One way to drive targeted traffic to your website is to do some guest blogging.
If you run an e-commerce website or a monetized blog, you probably know that you have to drive a significant amount of traffic to your website in order to make money. If we dig even deeper into this, your goal should be to drive highly targeted traffic to your domain. These are the visitors likely to make a purchase on your e-commerce website or make use of the affiliate links on your site, both of which generates revenue for you. How do you accomplish this? How do you rank higher on Google, easily the most popular and widely used search engine on the Internet?
As of July 2012, Google answers over 3 billion queries every day from users in 180 or more countries around the world. This equates to a mind boggling 35,000 queries every second. One of the ways you can drive targeted traffic to your website and improve its position on Google’s search ranking is to do some guest blogging. Let’s take a closer look at this.
What is Guest Blogging?
Guest blogging is the submission of a blog post or article to some external website, which will be featured on the site. Your goal is to incorporate links within the post back to your own website. Generally, webmasters will allow you to include a link within the author byline portion of your featured piece. Some webmasters will allow you to include links within the body of your article as well. Webmasters that offer guest blogging opportunities usually provide very clear instructions in the following areas: number of links allowed within the piece, word count requirements, topics accepted, time expectations in terms of when the post will go live, etc.
What are the benefits of creating these links back to your site on external domains? First, your website will enjoy a greater flow of targeted traffic, given that you are creating links in relevant niches. If you run an e-commerce website that sells fitness products and videos, for example, you should be submitting guest blog posts to relevant health and fitness websites. This will increase the number of visitors to your own site who are likely to make a purchase. Second, your site’s ranking in Google is partly based on an analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality and relevance of links all matter. The more quality links you can create on external websites back to your website, the better your search engine ranking position is likely to be. This will, of course, drive a significant amount of traffic to your website.
How do I find Guest Blogging Opportunities?
A very simple way to find guest blogging opportunities is to search on Google for: Keyword + “Guest Post” or Keyword + “Write For Us.” Replace “Keyword” with a term relevant to your niche. If we use the example discussed earlier, you should replace “Keyword” with “Fitness,” and so you would search for the following on Google: Fitness + “Guest Post” or Fitness + “Write For Us.” There are also helpful websites available, like this post on izideo, that compile various available opportunities.
It’s important that you write high quality, engaging, useful and informative content on your own website so that it can rank high on search engines. It’s just as important that you work on building high quality back links to your website, which can be done in a powerful way through guest blogging.
Aaron Stafford is a web content strategist and link builder for Baby Changing Station.com. Aaron has helped websites rank higher on search engines by launching link building campaigns for clients. One of his primary link building techniques is guest blogging.
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