Guest Blog Posting : Is that all it is made out to be?

[SirMax]

Experts frequently mention that one of the best way to build the link is to guest blog with some authoritative blogs in your niche after Penguin, Panda and other animals invaded SEO landscape.

At the same time everyone agrees that "Content is the king" and if you have unique and useful content, people would link to you without any extra efforts on your part.

Do you see any contradiction in those statements?

I spent my time, my resource, my genius writing up very good posts. As a matter of fact all my post are good (IMHO), but I can churn out only 2 or 3 masterpieces per month.

Should I share my content willingly as a guest post to other websites who are not my local direct competitor of course, but nonetheless are in my niche, thus adding to their authority on the subject? I will get a link out of it. Would I get a significant traffic? I doubt that. At least from my limited experience.

Or should I strengthen my own site striving to be such authority in my niche? But without strong external link profile  Google shall frown upon me and my site.

Personally I inclined more to save most of the content for my own blog.

What do you gals and guys think?

[BenFox]

There's so much that's dependent on context.

For example if you're a design agency and you want to get guest post links from other design sites then it's pretty easy to put together a roundup of "Top 35 Most Beautiful Examples of X" that will get published by a lot of medium weight sites and be worth the two hours you spend putting it together.

On the other hand if you want to be featured on powerful sites that are going to drive referring visitors and boost your brand reputation then you're going to have to put more effort in.

I would say that guest posts are good for monthly reports - they give you guaranteed links. If in doubt you could always dip your toe in the water and outsource. There are plenty of people who will gladly do guest posting for you and it's pretty cheap (sub $100 per link if memory serves).

[AnnSmarty]

The best way I usually follow:

1. Create one masterpiece for your own site
2. Create a couple of more masterpieces based on the same research (you have already done to write the article on your site)
3. Link to your article and your blog from those external masterpieces (+get exposure)

It may sound like the article marketing, only it not one because it's in no way about spinning or rewriting. it's about re-focusing your research to write masterpieces.

I have given a few examples in my article on content re-focusing (we have also had a Twitter chat on that)

[EGOL]

Sure, if you are producing great content.

Look at the feedburner list for SEOmoz.....   104,000 subscribers.

I don't have that many but it has been growing for several years.  Almost every day the number gets higher.

[imageworks-261290]

yeah but does that really work though?

[activitysuper]

Some may disagree with this method but sometimes when I have a high traffic term in the keyword tool (usually I look for question type queries in my niche).

I will write an article giving a great answer, use the search term from the keyword tool as the target keyword and surround the article in social sharing tools.

I would then push some cheap ppc to it, in the hope the sharing starts to take place.

[EGOL]

Once you have a track record of producing content that people like you can use Feedburner to offer an RSS feed and email subscription service.  That allows people to be notified about new content on your site.  The subscriptions will start growing and then you can have thousands of people who will tweet, like, share and link to your content as soon as it goes live.

You can also scrape that feed and republish it as an include on every page of your site, or process it and post includes of relevant (by category) posts on similar topic pages all over your site.  Then, as soon as a new post goes up, all visitors will be informed of it and you can have thousands of pages on your own site pointing to that new content.

[Marcus_Miller]

Yep, I agree with all of this. Great content is just not enough. If you are going to write it you also have to spend twice as much time promoting it and if it is as good as you say, networking with people socially, allowing people to guest post at your site, guest posting, asking other people to promote it, they are all just part of the toolbox but whatever you do it has to be personalised to work in that specific space as there is no content marketing blueprint that works exactly the same for every site.

I work with a carpets company, everyone in that industry is just starting to get to grips with mobile phones, social media, guest blogging, forget about it but, there is no quality content out there so by putting it out there and doing some light promotion, that is doing the job.

each job is different.

[EGOL]

If you place these "masterpieces" on your site and your site has very little traffic you can still get visitors into them if they are submitted to sites like slashdot and reddit.  If you have really good content it could get some traction there and be shared widely.

If you have that "masterpiece" content you might ask a couple bloggers in your niche if they would consider mentioning them, or share them with a few people on facebook, tweet to your friends.  This should get some traction if your content is really that good.

After you have several great pieces of content out there a little momentum and cross marketing can begin.

It's not easy.  It's not guaranteed.  Most people who try to do this can't produce content that is successful.  And, it will not work in every niche and only in small corners of some niches.

[Marcus_Miller]

Guest posting is a powerful tactic but it is also extremely hard work. In my mind, it all depends where you are in the life of your business.

If you are writing 'masterpieces' but no one is seeing them, then what is the point? Now, if you put one of these masterpieces a week onto another site, or... better still, if you wrote the masterpiece on your site, then wrote a summary version, still masterful of course, but not as authorative as the main piece and used that as a guest post with a link back to the main article, then you benefit from exposure and refereal traffic.

Also, you can't take social out of this picture - if you have little followers and your great posts are not getting read then you need to get them in front of people and a post on a high traffic site with a referral back to your site and a strong incentive to like / follow / plus you then when you next publish something amazing, you can fire a link out on your social channels.

So, guest posting, SEO silver bullet? No way. Guest posting, a hard but potentially good way to get increased referals and traffic which you can then do more hard work to get soft conversions to social media and the link + win those all so important early links - yep, it will do the job.

Like Egol so rightly said, just putting something out there and waiting for links is a slow game with no guarantees, no matter how good the content is. But, by guest posting, networking with other bloggers, getting people aware of your stuff and hopefully writing about you and sharing your stuff and by benefiting from the traffic and visitors of other more established sites, you can make this work for you.

No easy answers unfortunately, doing this right is hard work but when you get to the tipping weight, when you have enough links that your own masterpieces are starting to rank well AND you have good social standing to get viral sharing and referal traffic from the social networks, well, then you are really starting to see some traffic and not just 100% from organic sources.

Hope this helps buddy. 
Marcus

[DavidKonigsberg]

All comments here seem good but it really depends on what type of following you and your site have.

If you are writing master pieces they belong on your site but if you dont have anyone coming to your site to read it your wasting your time. what you need to do is a two prong approach create great content on your site and get people to read your site by offering guest post on high traffic sites in your niche encouraging people to come to your site and read more.

Good Luck

[activitysuper]

Both great responses from two people I know, know what they're talking about.

Like EGOL said 3 masterpieces a month should go on your own website, the time spent creating these masterpieces, they should have the exposure they deserve as well, so your have to come up with a strategy to get them in front of users.

[MoosaHemani]

I am one of those who have spent lot of time on Guest posting and looked at it from many different perspectives...

As a matter of fact all my post are good (IMHO), but I can churn out only 2 or 3 masterpieces per month.

The number in this time seems like your posts are really worth reading for your niche and you deserve the wider eye balls then you are currently getting but I still think that Guest Blogging to high Authority and Trafficked websites for you is important and you should offer your content to highly quality blogs in your niche.

At the same time you should have some attraction on the blog that grab the readers and visitors attention and make them visit again and again...until your over all authority go increased in your niche.

Once you have kind of name then you can always skip the guest blogging to 3^rd party websites but at the same time you will get offer from other bloggers to allow them to write on your blog.

So, Guest blogging allow you to build your authority and chance to get more content on your blog for free.

I think Guest Blogging does not offer you links only but it offers you to brand yourself in your niche which is more important than anything else.

[EGOL]

As a matter of fact all my post are good (IMHO), but I can churn out only 2 or 3 masterpieces per month.

Yes.  This sounds like me.  I spend a lot of time on a good page of content and usually have help with graphics, photos and data.  A lot of what I produce is among the best-on-the-web for the subject.

With that kind of content I am not sharing.  No way.  In fact, I would not share pedestrian content with other sites because I believe that it feeds competitors and produces new ones.

A few people have offered me great content and I have published it on my site and it now outranks their site.  Some have been happy about this because they have a "message to get out".  But others have not been so happy because they don't like my site above them in the SERPs.

Or should I strengthen my own site striving to be such authority in my niche?  But without strong external link profile  Google shall frown upon me and my site.

The route of not syndicating content for links is very slow to get traction.  Very slow.  It can take a few years to get rolling.  However, after your site is established it becomes hard to beat and then you can spend zero time on promotion and as much time as possible on content creation.  But for this to happen your content has to be really good.  If it is only "better than average" this probably will not work.

Good luck!