Profitable Guest Posting

Guest posting is popular for several good reasons:

  • Guest posting is an excellent showcase of your skills.
  • Guest posting is a highly targeted form of marketing.
  • Guest posting is an ace-in-the-hole for SEO.
  • Guest posting can be rather profitable.

If you raised an eyebrow at my fourth reason, you aren’t thinking about all of the true possibilities of guest posting.

What’s Guest Posting?

For those who don’t know, guest posting is a rather simple concept. You make a connection with a blog owner. You write an article to be posted on the blog. You include a link back to your website. You get traffic and publicity in exchange for your interesting, free content. It’s a win-win.

As a freelance writer, you may have written guest posts for blogs like this one or others in the writing community. You may have even branched out and written up some guest blogs in other niches – you may have already turned guest blogging into an element of your business plan. If you have, you’ve discovered what an interesting niche it can be for freelancers.

Guest Blogging and SEO

Google slapped down SEO pros a few times over the last six weeks with major updates that threw off the “old” assumptions of the algorithms. The updates are forcing SEO professionals to come up with a new link strategy that places links in the middle of relevant content on related websites. Sound familiar?

Guest posting is becoming huge in SEO because it is so ideal for generating excellent back links – the backbone of SEO. The traffic and exposure don’t hurt the website, either.

The guest post back links are increasingly more valuable to webmasters and companies working with SEO, and they are willing to pay a pretty penny to get those posts up on authority sites with the necessary links pointing back at the company. Most of all, they are willing to spend a great deal of money if they don’t actually have to do the hard work of writing and placing the necessary articles.

That’s where you come in.

I’ve offered a guest posting service for years, and I always have a bit more interest than I can handle with my limited schedule. Over the last month, however, the demand for guest posting has increased dramatically. This tells me that guest posting is a great market for those writers who have what it takes to sell the full service.

Guest Posting Realities

Before you rush off to create an ad selling your new guest posting services, however, be warned: Guest posting is very hard work. It’s often much harder than just writing articles or blogging for clients. It’s also very labor intensive – especially when you’re working on someone’s behalf.

To effectively guest post on someone’s behalf, you must establish the necessary relationship with an authority site in a particular niche. You must get permission to post. You then must get approval from your client before creating the post. Most guest posts are created on spec – you write them and might wind up being rejected multiple times before you find a solid placement.

Once the post is finished and placed, you’re responsible for finessing the blog owner to finish posting and ensuring that all links are pointing to the right place and working correctly. As you can imagine, this is not a simple process. A single placement can take months to deliver – especially in certain niches where guest blogging isn’t highly established or favored just yet.

If guest posting for clients catches your interest – give it a go! Just be sure to charge what your time is worth if you’re going to make the effort pay off.

Profile image for Rebecca Garland
Rebecca is a full-time everything. She teaches English and reading to her much loved, if challenging, high school students during the day and is a freelance education writer in the evenings. With almost ten years in the classroom and advanced degrees in business and information science, Rebecca specializes in materials that inform, educate and entertain. Rebecca indulges herself by pretending to have spare time and writing about the ups and downs of being a freelancing mama whenever she gets a chance.

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