Getting new visitors, readers, and customers is a tough job. It is also a continuous one, as you have to keep working on it to get people to know about you. If you just have a website, and you are doing nothing to promote it, it will be sad and lonely. There are many things you could do to improve the number of your visitors and the traffic you receive.
What are the best ways to do this?
There are many tips and tricks to do this, and if you have tried any of these, you might have gotten overwhelmed. That is very understandable. Still considering how important getting new visitors, readers, and customers is, giving each and every one of these tricks a try might not be a bad idea.
Still, you will be handling a lot of this for your website yourself, so you might think twice about that. You have tried to figure out which one will bring the most to the table, without costing you an arm and a leg, both in terms of money and the time you have to put in. Figuring out what to do when it comes to Social Media, On-Page SEO, and all the other ways to promote your blog takes time.
So, have you ever tried guest posting? Don’t frown; it is easy to see why it might seem counterproductive at first. Why would you want to publish your post on someone else’s site? Wouldn’t it be better to publish it on your own?
Three reasons why it is better to publish an article on someone else’s site
While publishing a post on your own site has its benefits, here are three benefits of guest posting to make you think twice.
1. Get recommendations
It is a bit self-explanatory: If an authority blog in your niche publishes your content, it helps with your recognition. You’ll get the status of a trustworthy author, and people will get the feeling that you know what you are talking about.
2. Get links for Google
It is no secret that adding links to authority sites and getting a link from them in return can do wonders for your SEO. If an authority site links to your site, it means that your blog is worthy of being in such a company – and Google will take notice.
3. Gain a new audience
That’s right. Being published on an authority site adds to your credibility. Their audience might decide to drop by your blog and get more relevant information about the problem they are trying to solve. Once they are there, it is up to your amazing content to keep them there.
I’m ready to guest post!
Now that we have convinced you that you should not keep that awesome article for yourself, you might want to send it to everyone in the world. Still, finding websites that will publish it for you so that you can reap all the benefits might not prove to be as easy as it might seem.
There are several routes you could go with to find websites willing to publish it. Here are the two, most common ones, which you should try first:
Google Research
While this might seem very obvious (duh), not all the websites are willing to publish other people’s articles. Just blindly pitching to any website that comes up after Googling your niche’s keywords is a serious waste of time.
What you could do is add words and phrases such as “write for us,” “become our guest blogger” or “submit an article.” The websites that pop up are most certainly ones that will accept your article. Now, it is all about a good pitch.
Lists
There are numerous lists of websites that accept guest posts, which means that someone else already took the first route for you, and you get to take advantage of the end product.
Most of them will have categories for these links, so you can narrow the list to get only relevant websites for your niche.
One too many sites on these lists!
Keep it in the niche though. Just because you found a list of a thousand knitting websites, doesn’t mean that your blockchain article should belong there. Still, any niche has its traffic. Unless you are going for a very specific keyword or phrases, the list of websites that accept guest posting is going to be rather long. At this point, you need to narrow the selection.
Why not pitch to them all? Once again, not everything that shines is gold. You need your efforts to pay off, and not waste good articles. Most importantly, you don’t want to waste time needed to write them, as all of the sites have requirements on the article quality that will accept. So, simply writing your articles will not be a quick thing. You don’t want a poorly written article promoting you – it should take a lot of time. You should save it for the right website.
What should you take into consideration when doing selecting the websites to pitch to?
The Stats to Follow
Your initial impression of a website might not be the only hint you should take into consideration. Yes, the design seems impeccable. There are no grammar mistakes on the site, and they are using all the right elements in the right place.
Still, they might not have enough readers to make it worth your writing. They could be having issues with Google, struggling to get out of their blacklist. Even worse, the website that looks like the best place to host your article might not do anything to change any of these stats.
This is why you should be aware of their stats before you commit yourself to attempt to write for them. Still, another a bit difficult endeavor, unless you have the right tools, of course. Let’s point out all the important stats to follow and how you can follow them using a free tool called Webmaster.Ninja. Yes, we’re all about saving your time and money at the same time.
1. Alexa Ranking
Ah, the infamous Alexa, getting a lot of hate for not many good reasons. While a lot of people will swear that Alexa rank is not important just because it is not the most accurate ranking tool out there, it is still not something you should ignore. Considering that Alexa bases her ranking on traffic that goes through a site, this is quite important for guest posting.
The lower the Alexa ranking, the better. It is rather difficult to get a good Alexa ranking considering that the field is very saturated, but this metric can come quite helpful when comparing two, or more websites, that got on your shortlist. You can go to the Alexa website and give it a look, or you can go ahead and get your own dojo with Webmaster.Ninja.
Both options are equally free, yet, the Webmaster.Ninja’s dojo allows you to add an unlimited number of sites to your dashboard. Why is this a better option? Because you can add all the sites on your shortlist to the dashboard (all you need is site's name!), and check within a glance the Alexa ranking for each of them.
This will provide you with a quick overview of this metric for each of the sites, making a comparison, and ultimately, selection, a piece of cake. This will let you see in an instant which of the websites is getting the most traffic so that you can put it on top of your to-do list.
2. Backlinks
As mentioned before, Google loves a good backlink, so the amount of backlinks a website has is another important metric to follow. In essence, the number of quality backlinks is what helps Google establish a website as an authority in the field. If many sites are linking to a particular site, then that site has something important to say.
It is easy to see that the number of backlinks a website gets should play a huge role in how you select websites to write for first. You have no use of a website that has no or a low number of backlinks. It will only be a waste of your time.
There is a number of free tools out there that can help you with checking the number of backlinks a website has. The even better news is that if you have used Webmaster.Ninja tools’ dojo to check Alexa ranking, you can also check for the number of backlinks in the same manner and in the same place. Within a single look, you can easily decide if that shiny website is as shiny when it comes to backlinks.
3. Domain registrar
This might not be the most obvious one, yet the domain registrar plays an important role in the proper functioning of a website. It is quite mandatory to have a good and reliable domain registrar.
Consider that they do not only provide your site with a domain name, but also privacy protection, email, and web hosting. Everything should run smoothly, and a website owner shouldn’t have any issues with this – provided that the registrar is good.
If not, the website owner might experience some hardships, and with that, your post will too. Picking a website with an unreliable registrar to host your post on is probably not a good idea. You can use Webmaster.Ninja tools’ dashboard to effortlessly check which registrar stands behind the website you plan to post on and make your decisions accordingly.
4. Google Analytics Traffic
Once you manage to get your guest post published, you will want to track it. One of the most popular methods of tracking inbound visitors is definitely Google Analytics.
The Webmaster.Ninja tools allow integration with Google Analytics, apart from all the other useful insights you can get within the dashboard. With an effortless chart, you can see what is happening on a particular site you own.
One of the most important goals you're looking to accomplish with guest posting is actually getting a link back to your site. And if you connect Google Analytics to that site, you will be able to track the number of clicks back to it, and more importantly, you will be able to tell how many visitors came from that specific guest post you worked so carefully on.
If the statistics are not shiny, then maybe that just-perfect website might not be “the one” for your next post and you should definitely push it down on your priority list when thinking about pitching another idea. On the other hand, if you realize that the site has been sending you new visitors on a regular basis, you will probably want to write more posts for them as it's obvious that the post attracted their visitors.
Okay, now what?
Thanks to these useful tools, (and there are many more you could use for your own site!), you will get quite an insight on what is happening behind the gorgeous front-end of a website. All the tools you would need to evaluate a site properly can be found within a single dashboard.
After all, not all of these websites accepting guest posts are equal, but with these tools, you can tell. Focus on some of them, and send them your best pitch! Others might not be worth it in the long run. To find out who’s who, just log in to your own dojo!
Once you are there, all these stats will give you important information, and prevent you from wasting your time, creativity, and energy on useless websites!