How I Use Guest Blogging for My Weight Loss Blog

etting consistent and quality traffic to a blog can be very difficult these days, especially if you are in the weight loss niche.

Most of us would have already heard about guest blogging, especially since it is the talk of the town in the blogosphere today. The majority of us are only familiar with guest blogging being a tactic used to generate traffic to a blog. The process is usually like this; write a quality guest post, submit it to big or medium sized blogs in your niche, expect traffic to come and look for ways to convert this traffic into subscribers.

The cool thing is that while this approach will work for some it will mostly be effectively only for people who are highly knowledgeable and experienced to get on the top blogs in their field and it will also require a lot of effort and patience to get results.

A New Guest Blogging Approach

This approach isn’t entirely new, but it is something that I have used to great success with my weight loss blog and I plan sharing my approach in details with you below.

The idea is simple, look for quality blogs in your niche, write good guest posts for them, included a few anchor text backlinks to your blog and start getting results. When I talk about “quality” blogs I’m not talking about the big blogs only; getting on the big blogs will take a lot of time and effort and in a situation like this we can start with average blogs. Since the main aim is to gain quality backlinks focused on impacting our rankings there won’t be much difference in results.

In other words, all you need to do is look for a few quality blogs in your field, write a 500 – 600 words guest post somehow tied to the topic of your blog and submit it to these blogs. If you’re able to submit to a lot of blogs you’ll be able to increase your potential of getting results on the long run.

How to Find Quality Blogs in Your Field

The effectiveness of this approach lies in the kind of blogs you’re able to get published on. In other words, getting a thousand guest posts published on blogs that were started last week will yield no results whereas getting your posts published on good authority blogs can lead to results in a matter of weeks. I’ll be sharing how I find quality blogs with you in this section.

Have a Yardstick for Measuring Blog Effectiveness: The first step you should take when it comes to looking for blogs to publish your guest posts on is to have a yardstick for measuring which blog to write for. In other words, your approach won’t just be random. You have to actually know what you’re doing, which kind of blog qualifies for a guest post from you and why the blog qualifies for a guest post from you. There are a lot of SEO metrics that can be used to determine how good a particular blog is; it could be Google pagerank, Mozrank or Customrank. In my own opinion, any blog with a Pagerank of 2 and Mozrank of 3 and above is a good candidate for a guest post.

Tools to Help You Discover Blogs

Once you’ve determined your yardstick for finding blogs the next step is to determine which tools to use. Of course, like you’ve probably imagined, there are a lot of tools available online that you can use and here are some of my top recommendations.

Technorati: The Technorati blog directory is the favorite tool in my guest blogging arsenal. Technorati has hundreds of thousands of blogs listed in its directory and as a result several thousands of blogs in each category. Almost all blog listed in Technorati with be worthy of a guest post so make sure you visit Technorati to check out a list of your niche category and to select blogs you want to write for.

Alltop: Alltop also works in a similar way to Technorati but it only contains authority blogs. You can find top blogs to write for on Alltop by visiting the category of your niche.

Google Toolbar: Like I said above, pagerank can be a good metric for measuring how good a blog will be if you were to write on it. A blog with a good pagerank is likely to have more impact on your links and the Google toolbar is your best bet as far as pagerank is concerned.

SEOmoz Toolbar: Similar to the Google toolbar, the SEOmoz toolbar helps you calculate the Mozrank of each web page you visit. You can then use this Mozrank score to determine whether to write for a blog or not.

Getting Results

It is very important for you to realize that writing quality guest posts alone won’t yield results; you also have to take some steps to ensure you’re getting the best from each guest article you publish.

Thematic Relevance: Most people complain about the ineffectiveness of writing guest posts for unrelated blogs. The reality is that unrelated blogs can be very effective for SEO if you’re able to master the art of writing thematically relevant content. Thematic content is content that is able to tie your niche with that of the blog you’re writing for. For example, this article is thematic because it shares how I use guest blogging for my weight loss blog. My niche is weight loss and this blog talks about blogging, so I’ve been able to tie the two topics and will get maximum results.

Use of Anchor Text: An anchor text is the keyword you use to link a particular URL. For example, the keyword “best weight loss programs” links to a particular page on my blog; and as a result the keyword “best weight loss programs” is the anchor text in this case. To really get results you need to learn to effectively use anchor texts. If you want a better idea on how to effectively use anchor texts make sure you check out this anchor text experiment on SEOMoz.