Paid Guest Posting: Why it is an Investment Worth Consideration
As part of an audience, you’ve probably seen it before. A post in your favorite blog that revolves around the blog topic but offers a unique point of view, an exciting use case or interesting personal experience, a deeper kind of expertise. It is usually penned by an expert from outside the blog and is endorsed by the blog author. In many ways, it complements what the blog is about and adds up to the blog’s value for you as a reader.
You guessed it right, in most cases, it would be a paid guest blog post. Now, let’s take a look at it from the point of view of said expert (and a bit from the point of view of the blog owner) and see the power behind paid blogging and how it works for the mutual benefit of guest posters and blog owners.
Paid Guest Posting. What is it exactly?
In a way, it’s exactly what the name suggests. You pay for your content to be featured in someone else’s blog. But is there more to it? For sure. First and foremost, paid guest posting is a SEO technique of the white-hat link building type. It allows you to obtain high quality, natural-looking links that gain you a lot of link juice. If the host blog has good domain authority ranking, the backlink becomes especially valuable. Oh, and yes, you pay for the placement.
Of course, there are multiple nuances to guest posting. If done right, it’s one of the best content marketing strategies. But if done wrong… let’s just say you don’t want to do it wrong.
Paid Guest Posting vs. Free Guest Posting: pros, cons, differences
It would be a mistake to think that paid guest blog posts are the same as free ones, except that you paid for them. The two SEO techniques differ in purpose, in mechanics and in other specifics.
Free guest blogging implies that a host blog places an article with your content without any additional charge involved, but hey, let’s be honest. There has to be some kind of a gain for them in that, right? And there is. When someone places your post in their blog for free, a lot of decision-making will be with them. Free guest posting implies that you have little control over when the post is made, how much of the original content is there, and even if they will backlink to you. After all, it’s their blog and their rules.
In a paid guest post, you have much more control over the details. As a rule, the waiting time will be shoulder, you will have a say about various post details and the blog host generally always agrees on various posting conditions with the guest.
Free guest post spots on more popular blogs also tend to be much more competitive. The more authority the blog has, the more people wish to use its guest blog services. And of course, the blog host gets to pick the content.
Eventually, this led to the tendency where the best blogs and the more popular influencers in any domain will do a free guest post only in exceptional cases. Usually such cases have little to do with business relationships and everything with some humanitarian causes, so paid guest posting remains the only option for a lot of more popular sites and hosts.
It is often thought that paid content placement usually looks less natural than free. Surprisingly, for guest posting it is vice versa. Paid guest posts are usually composed in a more meticulous, engaging manner and hosts are willing to put an extra effort in making the content look great because you pay for it. Because both sides approve of the final post before it sees the light, you will also be sure that it looks relevant . At the same time, free guest blog posts often come across as more contrived for the opposite of that reason – the hosts are already letting you have your content featured on their blog for free, they will not go out of their way to make it brilliant.
While free guest posting is a great way to embark on the guest posting journey, paid guest posting will not just open new audiences for you, it will allow you to establish long-lasting relationships with influencers and have your brand name be on the ear of their audience, thus raising your visibility and credibility.
Getting Started with Paid Guest Posting: a How-To
Now that you’ve decided to try paid guest posting and allocated a budget, where to start? Here’s a quick step-by-step.
- Define your strategy and goals
Plan before everything. What are you willing to achieve? An integration with a big name influencer? Drive more traffic to your website? Get high-authority backlinks? Establish yourself as a known expert in your field? These factors will influence your choice of platforms and guest posting services, your budget and the results.
- Do your homework
A.k.a., research your potential host blogs, feedback about them from other guest blog authors, their rates, their potential belonging to any blacklists and comprise a list of your target blogs. You can use tools like Moz’s Domain Authority tool to help you.
- Decide on the budget
Draw your spending limits and strategy. Do you want to invest in just a few expensive, but potentially very beneficial integrations? Or start out with many less expensive blog posts from more niche blogs? This is also where you can calculate the reach and the coverage for your content.
- Make a compelling pitch
Some blogs will take anything that’s paid for, but you want your content to look naturally placed, to have entertaining or useful (or both) value for the blog audience and to be liked and potentially freely reblogged. All in all, you want to make a great impression on both the blog audience and the blog author, so invest in creating an awesome piece of content. A paid blog post with poor content can actually create quite a backlash, you want to avoid that at all costs.
- Agree on the Terms
You’re paying for it, so ask your questions, get your answers, make sure that you are absolutely on the same page with the blog host about everything. Draw a legal agreement if needs be. It is vital that you discuss all the details about placement, content, duration upfront.
- Craft your content
And let me reiterate, do invest in high quality content. This way, you will have an additional advantage of using the paid blog post as a content marketing means.
- Optimize for SEO
Try to do it elegantly. No need to stuff your content with keywords or backlinks, it will look contrived. Find a good balance between natural key phrase insertion and readability. By the way, have you got a minute to speak about keyword clustering?
- Monitor feedback
Once the post goes live, take care to reply to user comments, monitor it for reblogs, reposts and mentions and in general try to engage your audience who is willing to communicate.
- Gather analytics
Monitor the changes in traffic to your site, pageviews, new subscriptions, brand mentions and other metrics. Did you reach your original goals? Gather this data to correct and refine your future integrations.
- Build relationships
All went well? It’s a good sign that you need to mark that blog host for potential other integrations, a continued series or articles or other types of collaborations. It will also showcase you as a reliable partner and help launch similar collabs easier. Guest blogging is often done as a community activity and becoming a full-fledged member of this community will bring you many benefits.
Serpzilla – the Best Guest Posting Marketplace
Now that we’ve covered the process of paid guest blogging, it’s easy to see that it is time consuming and effort-demanding. Fortunately, there are ways to make it easier and to automate many repetitive parts of the process such as creation of a blog pool, payment and placement. For that, you have the perfect tool, Serpzilla.
Why are we the tool to pick for your guest posting?
1. Widest selection of niches
Seriously, you name it, we have it almost certainly. From mainstream and popular domains like beauty or culinary travels, home improvement or fitness, to more specific and niche areas like crafts or spiritual practices, we will be able to match your content with a perfectly relevant pool of blogs.
2. Quality Assurance
We don’t joke about the content quality. Each article must meet our strict requirements to be approved for posting and there’s no way around it. We want your brand name to be associated with quality content only, period.
3. Additional Seo Perks
Yep, a nice freebie to go with the regular package. All our blog placement articles will be SEO-optimized. And we do it carefully, without random keyword stuffing.
4. Transparent Pricing Plans
No extra charges, hidden payments or anything like. You will know at all times what you are getting for your money, and once you make the purchase, its terms will not change. If a placement doesn’t take place, we will gladly refund you.
5. Optimized workflows
Tired of endless tackling of the terms, meaningless discussions without getting the result and lengthy negotiations? We are too, that’s why at Serpzilla we decided that we need to go without it and automated as much as we could so that you can focus on the important thing – running your business.
6. Experts at your service
We understand that navigating the sea of SEO is not without its reefs. If you need support or guidance, reach out to us and our team of professionals will be glad to share its expertise. We do wholeheartedly want you to succeed in your paid guest blogging campaign, because your success is our success.
High-Quality Guest Blogging Opportunities
Check out our selection of high-quality websites and blogs that accept guest posts. Choose a topic that suits your interests and goals.
Red Flags: What you should steer clear of
Like you’ve already guessed, paid guest posting is not always unicorns and rainbows. When starting out, there are a few things to look out for. If you encounter anything of the like, it should ring a bell.
- Uneven Content Quality
When the blog author is not picky about content quality and generally posts anything that they get paid for, no matter how irrelevant or badly composed, it’s always a bad sign. This drives audiences away from the blog like little else, and even if you do see many followers, chances are, they are fake. Make sure you check the blog for authority and authenticity.
- Exorbitant prices
People usually answer your quote request with an out-of-this-world price in two cases: they don’t want to post your content and are using this means as a paywall or they really do have such high prices, but in this case, pay special attention to the value you’ll be getting for your money.
- Bad Communication
The blog author takes their precious time to answer your questions? Or instead of giving your clear answers they just slide off? Avoid discussing important details? Are they all talk and no action? Consider stepping down, chances are, you will not get what you expect.
- Unrealistic Results
While you should always hope for the best, make sure your expectations are realistic. A diligent blog author will never promise you mountains of gold in benefits and traffic for your paid guest post. Check that both of you are on the same page when it comes to your predictions of the guest post outcome.
- Unclear Guest Post Guidelines or Lack thereof
Every reputable blogger takes care that their content has integrity. Which means, it’s styled and served in the same particular way. If they don’t tell you out front about their do’s and don’t’s, it’s a sign you need to revisit point 1 of this list.
- No Digital Footprint
Usually, a good blog is multi-platform, or at least, their author maintains a transparent social network profile. Blog authors may not always choose to cover every single popular social network, and it’s fine. But if a blog is not featured anywhere except for its own site, unless it is a well-known blog with a proven history of successful guest posting and a known author personality, there’s a fair chance it could be a scam.
Conclusion
Content marketing has become one of the most successful link building and SEO strategies in the recent couple of years. Not only does Google look favorably upon it, but it also is very versatile and can help you achieve several important marketing goals at once. Finding and promoting the tone of voice for your brand, thus making you more recognizable, engaging your audience, receiving feedback and building partnerships are among the obvious benefits of content marketing. Paid guest blogging is an excellent content marketing venue, as it lets you capitalize on audiences that are already set communities of highly involved users. We at Serpzilla strive to make paid guest posting a smooth and stress-free experience for you.
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