If you’re a blogger or blogger wannabe there’s a informative post by Ann Smarty about guest blogging at SearchEngineJournal.com that you should take a look at.

Guest blogging is a win-win situation. It provides already established bloggers with new, original (presumably well written) content. And it gives the guest blogger a platform to reach a lot of people he or she otherwise would probably not reach.

In another blog post from July 2010 Jeremy Bencken offers some suggestions for developing an effective guest blogging strategy. He suggests you should ask yourself three questions when getting involved in guest blogging:

1. What audience do you want to reach?
2. What’s your goal?
3. Is your content truly great?

The most important point is that guest blogging should be aimed not at building links but at building your profile and establishing your own blog as an authority. That means, first and foremost, writing good content that your target market will be interested in. Then find the blogs that help you target those people most effectively.

guest blogging, writing, link building, branding, blogs, blog strategy

Once you have done your keyword analysis and settled on a Master Keyword List for your web efforts you should begin creating content that focuses on the full range of keywords in your list. By “content” I mean articles, faqs, how-tos, blog posts, videos, photos, etc., etc.

This content will make up the substance of your website or blog. But it will also be used on supporting sites that link to your site or blog. This process of building supporting content demonstrates how content creation and link building are closely related.

When you create a blog post on a blog other than your own, or when you create a Hub Page, Squidoo lense or Youtube video these will not only be valuable content on their own, but will link back to your site or blog. Placing related content on already established sites is a great way to enhance the search engine ranking of your own site.

But it is important to remember that creating content is not just about link building. Creating content is at the heart of building a successful website. After all, it is your content that people want to see and read. They will not come to your website just because it is there. Or if they follow a link to your site and they don’t find any useful content they won’t stick around for long.

Organizing Your Website Using a “Silo” Structure

It is tempting to just start creating pages within your site or blog focusing on specific keywords (or groups of keywords.) This is certainly a lot better than nothing, but working with a large keyword list can be confusing and very time-consuming.

That is why it is usually helpful to organize your site into categories and sub-categories where each category lets you focus on a group of important keywords. For example, if you have a “pet training” site, you may have categories such as “dog training”, “cat training”, “bird training”, and so on.

The content in each of these categories or “silos” will have some natural cohesiveness, and will allow you to organize your content around specific groups of keywords.

This structure will also provide new opportunities to create content, and it will often suggest new keywords as you go along. This lets you develop your content in a fuller, richer way than would be the case if you just focused on your original master keyword list.

Organizing content this way is often referred to as using a “silo” approach to building a website. Each silo is a major category within the overall structure of your site (or blog). And each silo can have sub-categories (and corresponding sub-sets of keywords) within it.

Creating Supporting Content in External Sources

The silo system has other important advantages. One of the most important is that it gives you a very helpful approach to building supporting content in external sources such as other blogs, Squidoo, Hub Pages, Youtube as well as article sites such as Ezinearticles, GoArticles, and so on.

Each of these supporting resources will have links pointing back to the main silo page, or some other page within that specific silo. This is a great way to build links from highly relevant, keyword focused content found on already established sites.

Writing articles is one of the best ways to gain some online exposure for yourself and for your web properties. As I have pointed out in a previous post, Why Article Marketing is Worth Doing you can write articles on just about any subject and submit them to many different article directories – some of which are considered authority sites by Google.

That means that not only can writing articles enhance your own status as something of an authority on the topics you write about, but when you embed links in your articles they become a great source for backlinks to your website(s). That is one the most important factors for boosting your search engine ranking.

But there are two fairly frustrating parts about writing articles that often torpedo the best intentions of many marketers and small business people. First, they take a significant amount of time to write. And, second, they can take a lot of time to submit to article directory sites.

Outsourcing your writing

The most popular solution to the “I-don’t-have-time-to-write” syndrome is to outsource the writing to people who are eager to do it for you. Often these people are experience writers who have already been exposed to the type of articles you require. And usually you can find someone to do it for a very reasonable cost.

The source we currently use is TextBroker.com and I recommend them highly. Like most freelance sites they act as a middleman between writers looking for work, and marketers or publishers looking for specific types of content.

Once you open an account you will have to deposit a small amount of money into it in order to actually place orders. Placing an order involves submitting an idea of what you want the article to be about, the keywords you want to focus on, a couple of resources they can use to find information on the topic, the length of the required article, how quickly you need it done, and the quality level (between 1 and 5) you are looking for.

Once a project is submitted, if it is left “Open”, then any writer with at least the desired quality rating can take the project on. For example, if you want a “level 4″ article, then any writer with that rating or above can claim it. Once the project is claimed the writer will submit the finished article to the system where you can accept it or ask that it be revised.

We’ve had literally hundreds of articles written by these folks and sent very few back for revisions. We often make small editorial revisions, but that is to be expected in any project.

For a 450 word level 4 article you will pay around $10. We highly recommend TextBroker.com.

Article Submission with SubmitYourArticle.com

The other painful part of the process is submitting your articles to article directories like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, IdeaMarketers.com and many others. Since there are hundreds of these sites, and since at least 10 of them are fairly highly ranked by Google most article marketers recommend submitting to at least several of the better sites.

Even submitting one article to five or six sites can take a long time. If you intend to go at article marketing in a serious way you could be spending your whole day doing nothing other than submission.

That’s where an article submission site like SubmitYourArticle.com comes in. These guys will submit any number of articles to several of the major sites, as well as (in their words) “hundreds of other websites in our distribution network.”

The important thing about SYO is that they get your articles into the most important, highly ranked sites. Not all distribution systems do this. Also, like many article distribution sites SYO has integrated “spinning” capabilites which they call “Article Leverage”.

The one downside to the SYO service is that if you need to submit articles on behalf of different authors you will need a different account for each author.

Other than that (reasonable) limitation, SubmitYourArticle.com is the best article distribution service I have found.

Almost everybody who knows anything about online marketing knows the importance of search engines – especially Google. In fact Google has become so dominant it is almost impossible to talk about the internet without immediately discussing the role of Google.

The process of systematically trying to get the search engines to drive (“free” not paid) traffic to your website(s) is called Search Engine Marketing. SEM, as it is often rererred to, involves different ways of trying to influence search engines – especially Google – to give you high ranking for searches done on your most important keywords.

For example, if your most important keywords are “Toledo Real Estate”, SEM involves trying to get high ranking in Google searches for the phrase “Toledo Real Estate”. This way people will click on your link in the Google search results and be taken to your blog or website.

Voila. Traffic.

The two most important techniques used in SEM are

• “Optimizing” your content for specific keywords. This is usually called SEO – short for search engine optimization. SEO involves choosing the most promising keywords, and then making sure those keywords show up in your web content in the most important places.

• Link building. Getting links from other sites pointing to your content is a good way to get the attention of the search engines. They consider inbound links as “votes” by other online bloggers and publishers that your content is worth looking at.

Generally speaking, the more your content focuses on your primary keywords, and the more inbound links you have, the better your website or blog will rank in the search engines.

But there are problems with SEM…

• It is indirect. You are relying on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. to determine who is or is not a good candidate to visit your site or blog. This can be a very frustrating experience – especially when you are in a competitive market.

• It takes a lot of time and effort (usually) to influence the search engines. Typically you will have to wait at least three months to see any lasting results from SEM and SEO.
• It is unpredictable. We have seen clients rise to #1 for their search terms, and we have seen other clients drop off the map. It is hard to know if this is ever the direct result of a concerted SEM/SEO effort. You do your best to give Google and Bing what they want, but you just don’t know for sure it is going to work.

SEM is just one part of the marketing puzzle

SEM is a valuable long term strategy which every serious online marketer should adopt. But don’t count on immediate results. Eventually as your blog gains credibility you will consistently draw traffic from the search engines. But it can often be a very long and tedious process.

Even more important, SEM will only take you so far. It is what we call a “passive” method of marketing. It is like Social Networking in this regard. Social networking – being active in Facebook, for example – will introduce you to many new “friends” and prospects. But it will generally not do much direct selling for you.

For example, if you own a restaurant and you want to run a one week lunch special, SEM will be almost useless. To generate traffic to your offer page you will need other promotional techniques. These will be discussed in future posts.