Article Contributed by Neil Cavanagh
All search engines use backlinks to help determine rankings and for your small business website to position highly in search results. It’s widely recognised that obtaining quality back links to your site will certainly help with your position in major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.
This beginner’s guide gives an appraisal of some of the various types of site where you may be able to promote your own website, but be careful not to just publish links anywhere. Creating backlinks in the wrong places can damage your rankings as the search engines may penalising you for using “spammy” link building practises.
Finding where to blog and write guest posts to help promote your website can be a challenge all in itself. Make a start by considering relevant niche sites first and those that are specific to the industry that your company operates in. By targeting article and blog sites that compliment what your business actually does, you’re far more likely to get recognised by both the search engines and potential prospects to your website.
Hunting down blogs
One way to quickly find blogs is by using Google’s own blog search http://www.google.com/blogsearch With this facility you can easily search blogs for keywords to determine other blogs that could be covering similar topics that you can write about.
Sources of inspiration
Writing an interesting article can be tough; personal experiences of particular subjects are useful for facts and you should try to avoid writing an essay on the basics of an approach. It won’t do you much good just copying and re-wording articles from an online encyclopedia.
Unique, interesting and factual content is very important; most editors will use a tool such as copyscape to ensure that any work you send them has not been published elsewhere.
Checking out an article site
It’s really important to have a good look around a site before applying to guest post. Try to get a feel for the topics they like to cover, are they business focused or technical? Look at the style of writing too to determine how informal you need to be.
Many editors have a process for submitting guest posts and may require that you pitch an article to them first before submission, so ensure you read any guidelines before you start writing. Not following these guidelines can easily upset editors and harm your chances of getting an article published.
Getting an idea of how each site ranks.
Whilst nobody is sure for certain how sites are valued by Google and exactly what metrics they are currently using to rank site popularity for specific keywords. Moz OpenSiteExplorer can help give you an idea of how a particular site ranks by Page and Domain Authority for specific URLs. This will give you an appreciation of how much traffic the site is likely to carry. As a rule, the higher the Authority the better the link is likely to be. You may also find that the higher the authority the more effort you’ll need to put in to get a guest post published!
You can also use OpenSiteExplorer to get a list of your competitor’s links. This will give ideas of the type of sites that they have targeted in the past for outreach opportunities.
How can I get my article published?
Remember that high ranking websites may receive hundreds of article pitches per month so it may be worth spending a bit of time trying to get noticed by the editor. So how can you go about this?
Article comments
Can you add any informative comments to articles? Most comments usually need to go through some sort of approval process so it’s very likely that the editor will notice them; link off to other relevant content in your comments if appropriate, but don’t over self-promote.
Adding Value to other people’s work
If you can offer something to complement someone else’s work, you may be onto a winner. Producing graphics or artwork to accompany another person’s article or by displaying a useful way of interpreting any statistics. Stuff like this can really help you get noticed and you’re far more likely to get your work published or a link-back in a credit for what you’ve done. If you can put an infographic together, it’s very likely you might be onto a winner!
Re-tweeting
If you like an author’s post can you help them out by sharing their article through your own social media profiles or by liking it on Facebook and Linkedin? Re-tweeting can be a low value favour, so don’t expect great rewards in return.
Content Inspiration – What to write for my article?
It’s not always easy to come up with new inspiring content for guest articles, but here are a few tips:
Personal Experiences
Have you been through any interesting processes lately such as new marketing activities, networking events or trade shows? Can you share the success (or failures) of these with other people by telling your own story?
Article and Forum comments
By looking at article comments on both your own and other people’s posts by other readers, can you come up with a new article that answers any frequently asked questions that pop up on a range of posts?
Website content Audit
If you’ve already got content on your own website, or guest posts on other sites check out how much they are been accessed or shared; this will give you a good idea of which types of articles are working best.
Turning to Twitter
You may think that Twitter is treacle for updates, but it truly is a great place for outreach opportunities. The Twitter Advanced search is very powerful and allows you to search for URL’s, tweeters and keywords. This can really help you home in topics and find influential tweeters that may be interested in sharing or publishing your new article.
Analysing Tweets with FollowerWonk
If you want to find the truly best outreach opportunities on Twitter, it’s well worth taking a look a FollowerWonk which helps give a great summary of high value tweeters that you may want to target. Not only will FollowerWonk find the tweeters, it also gives a great summary of their followers, how many people follow them, number of tweets, age of twitter profile and social authority. Social authority like domain and page authority gives an idea of how influential a Twitter user is.
Once you’ve run a search query you can download the followerwonk results to Excel.
Keeping track of outreach opportunities
If you’ve reached out to an editor with an article pitch, try to keep track of your outreach activities in a spread sheet, by doing this you can follow up any older pitches and it ensures you don’t contact the same editor twice! Try to record the following details:
- Outreach method – Facebook message, email or twitter direct message?
- Date
- Pitch – What you’ve sent the editor for consideration
- Website – the URL or the site you’re hoping to publish on
- Result – Has the outreach activity been successful.
Conclusion
It’s important not to get too disheartened with outreach work; it will take time but don’t just think of volume of links alone. You’re more likely to get a better reward for work that you’ve taken your time on and researched. Not only will outreach help spread the word, you could also make some beneficial relationships.
If your article’s content is truly inspiring, it’s very likely to save you a lot of effort in the long term as readers will share it naturally and link back to your work themselves.
About the Author
Neil Cavanagh is the owner of Xpress Data Systems Ltd. He has over 15 years’ experience as Chief Technical Officer in large organizations in both the public and private sector. Having recently launched CamisOnline, a production management tool, Neil is actively contributing advice to help businesses thrive on the web.