Imagine this: you’re surfing the web one day and you come upon a website with copy that looks surprisingly like yours.
The headlines, slogans, content is nearly identical, the layout is a duplicate, and the images are so similar that pretty soon you’re grinding your teeth in anger. Who dared to steal your work in such a disgraceful, copycat way?
Well, instead of just fuming, let’s talk about the action steps that you can take to identify and stop content theft from happening in it’s tracks. As expert online copywriters, we know exactly what you can do—and we’re sharing it here!
Content Theft: What In The World Do You Do?
We’ve had many people pose as us, since a successful writing agency seems to be the perfect candidate for struggling writing agencies to mimic. (In this case, flattery is not the best compliment.) Some have copied our service pages word for word. The good news is, these posers didn’t last.
While content theft is a tragic and infuriating scenario, it’s one that affects many writers and marketers every year. From large-scale operations that duplicate entire websites to lazy bloggers who are happy to just copy and paste your text into their content fields, there are dozens of ways for people to steal your content. Luckily, there are also dozens of ways for you to go after them when they do.
Let’s talk business.
Stolen Content: The Writer’s Worst Fear
While it may seem insufferably audacious for anyone to steal content and use it as their own, it happens literally all of the time. According to a 2013 statement by Google’s Matt Cutts, anywhere from 25-30% of the web is made up of duplicate content. This is a shocking number, I know, but I have something else that’s even more shocking for you: Google doesn’t penalize duplicate content.
Because there are many different types of duplicate content (including legitimate, syndicated duplicate content that’s been published or shared on a variety of platforms) Google refrains from punishing duplicate content unless it is obviously spam. While this approach is meant to prevent webmasters who have duplicate content published on multiple URLs from incurring penalties, it also makes it difficult for Google to smack down people who blatantly steal your content.
Even though Google doesn’t out rightly penalize people who steal your content, stolen content hurts in a myriad of ways. Most notably, stolen content makes it harder than it already is for your site to rank well in the SERPs and gain the traffic boosts high-quality content typically affords you. When a person steals your content, it’s possible that the blog post you spent hours writing, proofreading, researching, and editing will be doomed to the fifth page of a search result while a stolen copy ranks as #1. Because Google doesn’t always understand who is the original owner of a content, this outcome is not only possible but probable.
Luckily, all hope is not lost. While it may be difficult, there are many effective ways to go after people who steal your content.
Locating and Addressing Stolen Content: 5 Proactive Steps to Stop Content Theft
To discover and address stolen content online, follow these steps:
1. Use a plagiarism checker to find stolen content
Plagiarism checkers are some of the most effective tools for locating stolen online content.
While these may be simple tools (they work by scanning input content for duplicate words or phrases on the web), they’re reliable and are by far some of the easiest and most reliable sources to begin addressing stolen content.
Here are two good plagiarism checkers.
Copyscape:Copyscape is a simple, easy-to-use platform that scans the web for duplicate content. One of the most frequently used tools for copywriters and editors, Copyscape offers both a free and paid service. The paid service is more extensive and it’s what we at Express Writers use to check all of our content for plagiarism and theft.
To use Copyscape, simply purchase credits (a steal at $0.05 each) and then input your content to find out if it shows up anywhere else on the web. Check out what happens when I put in a snippet of a recent blog post titled “25 Reasons Every Business Needs a Go-To SEO Copywriter:”
If you hit Compare Text, you can see exactly how much of the content is “duplicate” and where it’s found–and how much duplicacy is there (they give you a final percentage).
Copyscape is effective, simple, and cheap enough that even small businesses can use it to find out if their content has been stolen or not.
2. Grammarly: Grammarly is an online grammar and spelling checker that’s become popular in the online marketing community. What many people don’t know, however, is that Grammarly also has a powerful plagiarism detector that checks over 8 billion webpages. Check out what happens when I input the same blog snippet for “25 Reasons:”
Ideal for finding exactly the URL that’s stealing your content, Grammarly is a powerful tool that can help you track down stolen content quickly and easily.
2. Implement electronic alerts to monitor your content
Electronic alerts like those offered by Google Alerts are a fantastic way to get a heads-up whenever someone attempts to steal your content. Free, simple, and easy to use, Google Alerts allows you to input your content into the search query and get an alert if Google detects duplicate copies online.
Keep in mind that Google issues an alert for every single word you input into the search query, so not all of the alerts you get will be actual duplicate content. While it can be frustrating to sift through the results, this is an effective way to receive notifications about any duplicate content before it gets out of control.
With BuzzSumo, you can also set up content monitoring. I love this tool and have a daily email notification set up to come to my inbox anytime someone mentions “express writers” on the web. (On the plus side of brand monitoring, this has helped me find bloggers and businesses who were talking about me that I didn’t even know about–now I can go thank them!)
3. Know your rights
While you can’t totally prevent content theft from happening, even with the help of plagiarism checkers and electronic alerts, you can respond aggressively when you discover stolen content.
One of the best ways to do this is to know your rights as they pertain to private content and one of the best sources for this is the Google DMCA. The DMCA – or Digital Millennium Copyright Act – helps content publishers understand what they can do if their content gets stolen from them.
The DMCA, backed by the power of Google, offers helpful tools and information for people suffering stolen content and can actually scan your site to check for copies of your content anywhere else on the web. The DMCA offers both a free and a paid enrollment option and both are effective at helping you combat content theft.
This is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal when you go after content thieves. What’s worked for us is simply stating what the DMCA can do, if you file one. Check it out on our policy page:
4. Add a banner
Both Copyscape and the DMCA offer “Do Not Copy” banners you can easily add to your site. Most of these banners are free and can be exactly what you need to help would-be thieves understand that your site is protected and that you’re on the lookout for stolen content.
5. Trademark or copyright your work
The symbols above are trademark and copyright symbols: they can be expensive and time-taking to get, but worthwhile for your critical copy bits, the ones that define your business or sell your products.
While all content you write is automatically copyrighted, some content creators choose to take it a step further by copyrighting all of their work officially. While this approach involves a hefty level of paperwork, for those bits of copy you regard as precious, pick and choose what you want to protect the most. This process may be worth it for the peace of mind that comes with knowing that, if content theft ever strikes your company, that your content is protected legally.
Trademarking is equally important. For example, we’ve trademarked our slogans, and our company name Express Writers. This way, anyone who goes after recreating our company name and tries to steal on that large of a scale, they can’t—we can go after them legally and sue any second since we own the trademark to our company name. If you came up with a really cool, original slogan for your business, or have a catchy business name, stop and trademark now if you haven’t yet.
3 Writing Tips to Defend Against Stolen Content
While there’s no way to 100% guarantee that your content will never be stolen, there are some measures you can take to decrease the likelihood that thieves will get their dirty paws on your writing.
1. Include internal links.
Including internal linking in your writing helps increase craw-lability and make it easier for search engines to index your content, which can help ensure that your content (Rather than a thief’s stolen copy) is the what ranks in Google. Plus, if you take the time to ensure that your internal links point back to your own content, you make your content undesirable to steal, since all of the material within it just points back to your website.
2. Use first-person voice.
An anonymous, lofty blog post is a lot easier for a thief to steal than a personal, first-person, anecdotal story. Because of this, writing in first person is one of the easiest and most productive ways to ensure that your content stays your own. Because nobody can hijack your voice effectively, making your writing more personal is a great way to maintain ownership and discourage content theft across the board.
3. Design custom images.
Designing custom images and then referencing them throughout your content is an effective way to deter would-be thieves. While you don’t need to add a watermark to the images you create, plugging your logo into a picture or infographic and then referencing the image throughout the content (as in “see below image,” or “in our infographic, located below”) is a wonderful way to make your content harder to steal and deter would-be thieves.
Find Stolen Content? Here’s What to Do
Stolen content is a big deal and it’s not something to ignore. If you find stolen content online, here’s what you can do to minimize the damage and get the stolen content removed as quickly as possible:
Contact the webmaster. Sometimes, dealing with content theft is as simple as contacting the webmaster and requesting they remove the content. Use a site like com to find out who owns a specific domain and then write the owner and ask them to take down the duplicate content immediately.
File a complaint. If contacting the webmaster doesn’t work, file a complaint with Google on the basis of DMCA infringement. There’s a simple online form to do this, and Google may help you address the stolen content.
Let the hosting company know what’s going on. If all else fails, inform the hosting company of the duplicate content. Many hosting companies consider plagiarism a violation of their customer agreement and will take action to help you address plagiarized content.
Protecting Your Content by Knowing Your Rights
Stolen content is a maddening situation and, unfortunately, it happens to many content creators across the web. Luckily, there are several proactive steps you can take to protect yourself against stolen content and address the issue if it happens to you. From using plagiarism checkers to routinely scan the web for duplicate content to copyrighting all of your material, there are many ways to discourage stolen content and respond swiftly and sternly to any thief who places their lazy paws on your online writing.
Create unique content you’ll be proud of with our team of expert copywriters. Visit our Content Shop to learn more!
How can an infographic get better? Add moving parts. Our fantastic design team created and designed this first gifographic from Express Writers. In it, we’re showing you the major tricks of the trade when it comes to writing and optimizing great SEO content. Tell us how you liked our first gifographic, and for a limited time, we’re taking gifographic orders! Full transcript below. Transcript
A Guide To Writing & Optimizing Great SEO Content (Gifographic)
Here’s Why Creating Great SEO Content Is So Crucial To Your Marketing
Web traffic drives content marketing. The largest portion of content marketing success, 63%, is derived from website traffic. A big reason why you should focus on having correctly SEO optimized content on your site.
2/3 of B2B Marketers say content fuels their marketing. And if your content is well-written, answers questions, and is optimized for your buyers to find it, buyers are willing to finish 57% of your buying process without even talking to a sales rep.
Google loves it! Google has said that quality content is key to rankings.
Google Panda is the gatekeeper. The Google panda update has been launched primarily to ensure only high quality content ranks the best. This Panda algorithm looks into factors specifically that include how expertly the content is written, the quality of the source and author, if it is original and not duplicate, authoritative, complete, well-researched, and not-over populated with ads.
Optimized blogs are powerful. 8 out of 10 Internet users are reading blogs and social media, which accounts for a whole 23% of time spent on the Internet.
3 Major Types of SEO Content & Tips on Correctly Optimizing Them
Content is the fuel for what you publish on the web. Here are a few of the most common web content types:
Web pages. Web pages are one of the most commonly optimized forms of SEO content. Boost your web page ranking through the inclusion of related, well-researched keywords, well written title tags, meta descriptions, awesome headers, and high quality writing. Never skimp on the quality of the writing if you want the best results from your web pages.
Blogs. There are approximately 152,000,000blogs on the web and with that kind of competition it’s obvious that optimizing your blog for SEO is an important way to get it to stand out. Include high quality citations (links) that reference any statistics you include and shoot for 2,000 words of high quality, well-researched SEO content per blog or more.
Product Descriptions. When it comes to writing product descriptions, you want people to be able to locate them online quickly and easily. Don’t skimp on copy here either. Include keywords in your product descriptions and write descriptive headlines and meta content for each one.
Social Media. Did you know that social media can be optimized, too? Except with social media, you optimize your content so that it can be located and shared by people rather than search engines. So don’t write around your keywords; write your social content around your audience.
3 Rules of Thumb in SEO Writing
1. Keyword Amount: Stay under a 3% keyword density in your content (web pages, blogs, etc.) Using them naturally is your #1 rule. Headers, subheaders, and throughout the copy are key areas to use them. How to Calculate:
Keyword Density = (How many times you used the keyword / Total words in the text) x 100
Example: (20 / 800) x 100 = 2.5% 2. Don’t count your keywords. We mean it! Think of your audience, the quality of your content, how well you’re researching the content, and if the copy addresses every question the topic could raise. This is far more important than counting keyword density every time. Simply optimize naturally with keywords. 3. Find original sources when you’re stating a claim, and citate (link to it). See our sources at the bottom of this infographic? Those are our citations. You’ll want to actually hyperlink inside your blogs or other content where you’re making a statement or claim that you’ve read online. Make sure you use the original source when you hyperlink.
3 SEO Tools for the Web Content Creator
SEMrush is a powerful keyword tool that allows users to optimize their sites for SEO, create intuitive pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and conduct social media and video advertising research. When it comes to using SEMrush to find keywords for your ad campaign, you’ll want to look into niche-specific long-tail keywords that apply specifically to your industry. While it’s all well and good to target a high-volume search keyword, it’s also harder to rank for these keywords, which means you may be better off focusing on a less competitive, more specific keyword phrase that allows you to rank strongly from the get-go.
Wordtracker is another keyword research tool that allows users to search multiple sources for effective keywords. This tool can help you find keywords that nobody is competing on and will be an essential tool for SEO success.
BuzzSumo is an effective tool for finding the key influencers that can help you promote your content and get it noticed by a wide audience base. It can also help you find trending content topics and take inspiration for audience related content. Although it’s not specifically SEO, developing great topic ideas and feeding off of industry leaders is every bit as important as SEO optimization.
10 Key Factors of Great SEO Content
1. Write great headers! Aside from your body content, the most important piece of content for SEO is your header. A header tells people what the piece is about, grabs reader attention and gives a general overview of the topic. To make your header as interesting as possible, include your keyword and focus on writing a header that asks a question or addresses your readers’ fears. Create headers that are irresistible and make your readers want to click; include the keyword naturally. 2. Stay away from “stuffing.” Keyword stuffing is a dangerous practice that will get you in trouble with the search engines, decreasing your site’s rank and making it harder for users to find you. Plus, it just looks spammy. So when writing your content, shoot to use keywords naturally. They should be in your header (if it’s possible to include them while still feeling organic) and they should appear a few times throughout the body content. You want your keyword density under 3% for everything you write. 3. Optimize your keywords for many channels. Keywords are important for your website, but they’re also important for social media and email. To optimize for multi-channel visibility in places like blogs, web pages and social media sites, be consistent with your keyword phrases across all the platforms you use. 4. Write good meta content. That little bit called your meta description might be more important than you realize. Think of them as your organic PPC copy; what users will see if your content ranks high enough. 2-3 sentence is all you need there, and be sure to include your main keyword. Treat your title tags like a 4-8-word advertisement for best results. 5. Be unique. All of the content you create should be unique, so you’ll want to strike a balance between curated content and original content. This is one of the best ways to optimize your site for SEO. 6. Include citations. Find and mention industry leaders throughout your content to back up your content. Google cares about your sources and to rank well you’ll want to link to industry leaders. Moz’s MozBar can help you make sure you’re using good sites; the DA (Domain Authority) score should ideally be 50 or more. However, the DA metric isn’t set in stone, so use it with judgment. Additionally, in web content you’ll want to link strategically throughout your own text back to the most important pages of your site. 7. Have high word counts. Did you know that word count can play an important part of SEO ranking? To provide the most value for your audience and rank as well as possible in SERPs, write long-form content between 1,500-2,000 words. Seek to address every question that could be raised on your topic. 8. Make sure all of your content is well- Sounds simple, but it’s crucial. Content that is filled with typos, misspellings, poor-quality links, or too many keywords will harm your SEO ranking and drive readers away. Proofread everything (or hire a proofreader). 9. Earn great links. In addition to using good links in your content, you’ll want to earn high-quality links from the outside as well. The best way to do this is to create and publish useful content that includes your keyword terms and draws social shares. Over time, the links will come. 10. Post often and consistently: Content is the #1 ranking factor for SEO and when you post often, your content gets shared more, viewed more, linked to more and helps you earn better rankings. For best results, post to your various channels several times a week and never let a blog sit unattended for long.
Alecs is our Client Accounts Manager and a ten-year-veteran copywriter.
Email newsletters have been around for a long time, as a successful means of helping businesses communicate with their customers.
When email introduced a new dimension to the traditional newsletter, it instantly became more marketable in the twenty-first century.
Not all newsletters are great, entertaining reads, however. As someone who enjoys reading and learning from what I read, a newsletter gives me a valuable resource. Sadly not many companies that create newsletters do that with information in mind.
Be inspired from the greats.
Developing a Great Email Newsletter: 15 Keys to the Castle
One of the key things about creating a great newsletter is that the information contained therein should be mostly informative. The content in your newsletter is an extension of the content that you create for your blog or website. This content has to be entertaining and engaging. Newsletters that don’t perform as well as they should forget this one overarching idea: that content is value and value is what sells.
Let’s take a look at some of the more impressive email newsletters that have managed to make their way (and keep making their way) into my inbox. 1. The Skimm: Having information given to you in easily readable, bite-sized chunks is the aim of most content marketing. Less is more, since content seems to be downsizing. The Skimm builds a newsletter that embraces this trend by giving you all the news you need to know about in short, concise bursts. You don’t even need to click out of the email to be fully informed about what’s going on. As a newsletter, it brings immense value to the table in a nice, simple, clean layout that doesn’t distract from the story elements of the news. The stories make for viable inspiration for your own blog posts as well. 2. Community.is: This newsletter tries to fit into a number of molds at the same and time and manages to do so pretty well surprisingly. As a newsletter that is designed to “put people at the center of their work”, they have a wide and varied audience. Their unique combination of short, medium and long form content appeals to their different demographics really efficiently. This allows their newsletter to be properly organized without seeming confusing at all. When you’re trying to hit such a wide audience, that in itself is a task, but this newsletter accomplishes it easily. 3. Food Safety Update: A B2B email newsletter doesn’t need a flashy title and Food Safety Update’s title is relatively bland. When you take a look at their layout and content, however, you realize that the title is misleading. The content is organized into easily digestible chunks that are well-labeled, ensuring that you can find what you’re looking to read up on. Interspersed throughout the journal are thumbnails that help to break up the text and add flavor to the layout itself. Handy social sharing options allow for easy dissemination of articles you like and unsubscribing is pretty simple as well, although after you’ve read it you’d wonder why anyone would want to. 4. Austin Kleon: Minimalistic design has always been something that appeals to a lot of modern users. Austin Kleon’s newsletter goes into the minimalist design with great intentions and manages to be successful with its mix of simple design and informative writing. The thing that is most impressive about it is the tone. Reading this newsletter has a quaint, almost homey feel. It’s almost like getting a letter from a friend you haven’t seen in a while. This is probably the most impressive accomplishment of this newsletter, making the publication seem more human. 5. Litmus: Named after the chemical testing paper, this email marketing testing company has a newsletter that is unique in its design. Swathes of color are used to break up the sections into easily readable bits. You never feel as though you’re staring at a field of monotony with the color scheme. The colors are muted and give the sense of a background without being too outstanding to distract you from what you’re reading. The content is interesting as you would expect from a marketing testing company, and it’s definitely one you should look into if marketing and analytics are your thing. 6. NoshOn.It: If you’ve ever tried making something from a recipe book and the book doesn’t have a helpful, full-color picture of what it’s supposed to turn out as, you’ll realize the struggles of many aspiring foodies out there. NoshOn.It is a newsletter that is designed for foodies and gives them helpful hints along with recipes and included pictures to help their readers visualize what they’re creating. Combining them with simple red text-boxes that stand out over the images and announce what it is you’re looking at helps readers to go directly to the section they’re looking for. Innovative design, to say the least, and quite useful for someone who cooks. 7. InterDrone News: Since drones became commercially available, there’s no shortage of people willing to throw a few bucks at them. InterDrone news is a pretty informative newsletter that encapsulates information about commercial and industrial uses of drones. As is to be expected from a B2B newsletter, its design is simple but effective. The entries are easy to read and give you all the important information about drones and their usage. If you’re a drone owner or are just curious about how this new technology benefits us overall, this is a pretty good addition to your reading list. 8. Very Short List (VSL): The idea behind VSL is simple in its premise, but powerful in its delivery. What Very Short List does is give you a selection of three “cultural gems” every day into your inbox. These gems differ from day to day as does the style and variety of the pieces. This is because VSL tasks a different contributor each day with doing the editing and compilation of their newsletter daily. This ensures that their content is always fresh, and that it might differ vastly from one day to another. VSL’s design is fun and playful as is to be expected from a blog that is fluid in its content style and delivery. 9. NextDraft: Another minimalist production, NextDraft gives you insight into a variety of topics without being too overbearing on presentation. The content delivery is simple, concise and effective. Social sharing opportunities abound throughout each of the pieces that make up the newsletter making it easy to get it out to your friends. NextDraft utilizes social media to grow its readership and with good reason. It’s one of the most effective ways of attracting people who like to read these types of articles to sign up to his mailing list. Simple design and informative news make a killer combination when it comes to a newsletter.
10. Hacker Newsletter: No, it’s not a newsletter for hackers. They don’t utilize this type of medium. Hacker newsletter is a curation of the most interesting social media stories that is delivered daily to your inbox. The simple design can be misleading because the information it contains is informative. It’s a no-fluff newsletter, but uses sections to its benefit by breaking up potentially confusing stories and arranging them in a way that makes sense. It’s quite a lot more entertaining than trying to find out what’s going on over at Twitter by simply searching hashtags and far more efficient at delivering that information in a readable way to you too. 11. Chemical Processing Weekly: You tend to notice after a while that B2B newsletters are not very imaginative when it comes to titles. But in a professional publication, you have less creative freedom with your title. Chemical Processing Weekly makes up for the bland title with writing that’s definitely not what you’d think you’d find in a newsletter like this. The tone is friendly and cordial and makes you want to read more, even if you’re not into chemical process plants. Polls and reader questions help to build engagement with the audience and the writing is very well done, building your interest in the topic but staying true to its scientific roots. It’s not often you find a scientific writing enterprise that appeals to the layman. 12. Muck Rack Daily: In journalism, a “muckraker” is someone who digs up dirt on public figures in order to raise circulation of a newspaper or magazine. Muck Rack is certainly not that. The writing is fun and witty, and the tone is casual. It invites you to read more and the design is well put together, making reading easy. Bold headers separate sections so that you don’t have to worry about facing a wall of text. It’s simple yet effective at engaging the audience, and the information it presents is delivered with just the right amount of humor to make it readable. 13. General Assembly: Professionals that want to expand their skill sets should look into General Assembly as a newsletter to subscribe to. The header is entertaining with a simple GIF at the top to attract attention. Normally, when you see a GIF in a newsletter you usually prepare yourself for an onslaught of them throughout the publication. Gladly, you don’t encounter those in General Assembly. Rather the design is minimalist and gives you a content in a format that is easily scannable. Since this is a newsletter designed for professionals, being scannable is one of the major things that it must cater to since the core audience doesn’t have that much time to spend on sifting through newsletters. It’s an impressive publication nonetheless. 14. SD Times Featured Resources: If you’re a software developer, you must know how hard it is to get relevant information about what’s going on in the industry. SD Times caters to a niche by developing informative articles that address a lot of the issues within the industry. Strangely for a B2B newsletter the design is both and artistic. The calls to action are easily located at the bottom of the snippet for easy following. The layout of the whole newsletter is well done and the content is both appealing and relevant to the industry. 15. Medium: Medium is a blogging platform that came out in 2012. From the initial launch it has steadily grown momentum, providing informative articles and opinion posts on news, views and issues that affect a number of different industries. The newsletter they send is a compilation of some of the best posts on the Medium network and more often than not you’ll find yourself reading at least a few Medium posts per day. The minimalistic design is highlighted by the different colors and section division to give a feeling that you’re reading a more substantial publication. It’s simple, scannable and doesn’t hit you with information overload. What else could you ask for from a newsletter?
Your Email Newsletters and Outreach
Why should a company invest in a newsletter? The answer is simple. A newsletter gives you marketability. It helps you to be more prominent to people who want to read your content. Most of all, it allows you to develop a rapport with your core audience. Email marketing is alive and well in the twenty first century, but the face of how it interacts with the user has changed. Newsletters that are professionally designed take center stage with layout elements being as important to the email newsletter as it is to the blog or website.
Ideally, the email newsletter is a medium through which you can bring more readers in to your blog or site. More than one of those I’ve mentioned have easy sharing options for their articles and posts. The aim here is to reach out to the people that exist on social media and that find these kinds of posts interesting. By opening up your content to a wider audience you might even get more subscribers which turns into more views for you and a higher level of authority when it comes to Google.
At the end of the day, email newsletters can do wonders for spreading awareness about your site, but only if done the right way. See our email product in our Content Shop.
Guest blogging is one of the best ways to increase traffic, generate leads, and build brand awareness. From a business perspective, well-chosen guest blogging opportunities can result in a massive amount of positive impact on a site.
Guest blogging gets you noticed by the people who need to notice you. As a brand, guest blogging opportunities allow your company to get their name out there, while at the same time allowing the readers to then experience your content production skills firsthand. When you do guest blogging right, you’ll start to realize the massive return this form of organic content can afford.
3 Ways to Determine Your Guest Content Goals
Before you embark upon the twists and turns of the guest blogging road, you’re going to need to determine what you want to get out of your guest blogging opportunities. Just like every other structured marketing campaign, you need to have an end-game in mind to properly utilize your guesting posts. Ideally, as a guest blogger, you will be seeking to do one or more of the following:
Position yourself as a go-to person in the industry. Guest blogging allows you to share your experience and knowledge, which helps others perceive you as an expert.
Gain exposure for your brand, products, or services. This also helps to generate backlinks that help your SEO campaign immensely.
Drawing an audience. When done correctly, guest blogging can help you gain new readers that can become sales for your site.
For these goals to come to fruition, you need to have a unique mix of skills and execution. Just having an idea isn’t enough to get the most out of your guest posting. You need to become an expert in your field, reading every bit of information you can get your hands on. Once you’ve done that, you need to develop a real and actionable plan for gaining the attention you deserve from your guest blogging efforts.
How to Figure Out What’s a Good Guest Blogging Opportunity and What Isn’t
Most of the major players in the content creation field are open to the idea of having a guest blogger on their site. The tough part can sometimes be being chosen from the crowd. After all, experienced guest bloggers are more likely to get first preference than inexperienced bloggers.
That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get your foot in the door, though. After all – everyone starts somewhere!
When you’re just starting out, you may have to settle for less prestigious guest blogging opportunities. Although these aren’t as glamorous or far-reaching as the larger blogs, they are no less important in your quest to build a name as a well-known blogger.
That said, it’s well worth your time and energy to learn to differentiate good guest blogging opportunities from bad ones. Here’s how:
What Good Blogging Opportunities Look Like
Good guest blogging opportunities are those that give you a decent amount of coverage for your time investment. Remember, your guest blog should be as well researched (or better!) than your personal or in-house blogging efforts.
For professional guest blogging situations you are going to need to pitch your topic to the owner of the blog to see if it meshes with what they’re trying to achieve. Generally, you and the host can sit down and discuss what they expect and what you can deliver. From there, you may be able to develop a working topic and title before you get writing.
Keep in mind that some guest blogging options will offer less support than others, and this is largely a function of traffic. The most in-demand guest blogging platforms get thousands of submissions each month, and it’s impossible to keep up with them all manually.
That said, these platforms tend to use electronic forms and a team of editors and content managers to get guest blogs up on their sites. This shouldn’t rule a guest blogging platform out for you. Instead, pay attention to things like the professionalism of the staff, the Alexa Rank of the site, and the expedience with which staffers get back to you.
What Bad Guest Blogging Opportunities Look Like
To put it simply: bad guest blogging opportunities are those that don’t give you a lot of coverage or that abuse your work without giving you enough in return. Beware of sites that make it excessively easy to guest blog for them, since they’re among the worst offenders.
While you shouldn’t have to jump through flaming hoops to get your post featured, you should expect there to be a review and quality assurance process. If this doesn’t exist, it’s a likely bet that, not only will your guest post not count for much, but that it will quickly be lost in the sea of low-quality blogs out there.
Keep this in mind: If all you have to do is sign up and post then it’s probably not a very high-quality opportunity. Avoiding these sites is important since they don’t help you attain your guest blogging goals. These are usually the sites that take anything you give to them as a blog post without an actual discussion with the owner or content manager. Again: if you don’t have to talk to a real person or team, it’s probably not a good idea to guest post for them.
Guest Blogging Doesn’t Mean the End of Direct Content Production
Just because you’re getting into guest blogging doesn’t mean that you can stop producing your own original content. If anything, it’s an encouragement to continue with your own direct content. When you finally start to earn customers from a guest blog, you’ll still need to show them that you can back that content up with your own work. That’s why maintaining your own blog and content creation efforts is so important throughout.
Setting up an internal content production schedule helps you to balance your private posting with whatever guest opportunities arise. Guest blogging allows you to create relationships with the audience of the host blog and this can translate into growing your own audience. When you look at it like that, it’s clear that both approaches are essential, and that you can’t afford to compromise either.
In fact, having great content on your own blog is essential to being accepted to a guest blogging platform. Just like you work to boost your credit score before you apply for a mortgage, you need to build up your own body of content before you apply for a guest blogging platform.
That said, spend several months before you start guest blogging publishing your own high-quality content. This way, any publisher who checks your blog for reference will find that you’re a skilled, successful writer with a lot to offer.
How to Start Guest Blogging: 7 Tips
So, now that you know how important guest blogging is, let’s talk about how to do it. Here are seven tips:
1. Start Small
Unless you’ve already got a very well established brand platform, you can’t expect to pitch Neil Patel and get featured. Start small. Platforms like Business.com are fantastic guest blogging opportunities that don’t require you to be an internet superstar to get featured.
While some people see this modest start as a frustration, since things aren’t moving as fast as they’d like, it’s the natural course of things. Start small and build your way up as you progress. Not only does this allow you to build your skills, but it also helps you build your brand as a reputable guest blogger.
2. Find Some Guest Blogging Platforms
The next step is to find a guest blogging platform. If you don’t already have a few possibilities in mind, you’ll need to start with a few simple internet searches. To start, type a simple query into Google: “[your niche] guest blog.” You can also substitute things like “write for us,” “contribute content,” or “get featured.”
This simple search should offer some results. As an alternative, you can look at sites that your competitors or friends are blogging for, and apply there.
3. Pitch Your Guest Post
Once you’ve found a guest platform you want to contribute to, you’ll need to “pitch” your post idea. When you go to guest blog, the first thing you’ll need to do is develop a plan for what you’ll write about. There’s not a reputable guest blog out there that will accept a post without a pitch topic, so it’s well worth spending time on this process.
When you start the pitching process, here are some things you’ll want to consider:
What sort of problems has the blog owner not tackled yet? Can I cover this?
What sort of content is this blog known for? What encourages its readers to read and share posts?
What will be relevant to their readers?
Remember, when you pitch a blog post, you want to write about something that’s within your area of expertise, but also something that is relevant to the blog’s audience. If you write to an audience outside that one, you’re risking your pitch being turned down or your post not being as helpful and informative as it could.
If you incorporate this sort of thinking into your pitch for a topic, you should not have many problems getting featured. Always keep in mind that reading the blog you want to contribute to is the single best way to help you determine a good topic for pitching to the owner.
4. Write Your Post
Once your pitch is accepted and you’ve got the all-clear to start writing, you’ll want to keep one thing in mind throughout: quality. Remember, your purpose here is to appeal to the blog owner’s audience. This isn’t about you. This isn’t about your company, and it’s not about how great your product is. This is incredibly important. If your blog comes off as salesy or self-congratulatory in nature, you’ll place yourself at real risk of being pulled from the platform. Why, you ask? Site owners don’t want to populate their platforms with useless information, and that’s exactly what self-pitching content is.
Instead, seek to be helpful and relevant to the audience in question. Put yourself in their shoes and develop a plan for answering their questions and seeing to their needs. The more you can cater to their desires, the more successful your guest post will be, and the more likely the platform owner will be to feature more of your posts in the future.
Take your time on the writing process. If you rush, your post won’t come out as well as it could have, which is death for a guest blog. Leave yourself plenty of time to edit your post and read it for accuracy and relevance.
5. Be Prepared to Edit as Needed
If you’re writing for an industry magazine or something similar, there’s a decent chance that your pitch post will come back to you with edits. Be prepared for this. While it doesn’t mean that your pitch was garbage, it does mean that you’ll need to add to it to make it fit the organization’s goals.
If you do get a response email from an editor or site owner, and they want some edits, complete these as quickly as possible. Site owners don’t have time to sit around and wait for you, and they want to get content up on their site as quickly as possible. The faster you can complete these edits, the more likely it is you will be that person.
6. Write Your Guest Post Bio
Next, you’ll want to write your guest post bio. Generally, guest posting platforms have some rules for these. These may include character limits and restrictions on the types and number of links you can include.
No matter what the restrictions are (or aren’t), your guest post bio should be short, professional, and to-the-point. Highlight your largest authority metrics and include a link to your website or social media platform of choice (assuming your guest blog platform allows it) so people can find out more about you.
7. Respond To Commenters
Now comes the fun part: responding to your readers. If you’ve written an engaging and exciting guest post, people will respond with comments, input, and questions. As the author, it’s your job to engage with these commenters. Keep in mind that you always want to be professional and avoid pitching yourself or your company in these posts.
The more helpful and relevant you can be to these commenters, the more you’ll help the site owner out (After all – who doesn’t want friendly, relevant, informative people posting on their site?) and the easier it will be to gain future guest posting opportunities.
The Case for Guest Blogging
At the end of the day, guest blogging is one of the best ways to get your name out there and to generate leads and traffic from external blogs. While the path to a successful guest blogging placement can be long, and there are a lot of dead ends, every legitimate opportunity you get is one more step on the road to success.
By defining your goals early and working hard to achieve them, it’s easy to use guest blogging as a method to build your online reputation and broaden your readership. To ensure your guest blogging efforts are as productive as possible, always ask yourself if a guest posting opportunity is helping you achieve your goals.
If it’s not, you’re better off moving on and finding one that will. This helps you to separate good guest posting opportunities from bad ones, and will ensure that your efforts are always going to the most productive platforms out there.
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