Guest Post, Guest Post, Home To Bed

Afternoon All ….. So today I welcome a guest post from an esteemed colleague Andi Leeman from Tim’s Minions.

Andi has written for me a few times now, and is one of the great VALUE givers in blogging I believe. This post doesn’t dissapoint, and when I managed to get my hands on it for my blog I was really happy, having read this earlier today …. Enough of me …. Here’s Andi 

I think you will agree this is going to be a very interesting post. I was reading ‘ Ninjanomics’ by Patrick Meninga the other day when I came across a traffic and link generating method that I thought was interesting.

I also thought you good folk would like to hear about it. We as bloggers and internet marketers know of the importance of guest blogging and what guest blogging can do for us. The idea is simple; we write a high quality article and publish it on someone else’s website, usually a good well recognised website, for several reasons.

1. We get exposure, people see our names as writers and we get remembered.
2. We get free traffic from these sites; readers of our posts hopefully click through to our sites.
3. We get important backlinks to our site which helps raise our sites up in the rankings.

Writing these articles can take a fair bit of time, you should only send your best posts to be published on other sites. After all, these posts are in reality, traps. We want to trap readers into our web and lead them back to our site. In a nice way of course

So it makes sense to spend time crafting good articles and then send out our best to make sure we get as much good traffic back to our sites as possible. Search engines like Google and Bing use robots that crawl the web looking at the link structure that points back to our sites.

It is important that we have natural links back to our sites otherwise we will be penalised. All Google wanted was to reward sites that people liked. A link was in fact a ‘vote’. If a site was loved people would vote for it by linking to it and the more ‘votes’ you had, the better chance you had of… ‘Winning the election’ … so to speak.

Website owners wanted as many links (votes) to their sites as possible so they could rank higher in Google. To achieve this they did whatever they could like using link farms, directories and exchanges to name a few.

Link farms and directories were penalised in the recent Google updates, many sites lost thousands of links that they had built up often at a cost. Participating in link exchanges will not work anymore; having a link from your site to another and back again will simply be ignored.

What we as site owners need is a network of links all pointing back to our site that looks like they were done natural by people and not planned.

One way to do this is what we call ‘mechanical links’ which is in fact a ‘manufactured’ natural link set up. There is a cost to this but it is minimal and this needs to be outsourced, you will be having articles written but you do not want these articles to resemble the types that you would normally write.

It would be a good idea to use more than one writer for this job to keep it as natural as possible.

So what exactly is it am I talking about?

You hire people to write articles similar to your guest posts, something that relates to the content, you then offer the post to another website and link to your guest post instead of your actual blog.

Your own guest posts should link to different internal pages on your site and these new posts that you have written link to those guest posts so when the spiders go crawling they go more than one blog deep.

These other guest posts do not need to be anything like the quality you write as they resemble other newbie bloggers linking to posts they think are good and those posts are yours. You can get simple articles written at places like Fiverr.com. You could ask the writer to contact websites and offer the posts for free for you.

Many might accept as they are new blogs and they want good content. These posts won’t be recommending ‘Cheap Pay Day Loans’ or ‘Credit Cards’ like a lot of the guest posts people offer these days. They will just be posts about a relevant topic that has a link out to your guest posts.

This is the most important piece of the puzzle; the sites that you offer these guest posts to must accept them with the links intact. They do not need to be purely blogs, they can be from any network which allows you to link out like Tumblr or even Pinterest.

They do not need an author box either, allow them to look like they belong to the site and was written by the site owner. Link out to your proper guest posts within the body of the text.

Ideally you want to do this over time, do not suddenly go out and spend $100 and have every one of your past guest posts suddenly linked to within a few days. This will be noticed and look a little suspicious.

There is nothing stopping you having an article written and posted a day or two after one of your guest posts go live. When your guest posts are published the site owners along with you will share that post to the social media networks which could result in readers writing posts and linking back to it naturally.

What you are doing is exactly the same; you are simply mimicking natural human behaviour. You don’t have to link straight away though, once a post goes live to the world it can be read anytime and so links can and will be formed much later. It would be a great idea to do a mix of different timed links. As I say, do not go and do a bulk linking to all of your guest posts, do it gradually and naturally.

There is nothing stopping you from going deeper and having links to those ‘special’ guest posts, having shorter summary articles pointing to them can create some deeper levels giving Google the impression that you have links similar to tree routes. This will show your importance and Google will reward you.

It has to be clearly stated though; everything you do must appear to be natural. Having articles written that are not in your style and not simply machine spun should not look anything else but natural. Posts should not appear on the same websites, having just two websites all pointing back to your guest posts will look suspicious.

I know that it can happen, I have linked to the same sites several times but I do link to others as well, you just need to be very sure that you are not making yourself look in anyway suspect.

Remember, the guest posts you write will be on bigger authority sites, the kind people like to sit up and listen to. These are sites that people like to link to, so if you have a great guest post on a great site it is only natural people will link to it and share it.

You have just done if for them. Like everything in this business, you should plan it out and do it as a long-term on-going strategy. While you are writing guest posts you are creating a second tier as you go along. The main word here is natural, keep it natural and you should be ok.

Awesome post, I’m sure you agree ….. This has given me some food for thought, and I thank Andi for submitting this for my site!

Clair  

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