Guest Posting is The New Article Distribution
I love guest posts. I like writing them because it gets me free, quality links. I like publishing them because it gets me free, quality content. Guest posts also bring in direct traffic, introduce your website to a new audience, and allow you to develop a network of like-minded website owners and strategic partners.
What’s the difference between guest posting and article distribution?
When you distribute articles on a site like Ezine Articles, Content4Reprint, or Articlesbase you are taking a shotgun approach. Your content could end up being published anywhere, and duplicated dozens of times. More and more sites are scraping content distribution warehouses and stripping out the author’s links or nofollowing them. More importantly, however, these sites tend to be low quality and everyone knows what they’re up to – including search engines. Both guest posting and article distribution are old tactics that still work, but these days I’m finding guest posts to be a better use of my time. You can usually get better anchor text and can choose the site on which your content appears. You end up getting higher quality links as a result.
Everyone wins with guest posts: Writers get traffic and links; Publishers get free, quality content; Searchers get unique, relevant solutions to their queries; and search engines get happy searchers in addition to only having to deal with one instance of the content instead of dozens or more, as in the distribution model.
I could write about how to craft a guest post or how to approach a blog about guest posting. But other people (see below) have done a great job of that already so instead I’ll link out to a few resources to help you get started, or to help you take your guest posting and link building to another level.
Guest Posting Resources:
First, you should probably learn WHY you should guest post if you don’t know already. Check out:
7 Reasons Why Guest Posting is Integral to Any Linkbuilding Campaign
Next, Darren Rowse (Problogger) has two very good how-to posts on the topic. Follow his tips and you’ll be building links flat out like a lizard drinking… (it’s an Aussie thing).
How To Guest Post to Promote Your Blog
How NOT to Get a Guest Post Published on a Blog
A list of guest posting resources wouldn’t be complete without a guest post about guest posting. And one of the best examples of this is a post by Josh Hanagarne on Brian Clark’s CopyBlogger blog titled:
What I Learned From Writing 42 Guest Posts in 7 Weeks
Now that you know why and how to guest post, it’s time for some resources to help you find places to post your content – OR places from which to get content if you allow guest posting on your own website:
- 10 SEO Blogs Accepting Guest Posts – This article on Search Engine Journal was written by Ann Smarty who also happens to be the woman behing our next resource…
- My Blog Guest – Ann Smarty’s forum-style guest posting community where members trade content with each other. This is my favorite guest posting resource of all.
- GuestPosts.Net – I haven’t tried this website yet, but would love to hear about your experiences if you’ve used it. Otherwise I’ll try and give it a go within the coming weeks and will update the post when I have some feedback.
- Quick Online Tips – This site claims to have 22,000 RSS subscribers and you can post about almost any topic in a how-to format. They have clearly defined guidelines for guest posters, but nothing that I would consider too picky.
And of course we can’t leave out a good ol’ fashioned Google search showing over 200,000 pages containing the exact phrase “submit a guest post”.
<meta name="keywords" content="veteran SEO consultant, devoted husband, affiliate marketer, organic farmer, chicken herder, goat wrestler, ecommerce search engine optimization strategist, focused, driven, specialized, intelligent, inquisitive, good with faces, terrible with names, great with words, so-so with numbers" />
FYI – The Web Optimist blog accepts good, quality guest posts about SEO & Internet marketing. (weboptimist.com)
Most of these online “magazines” tend to be pretty low ranked links anyway.
Hi Everett,
Had to give you your props for this one. This is the most resourceful post that I’ve seen to date on the topic of guest posts and I totally appreciate those links, Dude!