Guest blogging can open many new doors for you. It can give you the chance to reach new audiences, it can boost the authority of your website, and it can improve your search engine rankings. But none of this can happen if you don’t do it right. A lot of times, however, the result is the complete opposite; you get rejection emails and performance that can be best described as “meh.”
Why? Because a lot of people think that, once they’ve written the post and hit submit, that’s it. The truth is, this is something you need to do in a strategic way, with a lot of precision and planning. Basically, you need to know what works and what doesn’t.
In this article, we’ll focus on the latter – what doesn’t work and how you can avoid doing it, so let’s start.
5 Mistakes to Watch Out for (and How to Avoid Making Them)
Let’s jump right into what you need to refrain from doing.
- Lack of Clear Goals
This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make, and if you get this wrong, the whole thing falls apart no matter how hard you work on your content. You’ll hear many bloggers say that publishing anywhere will get you more traffic and/or higher rankings, but that’s far from the truth.
Before you submit the content, think about what your goals are; do you want your brand to be more visible? Do you want more traffic or are you after high-quality backlinks? Each goal needs a different approach, so you’ll need a clear plan to develop strategy and make your guest posts give results.
- Targeting the Wrong Websites
Not all websites are the same, and even though you probably know that already, you might still make the mistake of choosing the wrong ones.
Some bloggers target sites that have low domain authority or audiences that are all but relevant and then expect results overnight. As you can imagine, the results don’t come.
To avoid this, research sites and look for ones that have high engagement, active readers, and relevance to the particular industry. SEO tools can help you check domain authority, site traffic, and spam scores.
- Ignoring Content Guidelines
You’ll find guidelines for the content on every reputable website, but still, many guest bloggers completely ignore them. If you submit content and you haven’t looked over the guidelines, the article will probably be rejected or you’ll need to do a lot of work to rewrite it. Either way, it’s a waste of time and energy.
Take the time to carefully read through the guidelines before you start writing, follow instructions, and you have a lot more chance of your content being accepted without any revisions.
- Submitting Low-Quality Content
You’ll get nowhere if the work you’re submitting is low-quality. It’s not hard to see why this could happen; you could be really busy, so you’re trying to rush through everything you need to. Or you’re writing about something really boring and you want to get it over with as soon as possible. You could even be thinking it’s all about the backlinks, so any type of content will do.
However, any of these approaches will damage your credibility and you probably won’t get published. You have to find a way to stand out from the crowd of low-quality and mediocre content, which means you need to submit engaging, original articles that contain useful information. Use credible sources, statistics, and examples from the real world to support your points and add more value to your content.
- Over-Optimizing for SEO
You’re reading that correctly, there is such a thing as going too far with optimization and if you do it, it will backfire. The most common mistakes include stuffing keywords, using anchor texts that are completely irrelevant or adding too many backlinks. Any of this will violate some websites’ policies, but apart from that, it will also hurt your site’s SEO if it gets flagged by search engines.
It’s better to integrate keywords naturally and use proper anchor texts. And if you’re linking back to your site, make sure that the content actually supports the link. This part can be really tricky, and while you can do it yourself, keep in mind that you’ll need to be equipped with the correct knowledge, the skill, resources, and the time to do this correctly.
There’s a (high) chance that if you require this, you’ll lack at least one of those things. Usually we’re looking at knowledge and time. So, you might want to think about partnering with a guest post service provider to get expert-level help.
Conclusion
Writing articles and hoping for the best won’t get you far. In fact, it probably won’t take you anywhere. You need to play it smart, otherwise, why bother?
Now that you’ve seen what the most common mistakes are, you can make sure to avoid them. And if you’re just starting out with guest blogging, you might want to get some outside help, at least in the beginning.
Guest blogging is more than just a marketing tactic, so make sure to stay focused and keep learning. And most importantly – don’t take any shortcuts. You might think you’re being clever, but if shortcuts worked, everyone would use them.