed in this article will help you.