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Avoid common Guest Blogging mistake: Guest blogging or guest posting has been a big deal on the web for a long time. Guest blogging is a great way to connect with your audience and build your brand in the market today. A lot of companies that do marketing hire guest bloggers to write content for them. As a guest blogger, you have a good chance of making enough money to live on.
If you want to be a successful guest blogger, you can reach out to popular bloggers in your field and offer great content in exchange for a mention or link on their blogs. By doing this, you get a lot of exposure and great visibility, as well as SEO benefits.
Do you think it’s as easy as it sounds to blog as a guest? Whether you know it or not, if you are a guest blogger, you might make mistakes that the website owner won’t like and won’t let you write for their site.
8 avoid common Guest Blogging mistake
Leaving Insufficient Time to Post
One of the hard parts of starting something new is making plans. Since guest posting is so mutually beneficial (you give content to the target site and they give you a link back), I think many people who are new to it are surprised by how many people:
- Don’t respond to your request even though they’re asking for guest posts
- Have strict guidelines that rule them out as a fit that are not listed anywhere on their site
- Reject your content even though they signed off on it and it’s what they asked for
Not Gathering Enough Prospects
This is also because people don’t realize how hard it can be to get someone to take something for free. You should also make sure you have enough link prospects for the posts you want to put up.
This is similar to making sure you have enough time to post (start out with something like five or ten prospects for every post you need to have placed, and here again track your success rate so you can plan for future orders).
Failing To Follow Guidelines
So that they can keep up with the number of guest post requests, many bloggers give clear rules for anyone who wants to submit a guest post. Even though it should be easy to follow these rules, many people who want to post as guest bloggers still break the rules. This will make sure that your proposal ends up in the trash.
Why would the owner of a busy blog take the time to look over your guest post if you can’t even follow simple directions? Most of the time, people who want to be guest bloggers make this mistake because they also make another common mistake: they don’t personalize their requests to be guest bloggers.
Failing To Deliver Exceptional Content
When you get right down to it, a guest post is an exchange. You, the guest blogger, offer your knowledge and skill in writing interesting content, and in return, you get readers and a strong backlink. If you want exposure and a backlink on a high-quality, well-known blog, you should do what you said you would.
Not only is it important to make great content if you want to get published, but it’s also important if you want to get the most out of your guest post. After all, why would a reader click through to your website or blog if the content on your guest post isn’t great?
Being Ruthless
A guest blogger who tries too hard to get published on your blog is the worst thing that could happen. If your pitch was turned down or the blog manager didn’t get back to you, you should move on. You’ll get more out of your time and effort if you pitch to a different blogger instead of the same one over and over again, who always turns you down.
Grammatical/Spelling Errors in Pitches
If you can’t write a pitch that sounds professional and uses correct grammar, why should the blog manager you’re pitching to think your blog post will be any better? Put some thought into your pitches.
Check for mistakes (or have a colleague who has an eye for editing take a look). Your email pitch is a writing sample for a blog manager who is thinking about letting you write a guest post. Make sure it shows the kind of work you do on your blog.
Not Aligning Your Tone/Style With That of the Blog
Your guest post shouldn’t stand out like a sore thumb to the blog’s readers. Instead, it should fit in with the rest of the content on that blog. Before you start writing, look at other posts to see how they are written and what tone they have. Is it written in a casual way or in a formal way? Does it sometimes have a sense of humor? If it doesn’t sound and feel like the other blog posts, it’s more likely to be turned down.
Making Your Post Difficult to Upload
Make it as easy as possible for the person in charge of the blog to add your post to their own blog software. Ask them how they’d like you to send them your draft. Do they prefer a Word doc or a Google doc?
Maybe they give guest bloggers a special way to log in to their blogging platform. When in doubt, keep things easy. The best guest blog post I’ve ever gotten was in a Word document and used basic HTML tags to format things like headers, links, and text that was bolded or italicized.