5 Things You MUST Know Before Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is among the top methods that can not only drive targeted traffic to your blogs but also build up good quality backlinks that help you boost your ranking in SERPs especially pagerank.

What do you think about guest blogging? Are you really interested in guest blogging on other sites? If yes, there are several things you need to know to maximize the benefits of guest blogging. These things-to-do list is quite simple but many of you might have missed.

1. Blog Design:

How important blog design is? Have you ever thought that professional and eye-catching design matters or just a simple layout? No matter what it is but my experience is that blog design plays an important role in keeping your readers stay longer.

I personally love a professionally-designed blog as it can show me how serious the owner is about his/her blog. If s/he invested in his/her design, that also means s/he will have long term plan for the blog too.

Putting yourself in the role of the first time visitors to your blog who are referred by your guest posts on other blogs, what do you think if you see a very simple layout with messy & crash design? Do you have same feeling that the blog owner is playing a 50-50 game?

The first impression is very important and your blog design is also a factor that contributes to keeping your readers stay or even becoming your loyal readers too.

2. Rich Contents:

What do you think if you see only one or two articles that are long outdated? I think that when you have plan for guest blogging, you should try your best to make your blog contents rich first as it is not easy to drive targeted traffic to your blog nowadays and you can not guest blog for life either. Therefore, try to maximize your benefits from guest blogging and keep your first readers stay as many as you can.

With that said, you must create compelling contents on your blog first before sending your guest posts to other blogs.

Image Source: Pixabay

3. Site Speed:

When you have good, professional design and your blog is rich of compelling contents. What happens if your readers take more than 5 mins to load your site? It is a nightmare. I myself will leave immediately after 30 seconds if I can not see the post. Time is money then you should remember this in your mind!

Site speed is not only important to your readers but also important to Google search too. Googlebots can easily skip crawling your contents if your site loading is extremely slow. Google suggested that your site loading speed should be less than 5 seconds. This can be easily tracked in Google Webmaster Tools.

To improve your site speed, you need to have a reliable hosting service such as HostGator or you can see other recommended hosting services for reference. This can help your site load faster with minimum downtime guarantee. Further, you should consider using plugins to make your blog blazing fast together with CDN service.

4. FeedBurner Subscription Box:

What a big pity if I visit your blog and would like to receive updates but I can no find where to subscribe? That is not a MUST thing but it is very important to you and your readers too. I have a huge list of blog to visit on daily or weekly basis but most of them are read by feed until I have comments to share.

How to know about your updates when I do not have a tool to track it especially for blogs that have long, difficult domain name to remember?

As a guest bloggers, you should think about this and try to provide the most convenient way that your readers can easily track your content updates with ease. That is why I would suggest your place your feed button or emails subscribe box at the most visible position that all readers can see.

5. Time arrangement:

How disappointed you are if you are referred to this blog and leave your first comments without responses? Will you think that this is an auto-blog?

This is very important and I myself think that all of bloggers love warm welcome message from blog owners or post authors when leaving comments. This shows that you appreciate their comments and feedback.

This can apply to guest blogging strategy and you should be ready to handle all questions and comments from visitors for your guest posts on other blogs. Don’t rely too much on blog owner s/he is not the one who created that article but you!

These are 5 MUST things to do before sending your guest posts to other sites. You can not drive traffic to an under construction, maintenance sites or a crash design with little contents. The first impression is very important to your readers and the more impressive your site is, the more traffic is generated.