I’ve talked a lot about how guest posting is a great fire-starter for building early traffic to your blog, and while I’ve seen it work for dozens of bloggers, I’ve seen many more waste the opportunity by making critical mistakes in implementing this guest posting strategy.
So today I’ve finally had enough, and I’m going to share a list of guest posting mistakes you absolutely cannot make when writing guest posts. Ignore this advice at your own peril.
1. Not Replying to Comments – BIG mistake when you're guest posting
The goal of guest posting is to reach a new audience and bring them back to your blog; backlinks are secondary. If you receive comments on a guest post, you are lucky, and you should act as such. Failing to respond to comments is a huge mistake that not only looks bad, but works against you.
2. Not Sharing
Look, one of the reasons other bloggers let you post on their blog is because they’re hoping you can bring them additional traffic, and they are expecting you to tweet and share the link to your audience when the post is published. Guest posting is a partnership strategy, and you’ve got to do your part.
Don’t write about something you haven’t done. Meta bloggers (blogging about blogging) make this mistake all the time, as do Internet marketers. Instead of repeating what you hear, write from experience. If you don’t have experience, then gain some.
Furthermore, don’t write about principles you violate. For example, if you don’t write guest posts, then don’t write a post about how to do guest posting. It sounds fairly obvious, but somehow, it’s not.
4. Blowing Your Bio
Your bio is the pitch that gets people moving back to your website. If you blow your bio, then you waste a golden opportunity to earn new prospects from guest posting.
Spend a lot of time crafting a great bio that mixes information with soft salesmanship. Read it out loud and have a friend look it over for good measure.
5. Dealing Improperly With Bad Comments
Look, we all get bad comments from trolls and people that disagree with us. The trick is to keep your composure and to not let comments get under your skin. Be smart, and always reply with tact.
6. Forgetting Links when guest posting
What’s worse than writing a bad bio? Forgetting to link back to your website.
I tend to leave a link or two in the body, and a solid anchor link in the bio. These anchor links can help you rank for keywords, but can also help you practice writing great copy. Learn which works get people to click, and refine your bio accordingly.
7. Sandbagging
Many people think that they should keep their best posts for their own blog, and leave 2nd rate posts as guest posts; I couldn’t disagree more.
Treat guest posting as you would treat a resume – it has to rock. Don’t submit anything but your best content as a guest post. I know a blogger that spent 10x more writing for others as he did for himself, and it worked.
So that’s it – 7 mistakes that prove you are wasting time using guest posting as a traffic strategy. Which of these mistakes do you make? Which do you see from other bloggers? Let’s talk about it below.