5 Things To Do Before You Start Guest Blogging

In one of my previous post, i discussed guest blogging and some of its benefits that entrepreneurs and small businesses can get out of it.

However, like any other marketing activity, guest blogging cannot be done in isolation and needs to be connected with certain pre and post activities in order to make it really work.

Keeping that in mind, here are a few things that, I believe, every website should do before launching a guest blogging campaign.

1) Have a Clear Objective with Guest
Blogging
This might sound very obvious, but nothing is more important for the success of your guest blogging efforts than having a clear objective.

Far too many businesses and bloggers consider guest blogging to be a solution itself.

Naturally, most of them never achieve any notable results from it.

Guest blogging is only a bridge between you and your objective. It is not the objective itself.

That’s why it is extremely important to ask yourself why you’re guest blogging and what exactly do you expect to achieve from it.

Guest blogging objectives can vary according to your business needs. For example, a freelance writer like me would use guest blogging to attract more clients.

Similarly, an online furniture shop could use guest blogging to attract potential clients to its website.

While this may seem very obvious, your objective will ultimately define the type of blogs you choose for guest blogging and the type of content you develop for your guest posts.

In short, a clear objective will give direction to every aspect of your guest blogging campaign.

2) Choose the Right Blogs
Once you determine your objectives for guest blogging, it will naturally guide you in choosing the right blogs to guest post on. Fundamentally, there are 3 factors that you should look for.
a- The blog should be visited regularly by your target audience. For example, if you’re a freelance writer looking for clients in the internet marketing and blogging niche, your target audience will consist of small business owners, internet marketing blogs, digital marketing agencies and tech entrepreneurs.
b- The blog should have a large following and a loyal community of readers. You can get a fair idea of the size of a blog from its social media following, the frequency of comments on its posts, its Google PR and its Alexa rankings.
c- The blog accepts guest post submissions

Try to maintain a list of all the blogs that meet this criterion so that you can keep an eye on them for future guest posts as well.

3) Get Familiar With Your Target Blogs
Once you have screened out your target blogs, it’s time now to have a closer look at their content.

One of the most common mistakes, that guest bloggers make, is to approach a blog with a guest post proposal without having a detailed look at its content.

You need to understand that most blog editors love quality guest posts. They’re always waiting for people to approach them with a high quality piece.

However, if a topic has already been covered in detail on a particular blog, or if it is completely irrelevant to the audience of that blog then how can you expect the editor to respond positively?

So make sure you have a good look at the blog before you pitch any guest post ideas to its editor.

Here are a few things that you should watch out for.
a- Look for the most popular posts on the blog. That will give you a fair idea of the type of content that works with its audience.
b- Go through the archives of the blog and look for the posts that are similar to the guest post topic you have in mind. See if everything related to the topic has already been covered or if there’s any unique angle or a different perspective that you can offer on the topic.
c- Also go through the comments on some of the more popular posts and see what the readers are saying about the topic.
d- Most blogs, that accept guest posts, usually have detailed guest post submission guidelines as well. Go through these guidelines in detail and make sure you stick to them while pitching your idea.

4) Build a Relationship With the Host Blog
Once you’ve gone through your target blogs and identified a few topics that you can pitch for guest posts, it’s time now to start building a relationship with the blog owner.

While it’s not absolutely necessary to know the blog owner in advance, it does make it much easier for you to understand the type of content the blog owner is looking for and also helps the chances of your post getting accepted.

And unlike the real world, online relationships can be developed much more quickly.

Here are a few steps that I would recommend you to take,
a- Follow the official accounts of the blog on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and any other social media website applicable.
b- “Like” and “Share” a few of their posts on Facebook and give them a few Retweets and mentions on Twitter.
c- Leave a few insightful comments on some of the recent posts of your target blog.
d- You can send a short email to the blog owner as well with some quick feedback. about the blog or just to say thanks on a high value post.

Since relationship building requires regular interactions, therefore you should spend a few minutes every day to comment on your target blogs and share their posts on social networks.

Once you manage to have a few interactions with the owner of your target blog, you can now send them a well-crafted pitch and discuss your guest post idea with them.

5) Prepare Your Website for Visitors
If you are an intelligent guest blogger, which I assume you are, then you might already be following some of the advice that I’ve discussed above.

However, all your efforts can still go in vain if you do not prepare your own website/blog for the visitors that your guest post will send your way.

As I said at the start of this post, guest blogging is only a tool to achieve certain objectives. It is not the objective itself. So you need to get your own website ready to properly receive your guest post visitors and make it easy for them to take action.

You can do that either by setting up a dedicated landing page or by routing them to a page that showcases your products and services in detail.

Again, it will all depend on your objectives. For example, if your objective is to get email subscribers, you might route your visitors to a landing page and offer a free eBook or email course in return for their email address.

Similarly, if the objective is to visitors contact you for your services, then you might just route them to your portfolio page.

Whatever the objective is, make sure you don’t waste all the good work just because your own house is not in order

Conclusion
As a guest blogger it is extremely important to keep the ultimate objectives in mind. It doesn’t work in isolation and will not give you the right results if you don’t prepare a workable strategy.

So instead of wasting hours of valuable time on aimless guest blogging, make sure you do your homework first and prepare yourself before going on a guest blogging spree.

Almost everything that I’ve said in this post comes from my personal experiences as a guest blogger. So I would love to know how you approach guest blogging and prepare yourself for it.

I look forward to your comments.

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3 Free Email Marketing Softwares That Can Build Massive List

E-Mail Marketing is such an awesome concept which will help you grow your blog traffic and also bring loyal readers to your blog.

I started building email list since I built this blog and to be sincere with you, my email list is growing and am equally getting traffic.

As a newbie in blogging, I can't afford to use Aweber E-mail marketing service. I had to do some research and guess what? I found free 3 E-mail Marketing services!

I'll share you the list of those E-mail marketing services and its features, its then left for you to make your choice.

1. Mail Chimp

This is one of the best E-mail marketing service used for building email list.

This free email service allows you to build only 2,000 subscribers and allows you to send only 12,000 emails per month absouletly free!.

Its very easy to set up and you can easily set up your campaign and web forms using this service. After setting up the necessary, you can use MailChimp List Subscribe Form which is a free wordpress plugin from mail chimp to integrate forms on your blog very easily.

Here are some awesome features

• You can create awesome looking • Custom Forms
• Easy Facebook Integration to allow users to subscribe you via Facebook.
• API Support
• Easily track your subscribers and results

This is one of the best E-mail marketing services. You can try this service and start building a good email list for your blog.

Also Read:

2. Mad Mimi

Mad Mimi E-mail marketing service is a quite new email marketing service that provides 2,500 subscribers and you can send 12,500 emails per month.

They are having very good-looking forms and you can modify them very easily.

Here are some features

• Very easy to create forms and connect with your subscribers
• Smart list management
• Easy integration
• Easy to add extra stuff

They also have Mad Mimi for WordPress plugin which will help you to install web form easily on your blog.

3. Mail Relay

They have two types of plans

Standard
and Enterprise

In Enterprise edition you will get free 5,000 subscribers and 25,000 mails per month.

They have mentioned that – “In order to get the 25.000 emails, and 5.000 subscribers, for free, you will need to create a Mailrelay account ( 15.000 emails and 3.000 subscribers for free ) and follow us in Facebook and Twitter.”

Here are the features

• Visual statistics with visitor tracking, clicks, and bounces.
• Custom newsletters with dynamic fields
• Easy web integration and signup forms.
• You can add Custom domain.
• Tracking tokens in links.
• Iphone application.
• Contacts sync with Microsoft Windows.
• Development and integration API.

Wordpress Mailrelay Plugin will help you to sync your subscribers with Mailrelay.com

Conclusion
If you were looking for free E-mail marketing services, then I think you should use any of the three E-mail marketing services.

Take action and put the web form into your blog which will in turn bring traffic to your blog.

If you have any contribution or questions, make use of the comment box below.

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What Is Guest Blogging And Its Benefits

Guest blogging is a method used by bloggers to increase blog traffic where bloggers write posts to be published on other bloggers' blogs. Guest blogging can work in one of two ways:
• You write a post to appear on people's blog

• Another person writes a post to appear on your blog.

Nowadays every blogger knows the importance of Guest Blogging. It has been playing a major role for growing your blog business and expanding it in the Internet World. But still lot people deny this important part of their blogging career.

They avoid Guest Blogging. In simple words, Guest Blogging is an art of publishing your post on any other person’s blog. No matter how is your blog’s condition or it belongs to an individual or many authors, Guest Blogging is always beneficial.

Most newbies or most individuals are still confused that they should write for other blogs or not. So, I am listing below 5 benefits for writing for other blogs i.e. Guest Blogging.

5 Benefits of Guest Blogging

1. Targeted and Quality Traffic
No one can deny the fact that Guest Blogging brings to you a lot of traffic. However, the best part of it is visitors of another blogs come to know about your blog by this process as you are given a backlink for submitting a post on any blog. As such, you are most likely to get unique visits to your blog. However, if your posts get published on a big blog, then you are most likely to receive huge traffic. However, this thing also depends upon the Quality of your post. By targeted traffic, I mean that if you own a Technology blog, you are most likely to submit Guest Post on a Technology blog. This mutual exchange of information helps to bring traffic from a different blog which brings you targeted Traffic.

2. Exposure
Everyone likes to be famous. Isn’t it? However, Guest Blogging helps to build an authority over the Internet people from different blogs and helps you & your blog to be famous. Guest Blogging helps you to bring exposure to you and your blog. It make your blog a Big brand and helping you to create high Impact over the Internet World. Let us consider this as you have published your post on two blogs. One gives you 100 visits and other gives you 50 visits. As a result, we conclude that your blog has been exposed to 150 people which gave your blog Targeted Traffic and Exposure. Guest blogging helps to be popular quickly.

3. Improve Your Writing Skills
We know that it’s the experience only which helps a person to decide what is right and what is wrong. However, when I was new to Blogging, most of my posts got rejected. Then I started from some small blogs and later on the process moved on and I became quite good at my writing skills. This is what The more you write, the more you learn. So, to improve our writing skills, we should be focused on our topics, try optimizing our posts for SEO and readers both which a quite hard process. Most bloggers will accept your Guest Posts only if they find your article at least better to some extent that readers find it useful. For that, you need to improve your writing skills.

4. Get More Backlinks
Whenever we submit a guest post on another blog, we get backlinks in the author bio and even sometimes in the post. Most bloggers include their blog’s link to get some essential backlinks. You need to be smarter in this thing. You should include your site keywords properly so as to increase your Search Engine Visibility and rank higher with your rankings.
These backlinks can also result to increase in your Pagerank. Good Pagerank means more Search Referrals and Good amount of organic traffic which is really most and needed.

5. Know what people think about your
posts
People that share views are different from blog to blog. Your blog visitors might take your posts in a different manner and others may too. However, you should be aware of the fact that what are the reaction of others about your posts, you must know that you are appreciated or you are criticized for your posts. However, Guest blogging can help you to know about this thing because people from other blogs may not know about and your blog, so you are most likely to get a honest opinion from them.

So, after reading my these posts, you would like to write for other blogs and gain Exposure, Traffic, Backlinks, Better Writing Skills and opinions. Guest Blogging is the best way to build authority and market your blog in the Internet World.

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A Tour Through Link Building Strategies And Strategies

This post A Tour Through Link Building And Strategies Appeared first on Rankwatch

Getting traffic to one’s site (let me correct it); getting quality traffic to one’s site has been the most toughest task for webmasters. One evergreen technique to driving relevant content and rankings is link building.

Therefore, the power of link building can never be underestimated. Google has a simple point of view; the more the number of relevant links, the greater is the relevance and authority of websites.

So, your backlinks can be understood as ‘votes of confidence’. We discussed about what is link building and its need in the previous article.

Here we will be discussing about the strategies for building links and the various techniques for building quality and safe links that Google will love.

Link building strategies

Relevance

Let’s suppose that you have a website based on dog grooming. You get 2 backlinks:

• From a blog, explaining the “benefits of coffee”

• From a website featuring an article on the “best foods for dogs”

Needles to say, the backlink from the second website would be much more beneficial and valuable to you for the very simple reason,
because that website is relevant with your business.
While the quality of the sites (that you link to) are of utmost important, it is equally important that those sites are relevant to the category/line of your business. So, it’s better to approach only those sites to feature your content or offer you a link which have keywords that are important to your business.

Google’s ranking algorithms dictate that if a user finds the search results that you offer as effective and useful, you are likely to rank well. Go through the following points to analyze whether your backlink is relevant or not:
• Approach for links from site that functions. under the same industry.

• Just in case, if the site is not directly connected with your industry, make sure that a particular section of it is related to your business/product in some way or the other.

• Links earned on a particular page should be in sync with the content on that page.
• If you are getting links from unrelated websites, make sure that the content of the page that is providing the link is in sync with the content of the page that is receiving the link.

Keep your Anchor texts natural
The days where you could do excessive link
scheming, keyword stuffing and other black hat
SEO and still escape Google’s punishment are history now.
If link building has gained so much importance over time, the significance of anchor texts cannot be underrated as well.
It is useful and beneficial to put keywords in some anchor texts here (if and only if they it is relevant to your website/webpage) here and there, but if you follow the policy of flooding keywords in anchors for all the inbound links, you are in for some great trouble of coming under Google’s black hat practices radar and the following consequences. For instance, you are a website which sells dog grooming products. Now, in order to earn a backlink from a leading E-commerce website like Amazon, you write a guest blog on ‘How single product/ website retailers are losing their competitiveness’ and get a reference back to your website using anchor texts like best dog products, best seller for dog foods etc. Would it
make any sense?
So, the bottom line is that stop usin . keywords in your anchor text just for the sake of it and keep the links natural. Until, the link is consistent with the context of your content, you have nothing to worry about.

Keep your link building strategy diversified

Earning links is not about following a static link building strategy for a long time. In the landscape of Google’s ever changing algorithms, sticking with just one or two tactics for link building is not going to help you in any way.

There is definitely no hard and fast rule or way to get you tons of high valued and qualified links. Try employing new tactics, if it works, continue with it for some time and keep improvising. Some of these ways include:

• Create, publish and promote high quality content
• Try and get recommendations and citations from important, reputed and valuable sites

• Guest blog for some highly trusted sites

• Immerse and involve yourself and have a strong social media presence

• Interview someone, highly regarded in your industry

• Write testimonials about your business product/service

• Take up membership in local civic organizations, marketing groups, Chamber of Commerce etc

Focus more on Brand building

In the race for driving as much of the traffic they can and increasing the number of conversions, most SEO practitioners tend to forget this very important element of SEO - Brand building.
Building a strong brand presence should be the utmost priority of every webmaster. The wider is the brand awareness, the stronger is the brand image and hence it would require lesser effort to voluntarily get high quality inbound links if the brand is well known.
Now, in order to establish your brand well, it’s very important to use your own trails rather than copying your competitors. Your link building strategy should be completely different from that of your competitors in order to create your own value and prevent the confusion for the users. If both of you are featured on the same industry blogs, it would reduce your brand effectiveness and uniqueness.
Once you are through with the approach for framing your link building strategy, let’s go on and find out about a few techniques for building links

Link building techniques

Forums

Forums turn out to be a great tool for promoting your link to your niche and get even more involved within the community. On entering a forum, always concentrate on giving more and taking less while replying to threads, answering question, offering advice etc; try and contribute more in terms of value that is required by the member. This will, in a way build the trust in other’s eyes about your genuineness and will also establish your reputation as an expert in your niche. Use your forum signatures effectively, generate curiosity on them to make them clickable. On very unique way to do this is by periodically starting off with any controversial topic in your niche inviting passionate debaters and heated arguments.
Another very important point is, try to “Do follow’ forums so that your the link to your site in the signature is easily crawled by the search engines.
Some examples of such forums are V7nforum, Siteowners forum , Joomla forum etc.

Blog commenting

Blog commenting helps build your relationships and authority in industry, which ultimately leads to organic links and traffic. Start by looking out for blogs in your industry; not just any blogs but, those blogs which receive a good number of traffic and engagement. Once you are done with this, follow the link of commentators and their respective blogs. In this way, you can decide on some places for placing your comments. Now, be very careful with your comment, don’t do it just for the sake of it. Read and understand the entire blog and then, go ahead and comment. Make sure you comment adds value and contributes in some sense to the same/related topic.

Guest Blog post

As explained in the section above, find good website in your niche that receive a good amount of traffic, engagement and comments.
Reach out to them and request them to write a guest blog on your website and/or ask them if you could guest post on theirs. This is a very effective and simple way to building backlinks from quality websites.

Blogging

Blogging is again a very good way of building backlinks and promoting your website. When you create unique, interesting and fresh content, people will voluntarily want to link to you. But, you need to create engaging content for that to happen including inforgraphics, video tutorials, how to, lists etc.

Social Bookmarking

With internet becoming more interactive and users gaining more decisiveness on “what is good quality content and what is not”, building links through social bookmarking serves almost every online niche. You could submit your blogs or pages to the popular bookmarking sites including Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon etc.
Getting backlinks from these websites will help a great deal in your SEO as search engines really love these sites. But be careful in handling the tags which are important to broadcast your news on a wide area network.

Infographics

Infographics are still a viable method for building links, though they aren’t as effective as they used to be. Infographics build links quick enough to influence a considerable change in PageRank, it builds links cost-effectively hence saving the big bucks of your budget and finally, it builds links safely, thus not inviting any negative attention from Google.
Infographics are concise and visual pieces of content that convey complex and significant information in a compelling, easy-to understand, engaging and interesting way. These types of viral content has a lot of advantages including wide reach, increased visibility of your business, but it’s link building still remains as it’s most important advantage.

Whenever an infographic is shared on a site, sharers post a link back to it. Now, any of their readers who might share the infographic, would also link back to the original, hence generating a large number of backlinks.

Link Exchange

Link Exchange is another good way for building links. However, you need to be careful with this one. I am not asking to go around ‘asking people for links’. Just move subtly with it. How, you may ask? It’s very simple, whenever you mention or cite any person/business/product in your post, just email him saying:
“ Hey, just mentioned you in this blog post http://www.xyz.com” .
It’s a simple message intending to convey, "Hey I did you a favour. Would you like to return the favour?”
And well, the most effective way is to ask people whom you already know in your industry.
In this way, you will be able to build yourself a platform for brand establishment. These types of relationships grow with time and helps to establish trust and respect amongst your industry peers.

Link baiting

Link baiting is another good method for promoting your website. It is simply content on your website, that people link to, not because you asked them to do so but, because they. wanted to do so. These types of linkable assets can come in any form including great content, a helpful e-book, a viral video, time sensitive news, quizzes, images, infographics, contests, whitepapers etc. These assets turn out to be a great way for garnering links for your website.

Photo sharing

Photo sharing is a very good technique to help buid your links. Images complement your web content and enhances visual experience. A great advantage of using image is that it builds your brand’s recognition, effectively acquires natural links and diversifies the types of links generated to your website. These images would include photographs, drawings/illustrations, typography, cinemagraphs, memes etc. Share these images on as many photo sharing websites like Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, Shutterstock etc.

Video promotions

Similar to photo sharing, you can share the videos created by you and submit to sites like YouTube, Vimeo etc allowing people to see and link to it.

Reviews

One of the most popular and simpler ways of getting backlinks and attracting traffic is to reach out to people and bloggers (of your niche) and request them to write reviews about your business product/service. This will naturally bring you links. Get listed on all the sites where you can likely expect a review like RateitAll, Kaboodle etc.

Directory submission

Many believe that directory submission is dead. But I think, it is just another source to get more of the targeted traffic. You just have to be effective and efficient while selecting the directories for submitting your website. While it is okay to submit your articles/blogs to general directories, niche directories are highly recommended. It for sure, gives delayed results, but is worth giving a try. Some good directories are Dmoz, Scrub the Web, Directory World, So Much etc.

Press release

Go with press releases or get involved in press, even a local publication would work well for starters. This can provide powerful backlinks from high ranking news domains. As pointed above, you can start with smaller local publication and then slowly work your way up with larger publications.

Article submission

This is another useful method for garnering links. You can submit your articles on popular article directory sites like Ezine, Go Articles, Now public etc. This can also help you drive relevant traffic apart from getting you backlinks.

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How To Promote Your Website/Blog With These 3 Sites

The advertising of the future is going online--and going local. This hot trend is growing rapidly and shows no signs of letting up.

There's no question that consumers are using the internet to navigate their way to local brick-and-mortar retailers. A recent study by ROI Research Inc. and Performics shows that online searches influence 20 to 30 percent of purchases made at retail locations--and that number is only increasing. So study up, plan your budget and get in on the online advertising game.

Below are the five website that will help you promote your blog.

1. Google AdWords
AdWords helps you target local online customers by setting your pay-per-click ads to appear only when people search a particular city, state or region. There's no minimum spending requirement--your daily budget is up to you.

2. Dotster
Dotster is a web domain registration and hosting company offering a local web advertising package called "Local Site Promotion." You set your monthly budget and Dotster will make your ad visible on all the major search engines.

3. Merchantcircle
This free site offers a local business listing service that. allows you to better manage your online reputation and become more visible in search engine results.

Hope the websites listed above will help promote your website. If you know of any website that will help promote a website/blog, let us know by making use of the comment box below.

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