How to Use Guest Blogging to Make Your Blog a Success

I can remember clearly when I just started my blog, on the second of April 2010. I didn’t know exactly what I was doing then, but I just knew, somehow, that my blog will grow to a stage where it is read by thousands of people every month. After a few months of blogging, I read a lot of articles giving tips on how to market a blog and drive traffic to it, I implemented as many tips as I came across, but none of them was as effective as guest blogging.

I discovered guest blogging around 2 months or so of starting my blog, and even though I expected it to be just like every other blog marketing tactic I’ve implemented, I was surprised to see my first guest post send me 50 visitors the week it went live. For a newbie, that was much, and I made up my mind to be using guest blogging to market my blog ever since.

8 months later, my blog got to a stage where it is getting 10,000 visitors monthly, and a stage where it is bringing me clients making me thousands of dollars monthly. It’s now 1 and a half years of starting my blog, and it is already getting over 30,000 visitors every month – Yes, that’s 30k monthly visitors, for a blog that is less than 2 years!

While that traffic isn’t that impressive to some bloggers, it is more than what most people achieve in 2 years of starting their blog. Mind you, I’m not trying to paint myself as a genius, because all that would have been impossible if not for guest blogging. Instead, I will be showing you how to use guest blogging to make your blog a success.

Determine Your Approach

I didn’t know much when I started blogging, so I didn’t have an approach. In fact, I hardly really knew what it meant to have an approach, but after guest blogging on blogs of all sizes in the last two years I have come to see how important having an approach can be.

If you want to achieve success with your guest posts, you need to have an approach. In other words, you need to know how you plan to use guest blogging to grow your blog, and how you want to go about it. It won’t be advisable to just start guest blogging on other blogs in your field without an end goal in mind.

For example, in my own opinion, there are two major approach you can follow. The first one is the approach of only guest blogging on big blogs in your niche. That way you will have prepared your blog to be able to convert your traffic in the best way possible. Since most big blogs send 100′s of visitors per guest post, if you are able to land 5 guest posts on 5 top blogs in your niche at an average of 400 visitors per guest post, that will be 2,000 visitors in one month. If you’re able to convert just 25% of the traffic you get from your guest posts on those 5 top blogs you will be able to get 400 subscribers every month. If you continue at that pace you will have at least 4,800 subscribers in the next one year, just from your guest posts.

The second approach is that of targeting small blogs. Since most small blogs will hardly send you any traffic, your main approach will be to focus your guest posts on sending high quality traffic to your blog on the long run. How can this be possible? You will be leveraging SEO.

Search engines value links from other blogs, and by effectively guest blogging on smaller blogs you can build quality backlinks to inner pages on your site. While this might not send you great traffic initially, it can lead to thousands of visitors to your blog monthly from the search engines in the next few months.

Prepare Your Blog for the Traffic to Come

While having the right approach is important, having an approach isn’t enough to make your guest blogging a success. You need to realize that people won’t just subscribe to an empty blog, and a poor blog is just like an empty blog.

You should work on creating your blog in such a way that you can effectively convert a large part of the traffic you will be getting to subscribers. This means you should work on having a nice conversion-focused design. You should work on having a consistent content schedule, and you should have a plan to monetize your blog in place.

The major mistake most people make with guest blogging isn’t the mistake of not writing the perfect guest post, it is the mistake of not preparing their blog for the traffic to come.

Make sure your blog is in the right state to capture the traffic from your guest posts, and you will be able to build your own community of raving fans over time.

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