Underused Link Building Strategy – Guest Author Articles

In webmaster and internet marketing forums around the planet, people are noticing, and subsequently saying, that article marketing is either dead or dying — at least in terms of providing SEO benefits. In case you’re either completely new to the website promotion and/or marketing game, or you’ve been living under a rock for the last several years — article marketing has been the de-facto method of driving traffic, directly and indirectly, to a website over the last 3+ years. Maybe it’s been going on for longer than that, but I can only remember using the method starting about three years ago.

While I have to disagree, wholeheartedly at that, that article marketing is “dead” — the landscape is certainly different than it was even a year ago. However, regardless of whether traditional article marketing is dead or not is not the point here — the point is that there is a severely underused, yet exceptionally viable, offshoot of article marketing that is available to writers and those who can hire writers today — guest author writing.

Guest author writing, or guest blogging in some cases, is where you write content for a website, and get recognition for that content. In some cases you will only receive a byline, in other cases you will get a dedicated page on that website where you can place an extensive bio, and in other cases, you will receive an “about the author” blurb right under the article that you’re sharing. The latter is the type of “guest writing” that we’re talking about today.

Benefits of becoming a guest author

Some people simply do not know the option exists whereas others know that the concept exists, yet fail to use this marketing method in any capacity. Guest writing is an underused tool, but it has a huge array of benefits:

• You can build link popularity for your websites
• You can direct targeted visitors to your website
• You can brand yourself as an expert in a niche
• You can increase your website’s visibility and search engine rankings
• If you already write your own content — it’ll only “cost” a little bit of time

How to find a guest writer position

One of the easiest ways to find guest-writing positions is to use search engines. If you use specialized commands, you can hone-in on super-targeted websites that are looking for writers. As an example, let’s say that you have a website that focuses on SEO. You can head over to Google and type in the following:

intitle:”write for us” seo (byline|link)

This query does a number of things:

1. It tells Google to only return pages that have “write for us” in the title
2. It tells Google to return pages that are either related to SEO, or have SEO within the text somewhere
3. It tells Google to return pages that have the words “link” or “byline” in the text — which, in this case, we’re looking for backlinks, so this is what we want

You can repeat the query with whatever keyword matches your market. For instance, if you wanted to promote a website that is in the general field of marketing, you could try this query:

intitle:”write for us” marketing (byline|link)

I went ahead and linked to the result so that you can see the query better — it’ll be easier to read within the search field on Google.

This tip, in and of itself, should give you a great start on how to find guest writer positions. However, you can also check out this video that I put together to help writers find writing jobs, and even though this is showing you how to find paid writing gigs, it’s the same concept.

How to capitalize on guest author posts or articles

Once you have successfully found a website willing to publish your article with a couple of links back, now you want to get the most out of it. I’m not big on putting a lot of stock in 3rd party websites, but I will certainly “help” the content that I have published on 3rd party websites, especially when it’ll benefit my primary website.

To sort of “help” the content along, and to get it noticed by search engines, you should use traditional article marketing and link to that newly created content. Don’t spend a lot of time on it, and only submit to a small handful of effective article directories that publish quickly and get indexed quickly, but if you want the “most bang for your buck”, this is what I advise.

While the death of article marketing as we know it is debatable, even if it is true, this doesn’t mean that the entire model is ineffective. There are other ways of acquiring link placement on relevant 3rd party websites, but becoming a guest author is probably one of the easiest.