Steve,
A few days ago I wrote to you about guest posting, which is the best strategy I know for...
...building relationships with authorities in your industry...
...attracting an audience of like-minded people...
...and getting your message out to the world...
...even if nobody knows who you are yet.
This is a strategy that I've been teaching and using for years, with great success.
But there's been some controversy around it lately, so I got a whole lot of questions back asking...
...is the strategy is still current?
...is it still practical in the modern age of blogging?
...should we all just switch to marketing on Instagram?
(Okay, I didn't get so many of that last one.) ;-)
Now, the short answer is that yes, the strategy is still current, and your best way of breaking through the clutter...
...but I can understand where those questions are coming from.
So here's a (brief) history of how guest posting came to look the way it does today:
For a long time now, smart marketers have been using guest posting to attract high-quality, targeted traffic by providing value on other blogs. The readers enjoy that content and flock back to the original poster's blog.
It's a win-win-win: the host blog gets great content, the writer gets quality traffic and engaged readers, and the readers benefit from consuming the content.
But... as Gary Vaynerchuk puts it, marketers ruin everything.
You see, guest posting also had the side-effect of building SEO value on search engines. And pretty soon, spammy marketers started using it to boost their rankings on Google.
They would use content mills to generate hundreds of cheap posts with backlinks to their site, and spam unsuspecting blog owners with requests to get them published. All those backlinks would "fool" search engines into thinking that the website was a highly-referenced and relevant source, which would earn the site a high ranking.
But search engines have been catching up on this spammy practice. In fact, over the years Google has been issuing warnings to stop relying on guest posting as a link-building strategy.
In 2014, Matt Cutts (head of Google's webspam team at the time) even went as far as to say:
"So stick a fork in it: guest posting is done; it's just gotten too spammy. In general I wouldn't recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well. Likewise, I wouldn't recommend relying on guest posting, guest posting sites, or guest posting SEO as a link building strategy."
Of course, quite a few people got upset, especially honest, respectful bloggers who use guest posting as a tool for building meaningful relationships in their industry.
So where does this leave us? Is guest posting really done?
Well, that depends entirely on which *kind* of guest posting we're talking about.
Marketers using spammy, zero value, cheap-SEO-tactic guest posting have every reason to be worried. Google is already clamping down, and it's only going to get worse - which I think is long overdue!
But if you're into honest, relationship-building, value-rich guest posting, then I promise you have nothing to worry about, because that's not going anywhere. In fact, Matt Cutts so much as said so himself:
"In general I wouldn't recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well."
And really that's just common sense. You wouldn't trust a perfect stranger with entertaining your closest friends and family would you? The same goes for guest posting.
Understand that for serious bloggers, their audience is the single most important thing in their business. They have invested a lot of time and energy cultivating that following, building a strong relationship based on trust and respect. And it's a very delicate, fragile thing.
When a blogger grants you the permission to guest post to their readers, it is an immense privilege, and you should treat it as such. And if you do, I promise you will never have to worry about getting traffic ever again.
Danny Iny
Founder/CEO at Mirasee
No comments:
Post a Comment