Guest Blogging

The goal with guest blogging is to take an article that you wrote and give it to another website owner to place on their blog. In that article you include two or three links back to your product reviews. It’s kind of a win-win for both parties – they get a free well written article and you get a few backlinks and possibly some traffic back to your site.

Now I know we call this “guest blogging” but you don’t have to limit yourself to only submitting articles to other bloggers. Any type of website is fine – it doesn’t have to be a blog and in fact, you can often get better backlinks from regular websites which is why we often focus on them first before going to bloggers.

Just keep in mind that this is a slow build-up of backlinks but honestly this one is well worth the effort. It will build strong backlinks that Google will love.

But because this is a slow build-up, you need to work on other methods of traffic building at the same time so ensure you refer to our 7 Super Powerful Methods for Increasing Traffic to Your Blog ebook and apply some of the other methods.

Things to consider

A prospective site owner will most likely take a look at your website before agreeing to take an article - after all they will be including a link on their website to your website. So consider the following before starting to send emails to prospective sites:
1. Does your website look professional?

2. Is your website still under construction? - A site may disregard you if your site looks unfinished.

3. Do you already have well written articles on your website? - A site will probably look at the articles on your website to gauge how well they are written.

4. Is your site full of spammy ads and pop-ups?


Finding Sites to Submit Articles To

When we first started searching for sites we found it quite difficult and had about a 1 in 30 response rate. When we started to use the following technique the response increased dramatically.

So firstly, here is what we don't do:

• We don't look for merchant/shopping cart websites - these sites generally either don't take articles or they are big enough to have their own writers.
• We don't look for sites that are in direct competition to us - in other words I wouldn't go looking for any sites that already sell cordless drills.

So here is what we do:

• We look for sites that already accept articles or have articles on their website (and we don't mean article directories).

To find these sites we just type in variations of our keywords with the words 'submit article' or 'articles' in the Google search field.

BUT we don't just use our keywords as this is very limiting. Instead we look at the big picture. For instance, cordless drills of this type are generally used by do-it-yourselfers and people at home for fixing things around the house. So I would go searching for home related sites like home decor, home improvement or DIY type sites. If we take the cordless drills example we might type in the following search phrases in Google to find these types of websites:

• Cordless drills submit article
• Home improvement articles
• Do it yourself submit article
• handyman articles
• home decor article
• home renovation submit articles
• home design submit article
• home decor articles
• home hints submit article

Another way to find sites is by typing in the keyword 'newsletters' as a variation (eg. ‘home improvement newsletters’. There are thousands of websites that send out newsletters and would love content to add. Ensure that they also place the newsletter on their website otherwise you won't get the value of the links.

Once you have finished with using the keyword 'newsletters' then you can start using the keyword 'blogs' or 'blog' or ‘guest blogger’. So you would start searching for 'home renovation blog submit articles' or 'home hints blog articles' and so on. Or alternatively you could start searching using the Google blog search which will only search for blogs:
http://blogsearch.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wb

You can see how many variations of the keywords you can use to find sites willing to accept articles. With time it gets easier and easier and you will find that your response rate gets better and better.

The Criteria for Selecting Sites

We don’t choose a site simply because they accept articles. We also ensure that they are strong in the eyes of Google or are sites that are getting lots of traffic.
We determine the strength of a site by using the Google Pagerank Tool. If the site has a pagerank of at least 3 on their home page then we will add that site to our list.

If the site doesn’t have a pagerank of 3 or more but still gets good traffic then we will add them to our list. We can tell if a blog gets a lot of traffic by looking at how many comments are left. If they regularly get 20 or more comments left on their blog then they have an active blog with lots of regular visitors stopping by. These are good blogs to add articles to as your article will get lots of views and hopefully a lot of people clicking through to your site.

Sending the email

Once we have a list of prospective sites we then email them. We have a standard email that we use and we are constantly adjusting it. (You can see a couple of examples in Attachment 5 at the end of this ebook.)

Basically we just start off by asking if they are currently accepting articles, then tell them that we are willing to provide them with a couple of unique well written articles. We also add that in return we would like two to three links back to our website within each article.

We often give them some topic ideas but also let them know that they can choose a topic if they like.

Once we have a positive response

When we get an email back to say they want an article we immediately respond to them to let them know that we will get to work on the article.

We then go through our bank of articles if we have already had some articles written up and rework one so that it suits the site. If none are suitable we will generally write our own.

We then add our links and send it back to the website. Usually we send two articles to each website but sometimes three if they are a particularly strong website.

Article Topics

Because you are promoting Amazon products the guest articles you write need to relate in some way to your product. In this case our product is a cordless drill so we need to write up guest posts that relate to that topic.

The best types of posts are:

• How-to’s
• Top 7 Tips (or whatever number you like)
• What to Look for…
• What is…

So for our cordless drill review our article topics might include:

• How to choose a cordless drill
• What to look for when buying a cordless drill
• How to clean your cordless drill
• 7 Tips for buying a cordless drill
• How to maintain your cordless drill
• What is the best drill for home handymen?

Helpful articles are what any website owner craves. They want this type of content on their blog or website so if you can write this type of informative article they will snap it up.

How to Write Guest Articles

You write your guest articles exactly the same way you write any other piece of content on your blog.
The only difference is that you need to include keywords in the guest article that you want to rank for. So say for instance that I want to rank for the keyword “Panasonic EY6432GQKW”. In my article I would need to include this keyword at least once. So it might read like this:
Top 7 Tips for Choosing a Cordless Drill
When choosing a cordless drill one thing you need to consider is the number of volts. The greater the volts the more powerful the drill. The downside to this however is that the greater the volts the heavier the battery and therefore the heavier the drill. One of the best drills we’ve found that provides a good balance of weight to power ratio is the Panasonic EY6432GQKW. This drill…..etc, etc.”
Wherever possible, try to include at least three keywords in the article.

Should You Write the Articles Yourself?
 
You can write the articles yourself or have them professionally written by a writer in Elance. It will just depend on how good that writer is. Some are better than others. We used to write all our guest articles ourselves until we finally found a good writer who did the job better than us.

Just be aware that the site owner will probably look at your site first and check out the quality of your articles. They will probably base their decision on whether to take your article by looking at the quality of your articles on your blog. If you end up giving them an article that doesn’t match the quality of those on your blog then they will most likely reject the article.

The article you send to them has to be good. It has to be as good as anything you put on your own site – in fact, it often has to be better. So my advice is that unless you have a really good writer, you should write your own guest articles wherever possible.

However, if you want to give the Elance writers a go then you can use the following example as a guide for writing up your job proposal. This is how we write them up:

10 Articles Required at 500+ Words on Cordless Drills

We would like 10 articles written at 500+ words on cordless drills. The topics are as follows:

• How to choose a cordless drill
• What to look for when buying a cordless drill
• How to clean your cordless drill
• 7 Tips for buying a cordless drill
• Etc, etc.

That's it really. We don't tell them to use keywords in specific places or provide any detail on what we want in each article. We leave it to them. We also add the basic info such as - it should be unique content, must be informative and written naturally. We will usually accept at least two different writers for each project. That way we get two unique articles on the same topic. The articles will cost anywhere between $6 and $15 each.
When choosing a writer in Elance go for one that has had extensive feedback and has a number of repeat buyers. Don’t just choose the cheapest – you get what you pay for when it comes to Elance writers.

Adding Links to Your Articles

The final step you need to take before you send your article to the blog or website owner is to add a few links to your article.

Now assuming you are using Microsoft Word you simply highlight the keyword/s you want to rank for, then right click your mouse and click the Hyperlink option. Then paste in the url of your product review page.

Hopefully you have added at least three keywords in your article. These are the keywords you want to add a link to. So the paragraph we wrote previously in this section might look like this with our link included:
Top 7 Tips for Choosing a Cordless Drill
When choosing a cordless drill one thing you need to consider are the number of volts. The greater the volts the more powerful the drill. The downside to this however is that the greater the volts the heavier the battery and therefore the heavier the drill. One of the best drills we’ve found that provides a good balance of weight to power ratio is the Panasonic EY6432GQKW. This drill…..etc, etc.”

You then add another one or two links in the article and that’s it! You can now send your article off.
Just remember, this guest blogging process is a numbers game. You might email 100 websites and only get 10 responses or you might get more. Just keep at it…it will be worth it!

Where to from here…

The goal with this entire process is to focus on quality not quantity. Remember that you don’t need hundreds of product reviews in order to make a decent income online. Stick with 5 product reviews at a time and stay focused on those 5 reviews until they start making sales.

You almost have to treat those product reviews like treasured objects…nurture them and keep making those pages better and better. But most importantly keep working on getting traffic to each of those pages. This will be critical to your success. If you come back to us in a couple of month’s time complaining that this isn’t working we will know that it is because you don’t have enough traffic.

• We want you to be asking yourself every day – “How can I get more traffic to my product review pages?”
• We want you to be working on getting traffic to those product review pages every single day.
• We want you to be the ultimate expert on generating traffic.

We DON’T want you frantically building more product review pages – instead we want you frantically working on building traffic.

Traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic……

Can we say it enough? Without it you’re just not going to succeed so make traffic generating your number one task.

So to summarize this is what you should be working on once your product reviews are up:
1. Spend 80% of your time on generating traffic.
2. Continue working on tweaking those pages so that they are the best they can be.
3. Start writing short articles of around 300 to 500 words to add to your website.

The point of these short articles is that they help to boost your website and can bring traffic. These articles are written in the same vein as the articles you submit to other websites when you are guest blogging. They are informational type articles like how-to’s and so on.

Within each of these articles you add links back to your product review pages. This is what is known as internal linking where you are linking to pages within your own site. This helps to boost those product reviews. They aren’t as strong as external links of course but even so they can do a lot to improving the rank of those product reviews. The search engines think that if you consistently keep linking to certain pages on your site then it must be important.

So for instance, if I had 5 product reviews on the following products….

• Panasonic Cordless Drill
• Makita Cordless Drill
• Ingersoll Quiet Sander
• Stanley Hand Saw
• Smithson Tool Shed

I might write 5 articles on the following topics:

• Top 7 Tips for Choosing a Cordless Drill
• Are Makita cordless drills the best on the market?
• How to Choose a Sander
• How to Sharpen Your Hand Saw
• Why Some Garden Sheds are Better Than Others

Each of those articles would go up on my blog as a post and within each of those articles I would link back to my product review pages. And for some of those articles like the Top 7 Tips, I could actually link back to two product reviews ie. The Panasonic cordless drill review and the Makita drill review.

Ideally you would want each product review to have around 5 to 10 articles linking to it.

Can you add affiliate links to those articles?

Yes definitely. We will often add Adsense ads to generate income from those pages. You can also add Amazon links as well or any other type of affiliate link for that matter. It doesn’t really matter. The ultimate goal however is for these articles to help to boost your product review pages.

And finally….

In order for this entire process to be a success, you need to focus on quality rather than quantity in everything you do. We found that once we started doing this we had greater conversions and greater success overall. We also found that we had more time in the day and we felt more relaxed as we didn’t have to frantically add content day after day in order to maintain the momentum.

Stay focused and provide quality to your readers and you can’t help but succeed.

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